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Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence, or perhaps it must be reliably formed, or perhaps there is some other ‘good-making’ features it must have. But does a belief’s justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists insist that such awareness is required for justification whereas externalists insist that it is not. The first part of this book argues that internalism faces an inescapable dilemma: either it leads to vicious regress problems and, ultimately, radical skepticism or it is entirely unmotivated. The second part of the book begins by developing the author’s own externalist theory of justification, one imposing both a proper function and a no-defeater requirement. It concludes by demonstrating the failure of two prominent critiques of externalism: that it is infected with epistemic circularity and that it cannot respond adequately to skepticism. Together, the two parts of the book provide a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism.

The analytic/synthetic distinction looks simple. It is a distinction between two different kinds of sentence: synthetic sentences are true in part because of the way the world is, and in part because of what they mean, whereas analytic sentences — like all bachelors are unmarried and triangles have three sides — are different; they are true in virtue of meaning and so, no matter what the world is like, as long as the sentence means what it does, it will be true. The distinction seems powerful because analytic sentences seem to be knowable in a special way; one can know that all bachelors are unmarried, for example, just by thinking about what it means. But many 20th-century philosophers, with Quine in the lead, argued that there were no analytic sentences, that the idea of analyticity didn't even make sense and that the analytic/synthetic distinction was therefore an illusion. Others couldn't see how there could fail to be a distinction, however ingenious the arguments. But since the heyday of the debate, things have changed in the philosophy of language. Tools have been refined, confusions cleared up, and most significantly, many philosophers now accept a view of language — semantic externalism — on which it is possible to see how the distinction could fail. One might be tempted to think that ultimately the distinction has fallen for reasons other than those proposed in the original debate. This book argues that it hasn't. It uses the tools of contemporary philosophy of language to outline a view of analytic sentences which is compatible with semantic externalism, and defends that view against the old Quinean arguments. It then goes on to draw out some surprising epistemological consequences.

This book defends a conception of the mind that is inspired by some of Descartes's writings. The crucial feature of the Cartesian view defended is not dualism — which is not adopted here — but internalism about the mind. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted thesis of externalism, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view that the mind is autonomous with respect to its environment: although it is obviously influenced by things in the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. The first part of the book argues that privileged accessibility is the mark of the mental, and that this thesis is strongly tied to criteria of personhood. The second part argues that internalism is best formulated as the thesis that mental features are determined by the phenomenal properties of our conscious mental life, and that the externalist denial of this thesis is incompatible with privileged self-knowledge. Hence, externalism is in conflict with the conception of the mind and personhood defended in the first part of the book. Supporters of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; this book answers these criticisms and argues for an uncompromising internalist Cartesian theory of the mind.

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. This book propounds a plausible physicalist internalism, called qualia empiricism. Qualia empiricism is the conjunction of a modal structuralist account of perceptual experience, an account of the content contributed to thought by referring terms that deploys rigidified description clusters, and an account of non-epistemic internal resources that can bridge those first two elements. It also argues that externalism is supported by no reasons that withstand close scrutiny. These include case-based arguments and arguments entwined with externalist accounts of perceptual states and language. The book critically considers externalist arguments rooted in work by Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Millikan, Dretske, Papineau, Prinz, Fodor, Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, Tye, Kant, Williamson, disjunctivists, Wittgenstein, Wright, Davidson, and Brandom, among others.

This book addresses two central questions in epistemology: (1) which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified)? and (2) where does perception end and inferential cognition begin? The book offers a highly externalist theory, arguing that it is not introspectible features of the beliefs that determine their status as basic or as perceptual; instead, these are determined by the nature of the cognitive system, or module, that produced the beliefs. On this view, the sensory experiences that typically accompany perceptual beliefs play no indispensable role in the justification of these beliefs, and one can have perceptual beliefs—justified perceptual beliefs—even in the absence of any sensory experiences whatsoever. The book develops a general theory of basic beliefs and argues that perceptual beliefs are a species of basic beliefs. This results from the fact that perceptual modules are a special type of basic-belief-producing modules. Importantly, some beliefs are not the outputs of this class of cognitive module; these beliefs are nonbasic, thus requiring evidential support from other beliefs for their justification. This last point is used to defend a reliabilist epistemology against an important class of traditional objections (where the agent uses a reliable process that she doesn't know to be reliable). The overarching view defended in the book is a type of reliabilism, and the basic/nonbasic distinction developed here offers a version of reliabilism that takes inference seriously yet remains staunchly externalist.

This is a collection of chapters by the leading proponent of process reliabilism, explaining its relation to rival and/or neighboring theories including evidentialism, other forms of reliabilism, and virtue epistemology. It addresses other prominent themes in contemporary epistemology, such as the internalism/externalism debate, the epistemological upshots of experimental challenges to intuitional methodology, the source of epistemic value, and social epistemology. The Introduction addresses late-breaking responses to ongoing exchanges with friends, rivals, and critics of reliabilism.

One of the key supposed ‘platitudes’ of contemporary epistemology is the claim that knowledge excludes luck. One can see the attraction of such a claim, in that knowledge is something that one can take credit for; it is an achievement of sorts, and yet luck undermines genuine achievements. The problem, however, is that luck seems to be an all-pervasive feature of our epistemic enterprises that tempts us to think that either scepticism is true, and we don’t know very much after all, or else knowledge is compatible with knowledge after all. My claim is that we do not need to choose between these two austere alternatives, since a closer inspection of what is involved in the notion of epistemic luck reveals varieties of luck that are compatible with knowledge possession and varieties that aren’t. We can thus do justice to the intuition that knowledge is compatible with (some forms of) luck without acceding to the sceptical claim that we do not know as much as we think we do. Nevertheless, I also claim that there is a sceptical problem lurking in the background that is related to the problem of epistemic luck, though it is not best thought of in terms of the possession of knowledge.

