Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that 'know' is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers' statements about their own mental states. My evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons.
If moral responsibilities prescribe how agents ought to behave, are there also intellectual responsibilities prescribing what agents ought to believe? Many theorists have argued that there cannot be intellectual responsibilities because they would require the ability to control whether one believes, whereas it is impossible to control whether one believes. This argument appeals to an “ought implies can” principle for intellectual responsibilities. The present paper tests for the presence of intellectual responsibilities in social cognition. Four experiments show that intellectual responsibilities are attributed to believe things and that these responsibilities can exceed what agents are able to believe. Furthermore, the results show that agents are sometimes considered responsible for failing to form true beliefs on the basis of good evidence, and that this effect does not depend on the seriousness of the consequences for failing to form a belief. These findings clarify when and how responsibilities for belief are attributed, falsify a conceptual entailment between ability and responsibility in the intellectual domain, and emphasize the importance of objective truth in intellectual evaluations.
Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. By asserting, we share knowledge, coordinate behavior, and advance collective inquiry. Accordingly, assertion is of considerable interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. This paper advances our understanding of the norm of assertion. Prior evidence suggests that knowledge is the norm of assertion, a view known as "the knowledge account." In its strongest form, the knowledge account says that knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for assertability: you should make an assertion if and only if you know that it is true. The knowledge account has been rejected on the grounds that it conflicts with our ordinary practice of evaluating assertions. This paper reports four experiments that address an important objection of this sort, which focuses on a class of examples known as "Gettier cases." The results undermine the objection and, in the process, provide further evidence for the knowledge account. The findings also teach some important general lessons about intuitional methodology and the curation of genres of thought experiment.
I review several theoretical and empirical developments relevant to assessing contemporary virtue epistemology’s theory of knowledge. What emerges is a leaner theory of knowledge that is more empirically adequate, better captures the ordinary conception of knowledge, and is ripe for cross-fertilization with cognitive science. I call this view abilism. Along the way I identify several topics for future research.
Contemporary philosophers nearly unanimously endorse knowledge reliabilism, the view that knowledge must be reliably produced.Leading reliabilists have suggested that reliabilism draws support from patterns in ordinary judgments and intuitions about knowledge, luck, reliability, and counterfactuals.That is, they have suggested a proto-reliabilist hypothesis about "commonsense" or "folk" epistemology.This paper reports nine experimental studies (N = 1262) that test the proto-reliabilist hypothesis by testing four of its principal implications.The main findings are that (a) commonsense fully embraces the possibility of unreliable knowledge, (b) knowledge judgments are surprisingly insensitive to information about reliability, (c) "anti-luck" intuitions about knowledge have nothing to do with reliability specifically, and (d) reliabilists have mischaracterized the intuitive counterfactual properties of knowledge and their relation to reliability.When combined with the weakness of existing arguments for reliabilism and the recent emergence of well-supported alternative views that predict the widespread existence of unreliable knowledge, the present findings are the final exhibit in a conclusive case for abandoning reliabilism in epistemology.i introduce an alternative theory of knowledge, abilism, which outperforms reliabilism and well explains all the available evidence.
I accomplish two things in this paper. First I expose some important limitations of the contemporary literature on the norms of assertion and in the process illuminate a host of new directions and forms that an account of assertional norms might take. Second I leverage those insights to suggest a new account of the relationship between knowledge and assertion, which arguably outperforms the standard knowledge account.
Moderate scientism is the view that empirical science can help answer questions in nonscientific disciplines. This chapter evaluates moderate scientism in philosophy. It reviews several ways that science has contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. It also reviews several ways that science has contributed to our understanding of how philosophers make judgments and decisions. Based on this research, it concludes that the case for moderate philosophical scientism is strong: Scientific practice has promoted significant progress in philosophy, and its further development should be welcomed and encouraged.
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