Crispin Wright has explored and defended the proposal that we are rational in accepting certain ‘cornerstone’ propositions that play an epistemically foundational role on the basis of non-evidential warrants – entitlements – rather than on the basis of evidential justifications. One of the principal objections to this proposal, formulated by Wright himself, is the leaching problem. Put metaphorically, the problem is that it's hard to see how a superstructure of justified belief and knowledge could have something less epistemically secure lying at its foundations. In this paper I discuss how to best formulate the objection behind the metaphor, and I argue that it remains a live worry despite Wright's attempts to neutralize it. I also aim to clarify Wright's conservatism in light of some conflicting remarks he has made about whether he takes acquiring (as opposed to claiming to possess) justification or knowledge to be subject to the conservative requirement that one must have antecedent warrant for accepting the relevant cornerstone propositions. A major theme of the paper is that these two issues are intimately linked – that formulating Wright's conservatism in the most stable and motivated way leaves him without a response to the leaching problem considered in its strongest form.

This paper discusses the permissibility of exclusively relying on a procedural objectivity model for news reporting, from the perspective of the normativity of informative speech acts. It is argued that, with the exception of urgency situations, the paradigmatic application of procedural objectivity is in breach of the relevant norms.

An ongoing debate concerns whether agents can come to know that a particular piece of art is beautiful on the basis of someone's say-so. This debate concerns the epistemology of aesthetic testimony. Pessimists of various stripes claim that testimony-based knowledge of aesthetic propositions is impossible; optimists of various stripes claim that such testimony-based knowledge is possible. In this paper, I defend an optimist position: agents can come to know aesthetic propositions on the basis of testimony. Moreover, agents come to gain this knowledge quite readily. I make my case by considering a parallel debate in epistemology regarding assertions based on a particular kind of testimony, cases of what Jennifer Lackey (2011, 2013) has called “isolated second-hand knowledge” (ISHK). I argue that assertions based on isolated second-hand knowledge are appropriate, and hearers can come to know aesthetic propositions via testimony.

Social epistemology has to be admired for its courage in tackling those areas of human judgment that seem most epistemically problematic. When and how are we justified in accepting the testimony of a stranger? That looks like a hard question. Social epistemology has less obvious application to what might be considered the easy cases of epistemic justification: for example, the justification of judgments founded on explicit reasoning (‘there is no largest prime number’), or inner sense (‘I am presently feeling cold and a bit nervous’). My aim in what follows is to explore the social dimension of these ‘easy’ cases, and in fact also to discuss some hidden reasons why the epistemic justification of these judgments seems less problematic than the justification of judgments based on, for example, testimony and perception.

Can we learn something interesting about knowledge by examining our concept of knowledge? Quite a bit, many argue. My own view, however, is that the concept of knowledge is of little epistemological interest. In this paper, I critically examine one particularly interesting defense of the view that the concept of knowledge is of great epistemological interest: Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. A minimalist view about the value of examining our concept of knowledge is defended.

It seems that epistemically rational agents should avoid incoherent combinations of beliefs and should respond correctly to their epistemic reasons. However, some situations seem to indicate that such requirements cannot be simultaneously satisfied. In such contexts, assuming that there is no unsolvable dilemma of epistemic rationality, either (i) it could be rational that one's higher-order attitudes do not align with one's first-order attitudes or (ii) requirements such as responding correctly to epistemic reasons that agents have are not genuine rationality requirements. This result doesn't square well with plausible theoretical assumptions concerning epistemic rationality. So, how do we solve this puzzle? In this paper, I will suggest that an agent can always reason from infallible higher-order reasons. This provides a partial solution to the above puzzle.

An important principle in the epistemology of disagreement is Independence, which states, “In evaluating the epistemic credentials of another's expressed belief about P, in order to determine how (or whether) to modify my own belief about P, I should do so in a way that doesn't rely on the reasoning behind my initial belief about P” (Christensen 2011: 1–2). I present a series of new counterexamples to both Independence and also a revised, more widely applicable, version of it. I then formulate and endorse a third version of Independence that avoids those counterexamples. Lastly, I show how this third version of Independence reveals two new ways one may remain steadfast in the face of two real life disagreements: one about God's existence and one about moral realism.

A standard view in the epistemology of imagination is that imaginings can either provide justification for modal beliefs about what is possible (and perhaps counterfactual conditionals too), or no justification at all. However, in a couple of recent articles, Kind (2016; Forthcoming) argues that imaginings can justify empirical belief about what the world actually is like. In this article, I respond to her argument, showing that imagination doesn't provide the right sort of information to justify empirical belief. Nevertheless, it can help us take advantage of justification that we already have, thereby enabling us to form new doxastically justified beliefs. More specifically, according to the view I advocate, imagination can contribute to one's satisfaction of the proper basing condition – which turns propositional justification into doxastic justification – but without conferring any new justification that the subject isn't already in possession of upon their beliefs. Very little attention has been devoted to the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification in the literature on imagination, and the view I here argue for takes up a yet-to-be occupied position.

Speaking with conversational AIs, technologies whose interfaces enable human-like interaction based on natural language, has become a common phenomenon. During these interactions, people form their beliefs due to the say-so of conversational AIs. In this paper, I consider, and then reject, the concepts of testimony-based beliefs and instrument-based beliefs as suitable for analysis of beliefs acquired from these technologies. I argue that the concept of instrument-based beliefs acknowledges the non-human agency of the source of the belief. However, the analysis focuses on perceiving signs and indicators rather than content expressed in natural language. At the same time, the concept of testimony-based beliefs does refer to natural language propositions, but there is an underlying assumption that the agency of the testifier is human. To fill the lacuna of analyzing belief acquisition from conversational AIs, I suggest a third concept: technology-based beliefs. It acknowledges the non-human agency-status of the originator of the belief. Concurrently, the focus of analysis is on the propositional content that forms the belief. Filling the lacuna enables analysis that considers epistemic, ethical, and social issues of conversational AIs without excluding propositional content or compromising accepted assumptions about the agency of technologies.