This book develops and defends a new externalist, reliabilist theory of knowledge and evidence, and develops a new view about scientific realism. Knowledge is viewed as a tracking theory that has a conditional probability rather than counterfactual formulation, and the property of closure under known implication is imposed on knowledge. It is argued that the tracking theory of evidence is best formulated and defended as a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. These tracking theories of knowledge and evidence fit together to provide a deep explanation of why having better evidence makes one more likely to know. The new tracking theory of knowledge is argued to be superior to all currently known externalist rivals. It provides a distinctive explanation of why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, and explains why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense. Finally, the book argues that confirmation theory is relevant to debates about scientific realism, and defends a position intermediate between realism and anti-realism based on a view about what having evidence requires.

The growth of both philosophy of mind and cognitive science has developed our understanding of the human mind in ways that just a few decades ago were unthinkable. As ideas from philosophy of mind begin to cross over into philosophy of religion, there is renewed interest in questions about the divine mind, about how it might relate to a human body, and about whether incarnation itself might be articulated with the conceptual tools offered by the current research developments in the philosophy of mind. This book offers chapters by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation. The doctrine of incarnation—that Jesus Christ was God become human—has always been one of the most central and distinctive features of Christianity. Similar doctrines about divine humans can be found in other religions, from the claims to divinity made by ancient kings and emperors to the concept of avatars in Hinduism. But many people regard the notion that a human being could also be divine as unjustifiable or incoherent, and none of the many attempts to articulate it philosophically has earned general acceptance. The chapters explore, from a variety of different viewpoints, whether any metaphysically rigorous and coherent model of incarnation can be defended today.

The essays in this book defend evidentialism. This is the view that whether a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition is determined entirely by the person's evidence. Fundamentally, it is a supervenience thesis according to which facts about whether or not a person is epistemically justified in believing a proposition supervene on facts describing the evidence that person has. According to evidentialism, epistemic evaluations are distinct from moral and prudential evaluations of believing, and epistemically justified beliefs may fail to be morally or prudentially valuable. The evidence to which the theory refers includes other justified beliefs and, ultimately, experiences. While evidentialism is not an inherently anti-skeptical view, we argue that people do have knowledge level justification for many beliefs. Several essays in the volume criticize rival theories of justification, notably externalist theories such as reliabilism.

Discusses the role of conscious experiences in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. Most epistemology of perception takes a person's possession of beliefs about the mind‐independent world for granted and goes on to ask what further conditions these beliefs must meet if they are to be cases of knowledge. I argue that this approach is completely mistaken. Perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs about particular objects in the world at all. So there are epistemic requirements upon the very possibility of empirical belief. The crucial epistemological role of experience lies in its essential contribution to the subject's understanding of certain perceptual demonstrative contents, simply grasping which provides him with a reason to endorse them in belief. I explain in detail how this is so; defend my position against a wide range of objections; compare and contrast it with a number of influential alternative views in the area; and bring out its connection with Russell's Principle of Acquaintance, and its consequences for the compatibility of content externalism with an adequate account of self‐knowledge.

A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed. The framework is used to defend and apply a pragmatic conception of presupposition, to account for the role of indicative conditional statements in reasoning, and to solve some puzzles about statements of identity and existence. The chapters in the second section concern the semantics of the attribution of belief and other propositional attitudes. They attempt to reconcile the possible‐worlds analysis of propositional content with the phenomena, including de re belief attribution and the attribution of indexical or self‐locating belief. The chapters in the third section defend an externalist account of the contents of thought. It is argued that there is no reason to think a viable account of narrow content can be developed, and that none is needed to provide an adequate account of the role of intentional content in the explanation of behaviour and experience. The chapters in the fourth section discuss the relation between the content of thoughts and the forms in which content is represented and expressed. It is argued that the temptation to build linguistic structure into the content of thought should be resisted since it does not provide the material for an adequate solution to the problems that plague the possible‐worlds conception of proposition, such as the problem of logical omniscience.

Practical Reality is about the relation between the reasons why we do things and the reasons why we should. It claims that, in order to understand this relation, we have to abandon current conceptions of the reasons why we act—our motivating reasons, as they are commonly called—as mental states of ourselves. Belief/desire explanations of action, or even purely cognitive accounts in terms of beliefs alone, drive too great a wedge between the normative and the motivational. Instead, we have to understand a motivating reason as the sort of thing that could be a good reason, for instance, that the train is about to leave. This, rather than my belief that the train is about to leave, must be my reason for running. Motivating reasons are not mental states of the agent, but states of affairs.

Explores issues ranging from introspection to social epistemology. “Internalism Exposed” pinpoints problems in the defense of internalism as an approach to epistemic justification. “A Priori Warrant and Naturalistic Epistemology” argues that naturalistic epistemology is compatible with a priori warrant, and shows how scientific research supports an innate faculty of number cognition that can generate arithmetic belief with a priori warrant. “The Unity of the Epistemic Virtues” examines the prospects for a unifying account of distinct epistemic values, such as justified belief and true belief. The next three papers consider intuitions and introspection from an epistemological perspective. One paper explains how intuitions can play the evidential role that philosophical practice assigns to it. Two papers argue that introspection plays an unavoidable but legitimate role in the science of consciousness despite being a “private” method. The final three papers deal with aspects of social epistemology. One asks how novices can justifiably choose among two or more competing experts. Another explores the possibility of an epidemiology of knowledge, of which memetics is a prominent example. The final paper provides a critical survey and guide to the diverse approaches to social epistemology.