TIME CONSTRAINTS AND PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT ON KNOWLEDGE

Episteme ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Shin
Keyword(s):  
Time Constraints ◽  
Pragmatic Encroachment ◽  
Knowledge Ascriptions ◽  
Ordinary Knowledge ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
The Way

AbstractCiting some recent experimental findings, I argue for the surprising claim that in some cases the less time you have the more you know. More specifically, I present some evidence to suggest that our ordinary knowledge ascriptions are sometimes sensitive to facts about an epistemic subject's truth-irrelevant time constraints such that less (time) is more (knowledge). If knowledge ascriptions are sensitive in this manner, then this is some evidence of pragmatic encroachment. Along the way, I consider comments made by Jonathan Schaffer (2006) and Jennifer Nagel (2008, 2010) to construe a purist contextualist and a strict invariantist explanation of the data respectively, before giving reasons to resist them in favor of an account that indicates pragmatic encroachment. If successful, this may suggest a new way to argue for the controversial thesis that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge.

The Psychology of Knowledge Ascriptions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Gerken
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
Knowledge Ascription ◽  
Knowledge Ascriptions ◽  
Process Framework ◽  
Intuitive Judgments ◽  
Ordinary Knowledge

Chapter 5 surveys some empirical psychology and outlines some folk epistemological principles. By considering the heuristic and biases tradition, it is argued that ordinary knowledge ascriptions are standardly driven by heuristic processes and, therefore, associated with biases. This idea is integrated with a dual process framework for mental state ascriptions. On this basis, some of the central heuristic principles that govern intuitive judgments about knowledge ascriptions are articulated, and some of the biases associated with these principles are identified. The result is an account of an epistemic focal bias in intuitive judgments about knowledge ascription. Thus, Chapter 5 provides both a survey of relevant psychology and a development of the folk psychological principles governing knowledge ascriptions.

Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charity Anderson ◽  
John Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Pragmatic Encroachment ◽  
Epistemic Position ◽  
The Way

Defenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on p and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate notion of stakes are indicated, and some troubling cases for pragmatic encroachment raised.

Entitlement and the Epistemic Status of Cornerstone Beliefs

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 126-137
Author(s):  
Hamid Vahid
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Pragmatic Encroachment ◽  
Crispin Wright ◽  
The Way

In a series of papers, Crispin Wright has proposed a number of arguments to show that what makes one’s perceptual experience confer justification on the beliefs it gives rise to includes having independent, non-evidential warrant (entitlement) to believe the kind of presuppositions (or ‘cornerstones’) that the skeptic highlights. It has been objected that such arguments at most show that entitlement has a pragmatic character. While sympathizing with this objection, I will argue in this paper that the kind of considerations that Wright adduces in support of the entitlement thesis can nevertheless bear on the epistemic status of cornerstone beliefs, though not in the way envisaged by Wright himself. To show this, I shall make use of the thesis of pragmatic encroachment arguing that, in addition to its practical stakes, the epistemic stakes of a belief are also relevant to its epistemic status. The consequences of the claim will then be explored for the question of the epistemic status of cornerstone beliefs which seem to show that, pace Wright, such beliefs can, after all, be evidentially warranted.

Generalizing Experimental Findings

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judea Pearl
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trials ◽  
General Solution ◽  
Causal Inference ◽  
Randomized Clinical Trials ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Formal Treatment ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
The Way ◽  
Non Parametric

AbstractThis note examines one of the most crucial questions in causal inference: “How generalizable are randomized clinical trials?” The question has received a formal treatment recently, using a non-parametric setting, and has led to a simple and general solution. I will describe this solution and several of its ramifications, and compare it to the way researchers have attempted to tackle the problem using the language of ignorability. We will see that ignorability-type assumptions need to be enriched with structural assumptions in order to capture the full spectrum of conditions that permit generalizations, and in order to judge their plausibility in specific applications.

Staging a Strict Purist Invariantist Comeback

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Gerken
Keyword(s):  
Functional Role ◽  
Pragmatic Encroachment ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
Positive Account ◽  
Knowledge Ascriptions ◽  
Intuitive Judgments ◽  
Folk Epistemology

Chapter 9 responds to arguments for pragmatic encroachment that appeal to the communicative functions of knowledge ascriptions or genealogical assumptions. The methodology of such arguments is criticized by way of a dilemma—the Functional Role Dilemma. A further dilemma for pragmatic encroachment—Pandora’s Dilemma—is then raised: many factors other than stakes can have an effect on knowledge ascriptions. So, pragmatic encroachers must either accept that these factors are partial determiners of knowledge or reject this. However, both options lead to trouble. Since these dilemmas are indicative of the mistakes in our intuitive judgments, Chapter 9 serves both the purpose of compromising mistaken appeals to folk epistemology and the purpose of guiding a positive account.

