Transcendental Knowability and A Priori Luminosity

This paper draws out and connects two neglected issues in Kant’s conception of a priori knowledge. Both concern topics that have been central to contemporary epistemology and to formal epistemology in particular: knowability and luminosity. Does Kant commit to some form of knowability principle according to which certain necessary truths are in principle knowable to beings like us? Does Kant commit to some form of luminosity principle according to which, if a subject knows a priori, then they can know that they know a priori? I defend affirmative answers to both of these questions, and by considering the special kind of modality involved in Kant’s conceptions of possible experience and the essential completability of metaphysics, I argue that his combination of knowability and luminosity principles leads Kant into difficulty.

Applied Epistemology

In this chapter, Jennifer Lackey shows how applied epistemology brings the tools of contemporary epistemology to bear on particular issues of social concern. While the field of social epistemology has flourished in recent years, there has been far less work on how theories of knowledge, justification, and evidence may be applied to concrete questions, especially those of ethical and political significance. Lackey highlights the seven areas that will be the focus of the volume: epistemological perspectives; epistemic and doxastic wrongs; epistemology and injustice; epistemology, race, and the academy; epistemology and feminist perspectives; epistemology and sexual consent; and epistemology and the internet. She then offers a brief overview of each chapter.

Applied Epistemology

Applied epistemology brings the tools of contemporary epistemology to bear on particular issues of social concern. While the field of social epistemology has flourished in recent years, there has been far less work done on how theories of knowledge, justification, and evidence may be applied to concrete questions, especially those of ethical and political significance. The present volume fills this gap in the current literature by bringing together essays from leading philosophers in a broad range of areas in applied epistemology. The potential topics in applied epistemology are many and diverse, and this volume focuses on seven central issues, some of which are general, while others are far more specific: epistemological perspectives; epistemic and doxastic wrongs; epistemology and injustice; epistemology, race, and the academy; epistemology and feminist perspectives; epistemology and sexual consent; and epistemology and the internet. Some of the chapters in this volume contribute to, and further develop, areas in social epistemology that are already active, and others open up entirely new avenues of research. All of the contributions aim to make clear the relevance, and importance, of epistemology to some of the most pressing social and political questions facing us as agents in the world.

Situated Knowledge, Purity, and Moral Panic

A great deal of contemporary epistemology is driven by a kind of moral panic over the worry that there are no “pure” epistemic practices, perspectives, or standards detachable from the social situation of knowers. Kukla argues that we cannot do epistemology without fundamental, central attention to social identities, power relations, and the social institutions and structures within which epistemic practices happen. But this result is of no threat to our usable notions of objectivity, justification, and the like. The quest for purity is unnecessary. We should recognize it as a product of ideology and become comfortable with situatedness as an everyday phenomenon. Kukla ends by arguing that a proper naturalized, non-ideal epistemology—one more continuous with the empirical sciences—will treat situatedness not as something spooky or epistemologically threatening, but just as an empirical fact about our epistemic practices.

Illuminating the Mind

This book provides readers with an introduction to epistemology within the Buddhist intellectual tradition. It is designed to be accessible to those whose primary background is in the “Western” tradition of philosophy and who have little or no previous exposure to Buddhist philosophical writings. The book examines many of the most important topics in the field of epistemology, topics that are central both to contemporary discussions of epistemology and to the classical Buddhist tradition of epistemology in India and Tibet. Among the topics discussed are Buddhist accounts of the nature of knowledge episodes, the defining conditions of perceptual knowledge and of inferential knowledge, the status of testimonial knowledge, and skeptical criticisms of the entire project of epistemology. The book seeks to put the field of Buddhist epistemology in conversation with contemporary debates in philosophy. It shows that many of the arguments and debates occurring within classical Buddhist epistemological treatises coincide with the arguments and disagreements found in contemporary epistemology. The book shows, for example, how Buddhist epistemologists developed an anti-luck epistemology—one that is linked to a sensitivity requirement for knowledge. Likewise, the book explores the question of how the study of Buddhist epistemology can be of relevance to contemporary debates about the value of contributions from experimental epistemology, and to broader debates concerning the use of philosophical intuitions about knowledge.

