Epistemic Reasoning and the Mental integrates the epistemology of reasoning and philosophy of mind. By examining the fundamental competencies involved in reasoning, Gerken argues that reasoning depends on the external environment in ways that are both surprising and epistemologically important.
Pieranna Garavaso and Nicla Vassallo investigate Gottlob Frege's notion of thinking (das Denken) to provide a new analysis of a largely unexplored area of the philosopher's work. Confronting Frege's deeply seated and widely emphasized anti-psychologism, Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance claims that the objective human science that Frege proposed can only be possible through a nuanced notion of thinking as neither merely psychological nor merely logical. Focusing on what Frege says about thinking in many passages from his works, Garavaso and Vassallo argue that Frege was engaged with issues that are still alive in contemporary debates, such as the definition of knowledge and the necessary role of language in conceptual thinking and in the expression of thoughts. Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance is essential not only for those interested in a new and original reading of Frege’s philosophy, but also for anyone engaged in epistemology, logic, psychology, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.
Bishop & Trout present a new approach to epistemoloy, aiming to liberate the subject from the 'scholastic' debates of analytic philosophy. Rather, they wish to treat epistemology as a branch of the philosophy of science.
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.
Dynamic Epistemic Logic is the logic of knowledge change. This book provides various logics to support such formal specifications, including proof systems. Concrete examples and epistemic puzzles enliven the exposition. The book also offers exercises with answers. It is suitable for graduate courses in logic. Many examples, exercises, and thorough completeness proofs and expressivity results are included. A companion web page offers slides for lecturers and exams for further practice.
This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.
The Handbook of Epistemic Cognition brings together leading work from across disciplines, to provide a comprehensive overview of an increasingly important topic: how people acquire, understand, justify, change, and use knowledge in formal and informal contexts. Research into inquiry, understanding, and discovery within academic disciplines has progressed from general models of conceptual change to a focus upon the learning trajectories that lead to expert-like conceptualizations, skills, and performance. Outside of academic domains, issues of who and what to believe, and how to integrate multiple sources of information into coherent and useful knowledge, have arisen as primary challenges of the 21st century. In six sections, scholars write within and across fields to focus and advance the role of epistemic cognition in education. With special attention to how researchers across disciplines can communicate and collaborate more effectively, this book will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the future of knowledge and knowing. Dr. Jeffrey A. Greene is an associate professor of Learning Sciences and Psychological Studies in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. William A. Sandoval is a professor in the division of Urban Schooling at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Dr. Ivar Bråten is a professor of Educational Psychology at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Oslo, Norway.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2008, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2008. The 27 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial orientation, spatial navigation, spatial learning, maps and modalities, spatial communication, spatial language, similarity and abstraction, concepts and reference frames, as well as spatial modeling and spatial reasoning.
On Folk Epistemology explores how we ascribe knowledge to ourselves and others. Empirical evidence suggests that we do so early and often in thought as well as in talk. Since knowledge ascriptions are central to how we navigate social life, it is important to understand our basis for making them. A central claim of the book is that factors that have nothing to do with knowledge may lead to systematic mistakes in everyday ascriptions of knowledge. These mistakes are explained by an empirically informed account of how ordinary knowledge ascriptions are the product of cognitive heuristics that are associated with biases. In developing this account, Mikkel Gerken presents work in cognitive psychology and pragmatics, while also contributing to epistemology. For example, Gerken develops positive epistemic norms of action and assertion and moreover, critically assesses contextualism, knowledge-first methodology, pragmatic encroachment theories and more. Many of these approaches are argued to overestimate the epistemological significance of folk epistemology. In contrast, this volume develops an equilibristic methodology according to which intuitive judgments about knowledge cannot straightforwardly play a role as data for epistemological theorizing. Rather, critical epistemological theorizing is required to interpret empirical findings. Consequently, On Folk Epistemology helps to lay the foundation for an emerging sub-field that intersects philosophy and the cognitive sciences: The empirical study of folk epistemology.