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It has been argued powerfully by Alvin Plantinga that naturalism suffers a kind of epistemic self-refutation, for it cannot provide appropriately for the very possibility of its being accepted rationally and known to be true. This argument is explained carefully, and its merits assessed, by reference to the epistemology of apt belief and reflective knowledge.

This chapter presents a theory of knowledge as coming in two main varieties: the animal and the reflective. Animal knowledge is apt belief, which hits the mark of truth through the exercise of competence, of intellectual virtue. This account enables a further, broader approach to scepticism, both dream scepticism and the more radical scepticism of outre scenarios such as the envatted brain and others of its ilk.

It is tempting to hold that a belief which is held unreflectively is not justified, and therefore, cannot constitute knowledge. Justification seems to be something which we achieve, rather than something which merely happens to us. More than this, when we hold a belief unreflectively, it seems that we have failed to be even minimally responsible, since it often happens that such beliefs are the product of hasty generalization, prejudice, or simply careless thinking. All of this suggests that in order for a belief to be justified, it must have been reflectively evaluated. This requirement is shown to be untenable, however, for it leads to an infinite regress. Technical fixes for the regress problem face an empirical difficulty: they presuppose that reflective evaluation is itself reliably performed and thus that reflective checking on one’s beliefs will improve the accuracy of the resulting conclusions drawn. Work in social psychology, however, shows that this is not generally the case. The value of reflective checking is thus called into doubt.

This chapter discusses the two varieties of human knowledge: the animal and the reflective. Animal knowledge does not require that the knower have an epistemic perspective on his belief, a perspective from which he endorses the source of that belief, from which he can see that source as reliably truth conducive. Reflective knowledge does by contrast require such a perspective.

This chapter argues that the goal of enquiry is reflective knowledge. Reflective knowledge is knowledge along with knowledge of how we know, or at least knowledge that we know. Recently discussed puzzlement about the value of knowledge is circumvented. The social transmission of knowledge is explored via a discussion of straightforward cases of testimony. An account of those cases is developed, drawing on the account of knowledge from indicators in the previous chapter but also invoking the idea that there is a practice of informing others by telling them things. A practice is taken to be a cluster of essentially rule-governed activities. It is argued that the account of practices does not suffice to explain the straightforward cases. We need to make sense of how we can recognize trustworthiness on the matter in hand.

This chapter argues that the new tracking view is superior to externalist rivals: process reliabilism, the safety view, and the relevant alternatives view. This is because of the generality problem, and treatments of reflective knowledge, lottery propositions, direction of fit with the world, the power property, and knowledge of logical and other necessary truths. A new view of logical truth is introduced, which is in keeping with the tracking view that knowledge is a matter of responsiveness to the way the world is.

This chapter aims to provide an account of Descartes's project in the Meditations that will fit various passages in the text that are incompatible with earlier interpretations. It emerges that Descartes upholds in all of its parts an epistemology that has come to be knows on the contemporary scene as “virtue epistemology.” This is the robust virtue epistemology that takes epistemic normativity to be the AAA performance normativity of accuracy, adroitness, and aptness, that distinguishes between animal and reflective knowledge, and that embraces epistemic circularity.

This chapter argues that people need to separate the issue of implicit learning from the issue of conscious access to implicitly acquired knowledge, noting that Merlin Donald's cognitive evolutionary theory can provide the ‘big picture’. It introduces classifier systems as an architecture for modelling the evolution of different knowledge systems, and uses this framework to examine evidence on the implicit learning of abstract knowledge. The chapter suggests that the tell-tale sign of implicitly acquired knowledge is fragmentary knowledge – not completely non-conscious knowledge. As far as explicit learning is concerned, it suggests that its function is to weave fragments of implicitly acquired knowledge into a coherent story. The chapter proposes that this leads to dissociations between what people say they are doing (reflective knowledge) and their actual behaviour (experiental knowledge).

Mainstream epistemology has aimed to provide reductive analyses of knowledge in terms of conditions on belief. Kinds of knowledge, for instance, perceptual knowledge and knowledge from testimony, are supposed to be explicated by drawing on the general analysis. This chapter outlines an alternative approach to epistemological method that aims to provide substantive accounts of knowledge of particular kinds and to illuminate knowledge in general in terms of those accounts. A case is made for the claim that those enquiring into the truth of some matter should aim at knowledge, and indeed reflective knowledge. It is argued that although epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge it should be sensitive to how the concept of knowledge figures in our thinking. Fruitful conceptual enquiry need not aim to provide analyses of concepts.

In this paper, we defend the claim that reflective knowledge is necessary for extended knowledge. We begin by examining a recent account of extended knowledge provided by Palermos and Pritchard (2013). We note a weakness with that account and a challenge facing theorists of extended knowledge. The challenge that we identify is to articulate the extended cognition condition necessary for extended knowledge in such a way as to avoid counterexample from the revamped Careless Math Student and Truetemp cases. We consider but reject Pritchard’s (2012b) epistemological disjunctivism as providing a model for doing so. Instead, we set out an account of reflection informed by Confucianism and dual-process theory. We make the case that reflective knowledge offers a way of overcoming the challenge identified. We show why such knowledge is necessary for extended knowledge, while building on Sosa’s (2012) account of meta-competence.

