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.

Global meta-philosophical skepticism based upon disagreement faces the problem of self-defeat since it undercuts its motivating conciliatory principle. However, the skeptic may easily escape this threat by adopting extensive meta-philosophical skepticism, i.e. the view that most of our philosophical beliefs are unjustified, except our beliefs in epistemically fundamental principles. As I will argue in this paper, this kind of skepticism still poses a radical challenge to philosophy as a cognitive discipline. Moreover, non-global skepticism that is still extensive undermines itself as well. The deeper reason for this is that this more modest kind of skepticism can only be motivated by the assumption that disagreement with philosophical peers is abundant and that we can identify peers only by relying on track-record arguments. But then one can argue for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism only if one presupposes that those philosophical beliefs that form the basis of track-record evaluations are justified. Here, the threat of self-defeat looms again. I will proceed by first defending the premises of this new anti-skeptical argument against standard objections from the literature. Second, I will show in more detail where the epistemic inconsistency arises in the argument for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism.

The contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist form of control. In this paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick's account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick's notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control.

In this paper, I consider the so-called Access Problem for Duncan Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism (2012). After reconstructing Pritchard's own response to the Access Problem, I argue that in order to assess whether Pritchard's response is a satisfying one, we first need an account of the notion of ‘Reflective Access’ that underpins Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism. I provide three interpretations of the notion of Reflective Access: a metaphysical interpretation, a folk interpretation, and an epistemic interpretation. I argue that none of these three interpretations comes without problems. I conclude that, until we have a clear and unproblematic account of Reflective Access, the Access Problem remains a challenge for Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism.

We investigate claims about the frequency of “know” made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in their “armchairs of an afternoon”, to use J.L. Austin's phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of “know” that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing.

Any good theory of knowledge ascriptions should explain and predict our judgments about their felicity. I argue that any such explanation must take into account a distinction between three ways of using knowledge ascriptions: (a) to suggest acceptance of the embedded proposition, (b) to explain or predict a subject's behavior or attitudes, or (c) to understand the relation of knowledge as such. The contextual effects on our judgments about felicity systematically differ between these three types of uses. Using such a distinction is, in principle, open to both contextualist and pragmatic invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions. However, there are some implications pertaining to the use of the “method of cases” in the debate about knowledge ascriptions.

Presumption is often discussed in law, less often in epistemology. Is it an attitude? If so where can we locate it within the taxonomy of epistemic attitudes? Is it a kind of belief, a judgment, an assumption or a supposition? Or is it a species of inference? There are two basic models of presumption: judgmental, as a kind of judgment, and legal, taken from the use of presumptions in law. The legal model suggests that presumption is a practical inference, whereas the judgmental model suggests that presumption is an epistemic attitude. I argue that presumption is neither a practical inference nor a merely epistemic attitude: it involves both, within the category of what we may call the inquiring attitudes.

Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn't elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright's contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don't remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don't actually enable us to acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wright's responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzzi's argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright couldn't answer Moruzzi's challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification.

Timothy Williamson recently argued that the notion of epistemic rationality is ambiguous between a Content-oriented schema and a Disposition-oriented schema. I argue that the Disposition-oriented schema suggested by Williamson is not faithful to the main idea behind it and that it should be replaced with the Disposition-Manifestation schema. This replacement suffices for avoiding Williamson's ambiguity thesis.

How does being a knower and possessing knowledge contribute to living well? Some have assumed that the eudaimonic value of knowledge is exhausted by its role as either a means or a final end. On this basis, it has been concluded that knowledge is not always valuable since its value will depend upon the ends that one has. I propose to expand our exploration by considering how knowledge might be valuable in virtue of being constitutive of certain eudaimonic goods. Using achievement as an example of an eudaimonic good, I argue, by way of considering its relations to credit and luck, that knowledge is necessary for achievement.

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors.

