Epistemic Explanations
Epistemic Explanations

Author: Ernest Sosa

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-07-22

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0192598449

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Epistemic Explanations develops an improved virtue epistemology and uses it to explain several epistemic phenomena. Part I lays out a telic virtue epistemology that accommodates varieties of knowledge and understanding particularly pertinent to the humanities. Part II develops an epistemology of suspension of judgment, by relating it to degrees of confidence and to inquiry. Part III develops a substantially improved telic virtue epistemology by appeal to default assumptions important in domains of human performance generally, and in our intellectual lives as a special case. This reconfigures earlier virtue epistemology, which now seems a first approximation. This part also introduces a metaphysical hierarchy of epistemic categories and defends in particular a category of secure knowledge.

Epistemic Explanations
Epistemic Explanations

Author: Ernest Sosa

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-07-22

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0192598457

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Epistemic Explanations develops an improved virtue epistemology and uses it to explain several epistemic phenomena. Part I lays out a telic virtue epistemology that accommodates varieties of knowledge and understanding particularly pertinent to the humanities. Part II develops an epistemology of suspension of judgment, by relating it to degrees of confidence and to inquiry. Part III develops a substantially improved telic virtue epistemology by appeal to default assumptions important in domains of human performance generally, and in our intellectual lives as a special case. This reconfigures earlier virtue epistemology, which now seems a first approximation. This part also introduces a metaphysical hierarchy of epistemic categories and defends in particular a category of secure knowledge.

Epistemic Analysis
Epistemic Analysis

Author: Paul Ziff

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-12-30

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 9789048183968

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THIS ESSAY was begun a long time ago, in 1962, when I spent a year in Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship. That twenty one years were required to complete it is owing both to the character of the theory presented and to my peculiar habits of mind. The theory presented is a coherence theory of knowledge: the con ception of coherence is here dominant and pervasive. But considera tions of coherence dictate an attention to details. The fact of the matter is that I get hung up on details: everything must fit, and if it does not, I do not want to proceed. A second difficulty was that all the epistemological issues seemed too clear. That may sound weird, but that's the way it is. I write philosophy to make things clear to myself. If, rightly or wrongly, I think I know the answer to a question, I can't bring myself to write it down. What happened, in this case, is that I finally became persuaded, in the course of lecturing on epistemology to under graduates, that not everything was as clear as it should be, that there were gaps in my presentation that were seriously in need of filling.

Appearance and Explanation
Appearance and Explanation

Author: Kevin McCain

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-02

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0192896873

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We might think that appearances give a prima facie justification for belief. This is the foundation for Phenomenal Conservatism in epistemology. McCain and Moretti adapt this view by integrating it with the view that epistemic justification is a matter of explanatory relations between one's evidence and propositions supported by that evidence.--

Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained
Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained

Author: Nathaniel P. Sharadin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-15

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1000618684

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Do epistemic requirements vary along with facts about what promotes agents' well-being? Epistemic instrumentalists say 'yes', and thereby earn a lot of contempt. This contempt is a mistake on two counts. First, it is incorrectly based: the reasons typically given for it are misguided. Second, it fails to distinguish between first- and second-order epistemic instrumentalism; and, it happens, only the former is contemptible. In this book, Nathaniel P. Sharadin argues for rejecting epistemic instrumentalism as a first-order view not because it suffers extensional failures, but because it suffers explanatory ones. By contrast, he argues that epistemic instrumentalism offers a natural, straightforward explanation of why being epistemically correct matters. What emerges is a second-order instrumentalist explanation for epistemic authority that is neutral between competing first-order epistemic theories. This neutrality is an advantage. But, drawing on work from cognitive science and psychology, Sharadin argues that instrumentalists can abandon that neutrality in order to adopt a view he calls epistemic ecologism. Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind.

Epistemic Injustice
Epistemic Injustice

Author: Miranda Fricker

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2007-07-05

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0191519308

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In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice. The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

Epistemic Consequentialism
Epistemic Consequentialism

Author: Kristoffer Ahlström

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0198779682

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An important issue in epistemology concerns the source of epistemic normativity. Epistemic consequentialism maintains that epistemic norms are genuine norms in virtue of the way in which they are conducive to epistemic value, whatever epistemic value may be. So, for example, the epistemic consequentialist might say that it is a norm that beliefs should be consistent, in that holding consistent beliefs is the best way to achieve the epistemic value of accuracy. Thus epistemic consequentialism is structurally similar to the family of consequentialist views in ethics. Recently, philosophers from both formal epistemology and traditional epistemology have shown interest in such a view. In formal epistemology, there has been particular interest in thinking of epistemology as a kind of decision theory where instead of maximizing expected utility one maximizes expected epistemic utility. In traditional epistemology, there has been particular interest in various forms of reliabilism about justification and whether such views are analogous to-and so face similar problems to-versions of consequentialism in ethics. This volume presents some of the most recent work on these topics as well as others related to epistemic consequentialism, by authors that are sympathetic to the view and those who are critical of it.

A Virtue Epistemology
A Virtue Epistemology

Author: Ernest Sosa

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2007-06-28

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0199297029

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This volume presents the six John Locke lectures delivered by the author in Oxford in May and June of 2005.

The Epistemic Role of Consciousness
The Epistemic Role of Consciousness

Author: Declan Smithies

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-08-02

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0199917671

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What is the role of consciousness in our mental lives? Declan Smithies argues here that consciousness is essential to explaining how we can acquire knowledge and justified belief about ourselves and the world around us. On this view, unconscious beings cannot form justified beliefs and so they cannot know anything at all. Consciousness is the ultimate basis of all knowledge and epistemic justification. Smithies builds a sustained argument for the epistemic role of phenomenal consciousness which draws on a range of considerations in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His position combines two key claims. The first is phenomenal mentalism, which says that epistemic justification is determined by the phenomenally individuated facts about your mental states. The second is accessibilism, which says that epistemic justification is luminously accessible in the sense that you're always in a position to know which beliefs you have epistemic justification to hold. Smithies integrates these two claims into a unified theory of epistemic justification, which he calls phenomenal accessibilism. The book is divided into two parts, which converge on this theory of epistemic justification from opposite directions. Part 1 argues from the bottom up by drawing on considerations in the philosophy of mind about the role of consciousness in mental representation, perception, cognition, and introspection. Part 2 argues from the top down by arguing from general principles in epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification. These mutually reinforcing arguments form the basis for a unified theory of the epistemic role of phenomenal consciousness, one that bridges the gap between epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Epistemic Paternalism
Epistemic Paternalism

Author: Guy Axtell

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1786615746

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This volume considers forms of information manipulation and restriction in contemporary society. It explores whether and when manipulation of the conditions of inquiry without the consent of those manipulated is morally or epistemically justified. The contributors provide a wealth of examples of manipulation, and debate whether epistemic paternalism is distinct from other forms of paternalism debated in political theory. Special attention is given to medical practice, for science communication, and for research in science, technology, and society. Some of the contributors argue that unconsenting interference with people’s ability of inquire is consistent with, and others that it is inconsistent with, efforts to democratize knowledge and decision-making. These differences invite theoretical reflection regarding which goods are fundamental, whether there is a clear or only a moving boundary between informing and instructing, and whether manipulation of people’s epistemic conditions amounts to a type of intellectual injustice. The collection pays special attention to contemporary paternalistic practices in big data and scientific research, as the way in which the flow of information or knowledge might be curtailed by the manipulations of a small body of experts or algorithms.