Doxastic Wrongs

Reasons First ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Mark Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Pragmatic Encroachment ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Tamar Gendler ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

Chapter 9 extends the arguments of Chapter 8 by defending the view that we can wrong each other in virtue of what we believe about one another, and arguing that this is best and most conservatively explained by Pragmatic Intellectualism. It is argued that cases from Rima Basu, Simon Keller, Sarah Stroud, Tamar Gendler, and Berislav Marušić all involve doxastic wrongs. Though there are two prominent objections to the idea that beliefs can wrong, it is shown that Pragmatic Intellectualism offers answers to each of these objections. And finally it is argued that we have independent grounds to think that the best cases of doxastic wrongs are also among the very best cases for pragmatic encroachment, because of the way that the wrongs they involve are stable over time.

Stalking the elusive mental image screen

2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Mental Image ◽  
Spatial Properties ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Imagery Debate ◽  
Image Representations ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
Image Screen ◽  
The Way

After thirty years of the current “imagery debate,” it appears far from resolved, even though there seems to be a growing acceptance that a cortical display cannot be identified directly with the experienced mental image, nor can it account for the experimental findings on imagery, at least not without additional ad hoc assumptions. The commentaries on the target article range from the annoyed to the supportive, with a surprising number of the latter. In this response I attempt to correct some misreadings of the target article and discuss some of the ideas and evidence introduced by the commentators – much of which I found helpful, even though they do not alter my basic thesis. I also further develop the idea that the spatial character of images may come from the way they are connected to our immediate or immediately-recalled environment (by attention or by visual indexes) and towards which we may orient while we are imaging, thus leaving the alleged spatial properties of images outside the head and freeing image-representations from having to be displayed on any surface.

A Computational Study of a Period of Infant Object-Concept Development

Perception ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Slava Prazdny
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Computational Study ◽  
Concept Development ◽  
External Object ◽  
Object Concept ◽  
The World ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
The Way

Piaget has distinguished a number of distinct stages in the development of the concept of an enduring external object during infancy. I present a theory of a class of behaviours at one of these stages embodied in a working computer program. The behaviour of this program matches a class of perceptual behaviours of infants between about twelve and twenty weeks of age in a number of experimental situations studied by Bower. The theory argues that these behaviours are a result of the interaction between the perceptual and conceptual levels of the system, and the way in which conflicts between competing descriptions of an object are resolved. I locate the cause of several features of the behaviours in the procedures for managing the changing representation of the world, and the system's way of treating transitions between the states of an object (for example, moving to stationary). The basic conceptual primitives of the analysis are objects and events, not motion and place, as argued by Bower, or the infant's previous activity, as argued by Piaget. I argue that adequate explanations of experimental findings such as these require the construction of fairly detailed computational models.

scholarly journals Current Status and Potential Applications of Underexplored Prokaryotes

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kian Mau Goh ◽  
Saleha Shahar ◽  
Kok-Gan Chan ◽  
Chun Shiong Chong ◽  
Syazwani Itri Amran ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Industrial Applications ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Potential Applications ◽  
Methodological Bias ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
The Way

Thousands of prokaryotic genera have been published, but methodological bias in the study of prokaryotes is noted. Prokaryotes that are relatively easy to isolate have been well-studied from multiple aspects. Massive quantities of experimental findings and knowledge generated from the well-known prokaryotic strains are inundating scientific publications. However, researchers may neglect or pay little attention to the uncommon prokaryotes and hard-to-cultivate microorganisms. In this review, we provide a systematic update on the discovery of underexplored culturable and unculturable prokaryotes and discuss the insights accumulated from various research efforts. Examining these neglected prokaryotes may elucidate their novelties and functions and pave the way for their industrial applications. In addition, we hope that this review will prompt the scientific community to reconsider these untapped pragmatic resources.

scholarly journals Scepticism without Knowledge-Attributions

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Aaran Burns ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Attributions ◽  
Ordinary Knowledge ◽  
The Way

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 Externalists, that he doesn't understand the way that the word “knowledge” is ordinarily used. In this paper, I distinguish a form of Scepticism that is compatible with the truth of ordinary knowledge attributions and therefore avoids these criticisms. I also defend that kind of Scepticism against the suggestion that it is philosophically uninteresting or insignificant.

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