On Reasonable Inquiry and Analysis Domains of Sympérasmology

Sympérasmology was proposed as the theory of synthetic system knowledge (SSK), which is seen as the fuel for the engine of systelligence. There are two main reasons why the proposal is made: (i) rapidly growing, SSK represents a third category of knowledge beside common personal knowledge and testified scientific knowledge, and (ii) though important, neither modern gnoseology nor contemporary epistemology studies its nature, principles, progression, and impacts. The need for rational and empirical studies of SSK is also underpinned by the on-going intelligence revolution, in which knowledge is deemed to be a productive power, a cognitive enabler of smart systems, and a strong transformer of social life. Sympérasmology is still in an embryonic state. Notwithstanding, a map of possible inquiry and analysis domains is released for a public debate in this paper. These domains can be sorted into four categories: (i) rudiments, (ii) principles, (iii) faculties, and (iv) implications. This paper explains these categories and the related domains of interest, and discusses some relevant aspects of study. Without striving for exhaustiveness, it elaborates on many relevant discussion topics and issues. The paper emphasizes that a precise specification of the scope and objectives of sympérasmology needs a stream of exploratory research studies as well as further insightful philosophical discussions.

The Truth About Better Understanding?

The notion of understanding occupies an increasingly prominent place in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. A central and ongoing debate about the nature of understanding is how it relates to the truth. In a series of influential contributions, Catherine Elgin has used a variety of familiar motivations for antirealism in philosophy of science to defend a non-factive theory of understanding. Key to her position are: (1) the fact that false theories can contribute to the upwards trajectory of scientific understanding, and (2) the essential role of inaccurate idealisations in scientific research. Using Elgin’s arguments as a foil, I show that a strictly factive theory of understanding has resources with which to offer a unified response to both the problem of idealisations and the role of false theories in the upwards trajectory of scientific understanding. Hence, strictly factive theories of understanding are viable notwithstanding these forceful criticisms.

Explicationist Epistemology and the Explanatory Role of Knowledge

It has been argued that much of contemporary epistemology can be unified under Carnap’s methodology of explication, which originated in the neighboring field of philosophy of science. However, it is unclear to what extent epistemological theories that emphasize the explanatory role of knowledge fit into this picture, Kornblith’s natural kind epistemology and Williamson’s knowledge first approach being cases in point. In this connection, I raise three questions. Can we harvest the insights of these approaches without loss in the more standard and less idiosyncratic explicationist framework? Can we do so without falling prey to prominent criticism raised against those approaches? Finally, do the approaches come out as coherent under an explicationist rendering? I argue that in Kornblith’s case the answer to all three questions is essentially in the affirmative. Much of the knowledge first approach is also translatable into explicationism. However, from that perspective, Williamson’s central argument for treating knowledge as undefinable, referring to persistent yet unsuccessful attempts to solve the Gettier problem, amounts to an overreaction to that problem. Leaving explicationism aside, I ask, in the penultimate section, what Williamson’s own philosophical method really amounts to.

Externalism, Warrant, and the Question of Relativism

According to James K.A. Smith, contemporary epistemology is overly focused on the noetic. Smith offers a counter-epistemology drawn from pentecostal spirituality that is narrative, affective, and embodied. Richard Davis and Paul Franks criticize this model and argue that it succumbs to story-relativism and arbitrariness. This article defends Smith against their critiques through three steps. First, it exposits Smith’s narrative, affective epistemology in order to identify areas that are relevant to their critiques. Second, it outlines and analyzes their critiques, reveals areas in which they fundamentally misunderstand Smith, and presents their commitment to epistemological objectivism. Finally, utilizing Alvin Plantinga’s externalist warrant model, it argues that Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology can assist Smith’s epistemology in consistent ways. If the following argument is successful, then Smith’s postmodern pentecostal epistemology can be reimagined as an externalist epistemology that overcomes the charges of relativism and arbitrariness.

Doxa Is of What Seems

What kind of thing is Plato’s doxa? This is a question nowadays rarely asked. It is widely assumed that Plato had in mind something perfectly familiar to us from commonsense contemporary epistemology: belief. I will argue that Plato’s doxa is instead essentially to be understood as the cognition of a special kind of object, what seems. Plato chooses ‘doxa’ rather than some more general or neutral term to name the inferior cognitive condition because of the etymological link with seeming (to dokein), which we find actively exploited in the Presocratics. Plato inflates this link into a substantive theory: what seems is something ontologically distinct from what Is, and when we attend to what seems we have doxa rather than epistêmê. This is particularly evident in Plato’s discussions of rhetoric. Thus the defining object of doxa is what seems.