For adults, extraordinary agents, like God, are distinctively different from ordinary agents, and the brain is distinctively different from the mind. Preschool theory of mind—explored and explained in prior chapters—provides the platform on which older children build conceptions of God, brain, omniscience, and soul. These further cognitions depend on children’s own spontaneous ideas but also on culturally supported beliefs transmitted by others. Fueled by these sources—their own ideas and those of others—older children’s conceptions go beyond the ordinary to wrestle with the extraordinary, go beyond awareness of the limits of everyday agents to imagine and think about more limitless, transcendent agents and mentation. In this way social cognition moves from the intuitive to the reflective and even counterintuitive. In summary, the chapter describes four progressive levels of theory of mind development: infant cognitions, preschool intuitive theories, later reflective ideas, and (for some adults) reflective theories.

Chapter 9 introduces a metaphysical hierarchy of epistemic categories and defends in particular a category of secure knowledge. What unifies the various levels of our hierarchy, as distinct levels of human knowledge, is that on these levels the thinker attains an epistemic success (truth, or aptness) attributable to them, as really their own doing. Coordinately, such success corresponds decreasingly to adventitious external luck. This holds good all along the ascent of attitudes from the animal level of the merely apt, to the reflective-full-well level of the fully apt, to the securely reflective-full-well level attained through competences retained safely and not just by luck: i.e., competences that would not too easily have been missing.

This chapter focuses on a criticism of reflective knowledge, which is taken by Vogel as a decisive objection to tracking theories. This criticism finds its roots in Vogel’s earlier work and recurs in papers by Ernest Sosa, who suggests that the externalist idea behind tracking is spot on, but that Nozick’s counterfactual is a misbegotten regimentation of the idea. In its place, Sosa offers his own counterfactual “safety” condition that properly captures the externalist idea, and which is mentioned here to point out that the criticism, which is the subject of investigation, is meant to do a lot of work. In Sosa’s case the criticism is meant to motivate his own counterfactual analysis, and in Vogel’s it promises to be a silver bullet against a theory that has recently found renewed life in the work of Keith DeRose. The chapter argues that the criticism is misguided.

Virtue epistemology takes its own approach to the questions of traditional epistemology. In what follows, a fresh treatment of philosophical skepticism is enabled by a distinctive notion of default assumptions, along with an analogy between epistemic and athletic performance, and between episteme and praxis more generally. The novel response to the skeptics will explain how they’ve mistaken what’s required for the epistemic quality of ordinary judgments and beliefs. Our virtue epistemological approach relies on a category of default assumptions that is different from any “default justification” or “entitlement” already in the literature, if only because ours is embedded in virtue theory and is to be understood thereby. Wittgenstein comes closest in On Certainty, though his own ideas are also unhinged from any broader virtue epistemology.

Over the years, the notion of epistemic agency has played a larger and larger role in Ernest Sosa’s epistemology. In his most recent work, epistemic agency plays an absolutely central role in explaining why it is that our beliefs are subject to normative evaluation. This chapter argues that there are problems with the accounts of epistemic agency which Sosa gives at every stage of his work. More than this, there are other resources within Sosa’s epistemology which can do all the work he calls on epistemic agency to perform. As a result, the problematic appeal to epistemic agency may be deleted without any deleterious effects.

Descartes is a virtue epistemologist. Not only does he distinguish centrally between animal and reflective knowledge - in his terms, between cognitio and scientia - but in additionhe conceives of cognitio as apt grasp of the truth: i.e. as grasp whose correctness manifests sufficient epistemic competence. First-order knowledge is such cognitio or apt belief, which can then be upgraded to the level of scientia through competent reflective endorsement. So Descartes both (a) advocates aptness as an account of simple knowledge, and (b) highlights a higher knowledge that requires endorsement from a second-order perspective. This includes both main components of a sort of ‘virtue epistemology’ found in contemporary philosophy. This chapter argues that we can make sense of Descartes’s epistemological project only as a second-order project that fits with the view of his epistemology just sketched. Along the way supportive detail will reveal his commitment more fully.

Apt means–end action, whose success manifests (sufficient) competence plausibly requires a level of knowledge of the means–end proposition by the agent. He must have at least animal knowledge that through those means he could attain his end. Consider the case of a pilot trainee who could just as easily be under simulation as flying a real plane. Since she is unable to discriminate her actual situation aloft from a simulation that she might now be under, it is implausible that, so situated, she could really know she is aloft looking down on her potential targets. We might still insist that Simone must have a level of “knowledge,” perhaps metaphorically so called, that by shooting now she would hit her target. This chapter spells out the conditions required for these various levels of knowledge, at least the animal and the reflective, conditions that will require more than just aptness.