Tag Archives: knowledge

Ron WILBURN ABSTRACT: Epistemic contextualism (EC) is the thesis that the standards that must be met by a knowledge claimant vary with (especially conversational) contexts of utterance. Thus construed, EC may concern only knowledge claims (“Semantic EC”), or else the knowledge relation itself (“Substantive EC”). Herein, my concern is with “Substantive EC.” Let’s call the claim that the sorts of …

Nuno VENTURINHA ABSTRACT: This paper outlines the major topics addressed in my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018), anticipates some possible misunderstandings and discusses issues that warrant further investigation. Download PDF

Diana SOFRONIEVA ABSTRACT: It is generally agreed that empathy can give us knowledge about others. However, the potential use of empathy as a tool to learn about features of objects in the world more generally, as opposed to learning only about others’ internal states, has not been discussed in the literature. In this paper I make the claim that empathy …

Aaran BURNS ABSTRACT: The sceptic says things like “nobody knows anything at all,” “nobody knows that they have hands,” and “nobody knows that the table exists when they aren’t looking at it.” According to many recent anti-sceptics, the sceptic means to deny ordinary knowledge attributions. Understood this way, the sceptic is open to the charge, made often by Contextualists and …

Jeffrey HOOPS ABSTRACT: In recent discussions in this journal, Moti Mizrahi defends the claim that knowledge equals epistemic certainty. Howard Sankey finds Mizrahi’s argument to be problematic, since, as he reads it, this would entail that justification must guarantee truth. In this article, I suggest that an account of the normativity of justification is able to bridge the gap between …

Gregory STOUTENBURG ABSTRACT: Epistemic probability theories of luck come in two versions. They are easiest to distinguish by the epistemic property they claim eliminates luck. One view says that the property is knowledge. The other view says that the property is being guaranteed by a subject’s evidence. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen defends the Knowledge Account (KA). He has recently argued that his …

Hans ROTT ABSTRACT: An idea going back to Plato’s Meno is that knowledge is stable. Recently, a seemingly stronger and more exciting thesis has been advanced, namely that rational belief is stable. I sketch two stability theories of knowledge and rational belief, and present an example intended to show that knowledge need not be stable and rational belief need not …

Moti MIZRAHI ABSTRACT: This is a reply to Howard Sankey’s comment (“Factivity or Grounds? Comment on Mizrahi”) on my paper, “You Can’t Handle the Truth: Knowledge = Epistemic Certainty,” in which I present an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. While Sankey is right that factivity does not entail epistemic certainty, the …

Howard SANKEY ABSTRACT: This reply provides further grounds to doubt Mizrahi’s argument for an infallibilist theory of knowledge. It is pointed out that the fact that knowledge requires both truth and justification does not entail that the level of justification required for knowledge be sufficient to guarantee truth. In addition, an argument presented by Mizrahi appears to equivocate with respect …

James SIMPSON ABSTRACT: In a recent discussion note in this journal, Moti Mizrahi offers us the following argument for the conclusion that knowledge requires epistemic certainty: If S knows that p on the grounds that e, then p cannot be false given e. If p cannot be false given e, then e makes p epistemically certain. Therefore, if S knows …