This paper is about the underlying logical principles of scientific theories. In particular, it concerns ex contradictione quodlibet (ECQ) the principle that anything follows from a contradiction. ECQ is valid according to classical logic, but invalid according to paraconsistent logics. Some advocates of paraconsistency claim that there are ‘real’ inconsistent theories that do not erupt with completely indiscriminate, absurd commitments. They take this as evidence in favor of paraconsistency. Michael (2016) calls this the non-triviality strategy (NTS). He argues that this strategy fails in its purpose. I will show that Michael's criticism significantly over-reaches. The fundamental problem is that he places more of a burden on the advocate of paraconsistency than on the advocate of classical logic. The weaknesses in Michael's argument are symptomatic of this preferential treatment of one viewpoint in the debate over another. He does, however, make important observations that allow us to clarify some of the complexities involved in giving a logical reconstruction of a theory. I will argue that there are abductive arguments deserving of further consideration for the claim that paraconsistent logic offers the best explanation of the practice of inconsistent science. In this sense, the debate is still very much open.

Survey data suggest that many philosophers are reliabilists, in believing that beliefs are justified iff produced by a reliable process. This is bad news if reliabilism is true. Empirical results suggest that a commitment to reliable belief-formation leads to overconfident second-guessing of reliable heuristics. Hence, a widespread belief in reliabilism is likely to be epistemically detrimental by the reliabilist's own standard. The solution is a form of two-level epistemic consequentialism, where an esoteric commitment to reliabilism will be appropriate for an enlightened few, while a form of epistemic fetishism – on which some heuristics are treated as fundamental epistemic norms – is appropriate for the rest of us.

Cartesians and Lichtenbergians have diverging views of the deliverances of introspection. According to the Cartesians, a rational subject, competent with the relevant concepts, can come to know that he or she thinks – hence, that he or she exists – on the sole basis of his or her introspective awareness of his or her conscious thinking. According to the Lichtenbergians, this is not possible. This paper offers a defence of the Lichtenbergian position using Peacocke and Campbell's recent exchange on Descartes's cogito as a framework for discussion. A thought-experiment will be presented involving two communities with radically different conceptions of the metaphysics of the self. The purpose of the thought-experiment is to suggest that a substantive metaphysical thesis, whose truth cannot be a priori known, is presupposed by any justified transition from one's introspective awareness of a certain mental activity to the self-ascription of that activity.

The generality problem is one of the most pressing challenges for process reliabilism about justification. Thus far, one of the more promising responses is James Beebe's tri-level statistical solution. Despite the initial plausibility of Beebe's approach, the tri-level statistical solution has been shown to generate implausible justification verdicts on a variety of cases. Recently, Samuel Kampa has offered a new statistical solution to the generality problem, which he argues can overcome the challenges that undermined Beebe's original statistical solution. However, there's good reason to believe that Kampa is mistaken. In this paper, I show that Kampa's new statistical solution faces problems that are no less serious than the original objections to Beebe's solution. Depending on how we interpret Kampa's proposal, the new statistical solution either types belief-forming processes far too narrowly, or the new statistical solution fails to clarify the epistemic implications of reliabilism altogether. Either way, the new statistical solution fails to make substantive progress towards solving the generality problem.

A group of philosophers led by the late John Pollock has applied a method of reasoning about probability, known as direct inference and governed by a constraint known as Reichenbach's principle, to argue in support of ‘thirdism’ concerning the Sleeping Beauty Problem. A subsequent debate has ensued about whether their argument constitutes a legitimate application of direct inference. Here I defend the argument against two extant objections charging illegitimacy. One objection can be overcome via a natural and plausible definition, given here, of the binary relation ‘logically stronger than’ between two properties that can obtain even when the respective properties differ from one another in ‘arity’; given this definition, the Pollock group's argument conforms to Reichenbach's principle. Another objection prompts a certain refinement of Reichenbach's principle that is independently well-motivated. My defense of the Pollock group's argument has epistemological import beyond the Sleeping Beauty problem, because it both widens and sharpens the applicability of direct inference as a method for inferring single-case epistemic probabilities on the basis of general information of a probabilistic or statistical nature.