scholarly journals In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-212
Author(s):  
Chad Gonnerman ◽  
Lee Poag ◽  
Logan Redden ◽  
Jacob Robbins ◽  
Stephen Crowley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Folk Concept ◽  
Knowledge Attributions ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon

Sackris and Beebe show that many people seem willing to attribute knowledge in the absence of justification. Their results provide some reason to claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. This chapter provides some support for this claim. It does so by addressing an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the observed knowledge attributions stemmed from protagonist projection, a linguistic phenomenon in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. That said, caution is recommended. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before much confidence is given to the claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not take justification to be necessary for its use.

scholarly journals God’s Divinely Justified Knowledge is Incompatible with Human Free Will

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
John Shook
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Divine Knowledge ◽  
Soft Fact

A new version of the incompatibilist argument is developed. Knowledge is (at least) justified true belief. If God’s divine knowledge must be justified knowledge, then humans cannot have the “alternative possibilities” type of free will. This incompatibilist argument is immunized against the application of the hard-soft fact distinction. If divine knowledge is justified, then the only kind of facts that God can know are hard facts, permitting this incompatibilist argument to succeed.

Knowledge before Belief

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Jonathan Phillips ◽  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
Fiery Cushman ◽  
Ori Friedman ◽  
Alia Martin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
External World ◽  
Knowledge Representations ◽  
Knowledge Attributions ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Belief Attributions ◽  
Learning From Others ◽  
Representations Of Belief

Abstract Research on the capacity to understand others’ minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one doesn't even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that non-human primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibit a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind—one that is focused on understanding others’ minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.

scholarly journals Knowledge Judgments in "Gettier" Cases

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Gettier Case ◽  
Gettier Cases ◽  
Knowledge Attributions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Experimenter Bias ◽  
Intuitive Judgments ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Analysis Of Knowledge

“Gettier cases” have played a major role in Anglo-American analytic epistemology over the past fifty years. Philosophers have grouped a bewildering array of examples under the heading “Gettier case.” Philosophers claim that these cases are obvious counterexamples to the “traditional” analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and they treat correctly classifying the cases as a criterion for judging proposed theories of knowledge. Cognitive scientists recently began testing whether philosophers are right about these cases. It turns out that philosophers were partly right and partly wrong. Some “Gettier cases” are obvious examples of ignorance, but others are obvious examples of knowledge. It also turns out that much research in this area of philosophy is marred by experimenter bias, invented historical claims, dysfunctional categorization of examples, and mischaracterization by philosophers of their own intuitive judgments about particular cases. Despite these shortcomings, lessons learned from studying “Gettier cases” are leading to important insights about knowledge and knowledge attributions, which are central components of social cognition.

Perpetrators are condemned more when they know, rather than merely believe, they will cause harm

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristopher M Smith ◽  
Robert Kurzban
Keyword(s):  
Strong Evidence ◽  
True Belief ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Knowledge Attributions

Are the perpetrators of an offense condemned more if they know, rather than merely believe, that their actions will cause harm? In three experiments, we tested how the epistemic status of perpetrators’ belief influences condemnation. In Experiment 1, we found that when perpetrators falsely believed their actions would not cause harm, justification for that false belief reduced condemnation relative to holding an unjustified false belief. In contrast, when perpetrators correctly believed their actions would cause harm, justification for that true belief increased condemnation relative to holding an unjustified true belief. In Experiment 2, we found that when perpetrators’ justification for their true beliefs that their actions would be harmful was later revealed to be erroneous, participants denied perpetrators “knew” their actions would be harmful and condemned them less than if they held a standard justified true belief. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that when perpetrators had strong evidence that their actions would be harmful but refused to believe it, participants denied perpetrators “believed” they would cause harm but agreed that perpetrators “knew” they would cause harm. Moreover, when perpetrators held a false belief contrary to evidence, they were condemned more than if they held a standard unjustified false belief. In all three experiments, knowledge attributions mediated group differences in condemnation. Together, these results indicate that knowledge of harmful consequences increases condemnation relative to mere belief of harmful consequences.

When Is True Belief Knowledge?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Foley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Coming To Know ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology ◽  
What Matters

A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief. This book finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not knowledge, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs—something important that she doesn't quite “get.” This may seem a modest point but, as the book shows, it has the potential to reorient the theory of knowledge. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information one does or doesn't have. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that, contrary to what is often thought, there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one doesn't lack important nearby information. Challenging some of the central assumptions of contemporary epistemology, this is an original and important account of knowledge.

Frustrating Absences

Disputatio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (53) ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
André J. Abath
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
The World

Abstract Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence.

Introduction to the cognitive abilities account for the reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of autobiographical memory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve M. J. Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Memory Function ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Temporal Distribution ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Reminiscence Bump ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
Cue Words

People tend to recall more specific personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods, a finding known as the reminiscence bump. Several explanations have suggested that events from the reminiscence bump are especially emotional, important, or positive, but studies using cue words have not found support for these claims. An alternative account postulates that cognitive abilities function optimally in adolescence and early adulthood, which may cause more memories to be stored in those lifetime periods. Although other studies have previously discussed the cognitive abilities account as a possible explanation for the reminiscence bump, it was only recently shown that cognitive abilities are indeed related to autobiographical memory performance. When this recent finding is combined with previous findings that cognitive abilities as well as autobiographical memory function optimally in adolescence and early adulthood, they suggest that the cognitive abilities account is a promising explanation for the reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of word-cued memories. However, because the account does not aim to explain the reminiscence bump in the distribution of highly significant events, it should be regarded as complementary to the existing accounts.

The Circulation of Life’s Resources

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Resource Flows ◽  
Recursive Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Egalitarian Ethos

To conclude the book’ s alternative account of the Athenian politeia, the chapter offers a recursive analysis of the resource flows which made this way of life possible. The result is very different from a conventional modern secular economic analysis. Instead, it treats resource transactions as the lifeblood of a cosmic ecology that united gods, land, and people in a condition of symbiotic interdependency. The most important of all these transactions were those between gods and humans, whereby the latter received secure conditions of existence in exchange for temples, sacrifices, votive treasures, and other often costly ritual offerings. The most important of the resource transactions between humans were marriages, whereby the managerial and reproductive capacities of females were transferred from one household to another, thereby perpetuating the life of the social body. Contrary to the “egalitarian” ethos which moderns believe animated “democratic Athens,” demokratia would also have been unsustainable without the innumerable contributions of resources, material and otherwise, that were made by a relatively small number of super-wealthy Athenian households. And in a polis where members typically worked only for themselves, the existence of these ecologically essential super-wealthy households would have been unsustainable without the routine exploitation of slaves.

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