I argue that the ground of the epistemic force of perceptual states lies in properties of the perceptual capacities that constitute the relevant perceptual states. I call this view capacitivism, since the notion of a capacity is explanatorily basic: it is because a given subject is employing a mental capacity with a certain nature that her mental states have epistemic force. More specifically, I argue that perceptual states have epistemic force due to being systematically linked to mind-independent, environmental particulars via the perceptual capacities that constitute the perceptual states. Thus, capacitivism shows how the epistemic force of experience is grounded in metaphysical facts about experience. Capacitivism is a distinctive externalist view of evidence and knowledge that does not invoke reliability, remains steadfastly naturalistic, and in recognizing a metaphysically substantive common element between perception and hallucination avoids any commitment to disjunctivism.

Theorists of education have long debated the ultimate aims of education, often proposing one or another cognitive aim, such as true belief or critical thinking. I will argue first that there are no ultimate aims common to all kinds of education, apart from the vacuous ones of transmitting cognition and improving the student's cognition. In light of this conclusion, the matter to investigate is the ultimate aims of certain broad kinds of education. I will restrict my inquiry here to cognitive ultimate aims, and I will focus on liberal arts education. I will propose that the organizing cognitive ultimate aim of liberal arts education is justified belief rather than true belief.

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures.

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some kind of epistemic injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners.

A telic virtue epistemology was presupposed in our treatment of insight and understanding. What follows will lay out the main elements of that telic theory and explore how it provides an epistemology of suspension.

Two sorts of connections between privacy and knowledge (or lack thereof) have been suggested in the philosophical literature. First, Alvin Goldman has suggested that protecting privacy typically leads to less knowledge being acquired. Second, several other philosophers (e.g. Parent, Matheson, Blaauw and Peels) have claimed that lack of knowledge is definitive of having privacy. In other words, someone not knowing something is necessary and sufficient for someone else having privacy about that thing. Or equivalently, someone knowing something is necessary and sufficient for someone else losing privacy about that thing. In this paper, I argue that both of these suggestions are incorrect. I begin by arguing, contra Goldman, that protecting privacy often leads to more knowledge being acquired. I argue in the remainder of the paper, contra the defenders of the knowledge account of privacy, that someone knowing something is not necessary for someone else losing privacy about that thing.

When scientific research collides with social values, science's right to self-governance becomes an issue of paramount concern. In this article, I develop an account of scientific autonomy within a framework of public oversight. I argue that scientific autonomy is justified because it promotes the progress of science, which benefits society, but that restrictions on autonomy can also be justified to prevent harm to people, society, or the environment, and to encourage beneficial research. I also distinguish between different ways of limiting scientific autonomy, and I argue that government involvement in scientific decision-making should usually occur through policies that control the process of science, rather than policies that control the content of science.

I argue, first, that testimony is likely a natural kind (where natural kinds are accurately described by the homoeostatic property cluster theory) and that if it is indeed a natural kind, it is likely necessarily reliable. I argue, second, that the view of testimony as a natural kind and as necessarily reliable grounds a novel, naturalist global reductionism about testimonial justification and that this new reductionism is immune to a powerful objection to orthodox Humean global reductionism, the objection from the too-narrow induction base.

Insight often strikes us blind; when we aren't expecting it, we suddenly see a connection that previously eluded us – a kind of Aha! experience. People with a propensity to such experiences are regarded as insightful, and insightfulness is a paradigmatic intellectual virtue. What's not clear, however, is just what it is in virtue of which being such that these experiences tend to happen to one renders one intellectually virtuous. This paper draws from both virtue epistemology as well as empirical work on the psychology of problem solving and creativity to make some inroads in accounting for insightfulness as an intellectual virtue. Important to the view advanced is that virtuously insightful individuals manifest certain skills which both cultivate insight experiences (even if not by directly bringing them about) and enable such individuals to move in an epistemically responsible way from insight experience to epistemic endorsement.

The idea that one can blamelessly violate a norm is central to ethics and epistemology. The paper examines the prospects for an account of blameless norm violation applicable both to norms governing action and norms governing belief. In doing so, I remain neutral on just what are the norms governing action and belief. I examine three leading suggestions for understanding blameless violation of a norm which is not overridden by another norm: (1) doxastic accounts; (2) epistemic accounts; and (3) appeal to expected value. We see that all of these accounts face problems when understood as accounts of blameless norm violation applicable to both belief and action. This leaves a variety of options including (1) seeking an alternative account of blameless norm violation common to belief and action; (2) concluding that we cannot determine the correct account of blameless norm violation independently of what are the norms of belief; and (3) abandoning the project of finding a common account of blameless norm violation common to ethics and epistemology.

Democracy has recently been criticized by several philosophers on grounds of poor epistemic performance. The proposed alternative – epistocracy – faces criticism for failing to uphold and express the core democratic values of civic equality and individual autonomy. In response, proposals have been offered that try to achieve epistocratic performance while retaining democratic inclusion. This paper raises two problems for such proposals, relating to the selection of experts and the incentive-compatibility of the system. Given these failures, I sketch what I call the Wiki-Model. I argue that the Wiki-Model (i) has desirable epistemic properties; (ii) realizes our democratic ideals; while also (iii) avoiding the two problems that other hybrid models face.