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This chapter argues that the regress of justifications can be satisfactorily avoided by seeing the second-order knowledge of the justification involved in visual knowledge as knowledge of a transparent fact, which constitutes an entitlement, but not a justification to the belief this second-order knowledge involves. The disjunctive conception of visual experience is employed to shed light on the idea of a transparent fact. This account can seem to be vulnerable to two powerful arguments: first, Williamson's argument against luminosity; and secondly, a version of McKinsey's argument against the idea of non-empirical knowledge of ‘broad’ mental states. It is suggested that the first argument does not affect the present account, and that the second argument can be avoided with the help of a distinction between the entitlements to, and the presuppositions of, the beliefs which knowledge involves. The upshot is an account of the second-order knowledge which visual knowledge involves as non-empirical knowledge, and hence as a species of privileged self-knowledge.

Bill Brewer explores a solution to a reductio ad absurdum argument template, one instance of which has the conclusion that we can know the proposition ‘someone has interacted with water’ a priori. Brewer holds that empirical knowledge of water is required for a thinker to possess the concept ‘water’ in the first place, so this knowledge cannot be said to be derived a priori by means of the argument.

‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM) is sometimes read as attacking empiricism in general. But Sellars's announced target is traditional empiricism. In traditional empiricism, experience yields knowledge in a way that does not presuppose other empirical knowledge, so that the knowledge provided by experience can serve as foundations, in a straightforward sense, for other empirical knowledge. To accept this conception is to fall into a form of the Myth of the Given. In EPM Sellars works out a different conception of experience, according to which it is a kind of inner episode that, in the best kind of case, yields knowledge, but in a way that presupposes other empirical knowledge. The knowledge provided by experience can still serve as foundations for other empirical knowledge, but now only in a nuanced sense. The chapter concludes that so far from rejecting empiricism altogether, EPM rehabilitates empiricism, but in a non-traditional form.

This chapter presents a synthesis of the preceding discussions and some concluding thoughts. The book is built around the idea that of the interdependence of perceptual judgments and view. The rationality of our view depends upon the rationality of our perceptual judgments, and the rationality of our perceptual judgments depends in turn upon the rationality of our view. This interdependence is not a threat to the unconditional rationality of our view and perceptual judgments. Rather, it provides the best route to understanding this rationality. The interdependence dictates that the given in an experience is hypothetical, not propositional. The present proposal respects both the Multiple-Factorizability of Experience and the Insight of Empiricism. By acknowledging the invariable interdependence of perceptual judgments and view, it respects the idea of Multiple-Factorizability. By recognizing experience to be the force behind the rational dynamics of views, it accommodates the Insight of Empiricism.

Explores Schlick's and Neurath's dispute over the foundations of empirical knowledge, and thereby equips ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’ with commentary and historical background. Davidson works out the difficulties involved in drawing epistemological conclusions from a verificationist theory of meaning and argues that there are promising hints of a better theory, akin to Davidson's coherence theory of truth and knowledge, in the logical positivists’ writings.

This chapter discusses the epistemological status of the knowledge claims Hegel makes in the Philosophy of Right. It distinguishes between empirical knowledge (EK), potentially conditioned knowledge (PCPK), and philosophical knowledge (PK), and argues that PK is immune to criticism based on EK and PCPK because it is ontological prior to them. From ‘our’, PCPK-style perspective, Hegel might have failed truthfully to express PK so for ‘us’, his claims as well as our own are open for revision by the always already present standard of PK. Insofar as Hegel failed to express PK and we succeed, true thought is manifest and recognizes itself in ‘our’ thinking. When this happens, PK replaces PCPK and the contradiction between PK and PCPK is avoided.

This chapter is a direct attack on the idea of a subjective–objective dichotomy resulting in a fundamental distinction between uninterpreted experience and an organizing structure of concepts. Consequently, Davidson attacks the foundation of all metaphysical and epistemological dualisms and the philosophical stances based upon them. He attempts to make a case for their replacement by a view that combines the denial of objects before the mind with the claim that empirical knowledge does not and need not have an epistemological foundation.

This chapter explores how experience and observation contribute to moral knowledge. It defends the view that experience and observation can contribute to moral knowledge in any of the ways in which they contribute to our ordinary, non-moral knowledge of the world around us, including by empirically confirming and disconfirming moral claims. I argue that moral testimony has important implications for the possibility of confirming moral views by non-moral observations. I also argue that membership in a moral community, which puts one in a position to compare the moral opinions of others with one’s own, can contribute to moral knowledge not only by affording evidence for or against one’s opinions, but also by providing feedback that can serve to calibrate one’s capacity for judgment so that future exercises of that judgment are more likely to deliver knowledge. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a priori moral knowledge.

This chapter completes the examination, started in Chapter Four, of the second half of the Transcendental Deduction, as found in the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The focus of this chapter is §24 and §25. The special problem of these sections is empirical self-knowledge. The author argues that Kant treats self-knowledge as a special case of the cosmology of experience: the problem is how I situate myself in the empirical world. The solution to the problem is to build up in thought an understanding of the world by legislating universal laws to nature by means of the categories and to map my geographical and historical place in the world by means of the cartographic resources available to the productive imagination. The chapter has two parts. The first part is devoted to a paradox Kant claims to be associated with self-affection. It tries to understand his claim as a reflection on his own views in the mid-1770s about self-apprehension by inner sense and apperception. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the specialized cartography Kant takes to be involved in empirical self-knowledge and considers how Kant distinguishes between biography and autobiography.

This chapter is an attempt to specify some of the constitutive components of human rationality. Drawing on conclusions previously defended (mainly in his essay ‘Thought and Talk’), Davidson argues for the mutual dependence of thought and language. Given the characteristically holistic framework of the discussion, Davidson regards this conclusion as being established by antecedent empirical knowledge rather than by considerations that secure a necessary footing.

In the final chapter it is claimed that the history of the debate shows that we must give up the inner–outer distinction. This move was initiated by an anti-Cartesian line of thinking. To this extent this is an externalist move. What is being claimed to be finally achieved is a view which reinterprets the mind–body relation as a relation which is constitutive of both the relata. The author claims that phenomenologists have, in a more substantial way, been able to show how exactly this relation is constitutive of both the relata. There is an affinity between the views of Husserl and the externalist John McDowell. According to the phenomenological view, the mind and world are not distinct entities; rather they are bound constitutively together.

This chapter turns to Daoist epistemology, specifically, Ge Hong's preservation of the One. Unlike Plato's abstract reasoning, Ge Hong's notion of knowledge is empirical. It neither regards reason as having the monopoly on knowing Dao nor believes objective knowledge is superior to subjective opinion. For Ge Hong, cultivation plays the central role in the activity of preserving truth. His writings reveal two forms of cultivation that he describes seeking a path exactly opposite to the ontological flow of Dao. One is cosmogony, which unfolds from the one to the many in the mode of separation; while the other is soteriology, which returns from the many to the one in the mode of unification.

This chapter describes the dramatic disavowal of English literature's association with Christianity, indicating a shift from universal Christian truths to the legitimacy of British authority—from religious forms to intellectual control. Disavowal was an effort at resolution between these two contrary states, and a justification of two mutually exclusive effects, one seeking identity within history and the other seeking differentiations outside it. The strategic value of disavowal conferred upon modern knowledge, as a product of historical development and increased human capacities for reason, the status of independence from systems of belief based on pure faith. The dissociation, executed by jurist Charles Cameron, was therefore less of a denial of Christian influence in European literature and more of a rewriting of Christianity as empirical knowledge.

This chapter delineates between brute causation and intelligible causation. These intelligible relations are intended to be explanatory relations; the intrinsic properties in question are not themselves causal powers but are supposed to intelligibly explain why the relevant conscious states have some of their causal powers. Causal powers are connected to their underlying categorical properties by means of something extrinsic, particularly the laws of nature. Natural laws make sure that certain categorical properties will also have certain causal powers. It is important in this chapter to establish that laws of nature are brute or not intelligible, that is to say, they cannot be known a priori. Discovering laws of nature requires empirical knowledge about which categorical properties are constantly conjoined with which causal powers.

There is a long-standing skeptical position among philosophers regarding the cognitive value of literature. In this essay, using Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus as viewed through Aristotle’s Poetics, I will attempt to undermine the skeptical case against the cognitive value of literature as advanced in terms of the no-evidence argument, the evidentially tainted argument, the no-argument argument, and the banality argument. By defeating these arguments, with reference to Oedipus Tyrannus, I hope to establish the possibility that literature can serve as a vehicle for the communication of general empirical knowledge and philosophical knowledge or, at least, to shift the burden of proof in this debate back to the skeptic.

The Pyrrhonism of Montaigne and Charron was motivated by an unexplained ideal of certainty and truth that was allegedly realized in divinely revealed religious beliefs or in what Aristotle classified as ‘demonstrated’ propositions. Doubts about both sources of certainty undermined the meta-assumption on which Pyrrhonism relied. Sanches and Mersenne began to articulate a new concept of empirical knowledge, which reflected the practices of natural philosophers. While Silhon and Descartes both defended the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, Cartesian naturalism implied that we lack a transcendent criterion by which to evaluate the reliability of our knowledge claims. When we use our cognitive faculties carefully, the result is what we call knowledge.

This chapter examines to what extent it is true that fiction is a problematic source of information about empirical matters. This is done via a comparison with what are often thought of as paradigmatic sources of empirical knowledge, at least in well-formed cases: historical texts. The focus of the discussion is on testimony—roughly, the conveying of information to a hearer with the aim of being believed, partly on the speaker’s say-so—as it occurs in both historical and fictional texts. The chapter concludes that despite appearances, in many typical cases fiction can be a relatively solid source of information about the world, so that indignant responses to occasions of inaccuracy in fiction may not be misplaced after all.