Radical Enhancement, Knowledge, and Autonomous Belief

Epistemic autonomy is necessary for knowledge in ways that epistemologists have not yet fully appreciated. This chapter uses a series of thought experiments featuring (radical) forms of cognitive enhancement in order to show why; in particular, and with reference to a series of tweaks on Lehrer’s ‘TrueTemp’ case, I motivate an autonomous belief condition on propositional knowledge, a condition the satisfaction of which—it will be shown—is neither entailed by, nor entails, the satisfaction of either a belief condition or, importantly, an epistemic justification condition. This transition from a ‘JTB+X’ to a ‘JTAB+X’ template marks an important and needed update to the received thinking about what knowing involves. (Of course, the question of whether knowledge is analysable is contentious; an appendix for knowledge-firsters explains the relevance of the necessity of epistemic autonomy for knowledge for knowledge-first projects).

The Value of Autonomous Knowledge

How does satisfying the epistemic autonomy condition on propositional knowledge add value to an otherwise unknown belief (including a justified, true, non-Gettiered but epistemically heteronomous belief)? This question isn’t some kind of afterthought. As work on the value of knowledge would suggest, lacking a good answer here actually counts as a mark against the adequacy of the JTAB+X template account. Several strategies are canvassed for attempting to vindicate the idea that epistemic autonomy adds value to an otherwise unknown justified, true non-Gettiered belief. Pragmatic and instrumentalist arguments are considered and shown to fail. A variation on a recent non-instrumentalist argument strategy is given special attention, but it also is shown to come up short. Finally, and by cobbling together some new twists on some ideas in value theory and action theory, I outline an answer that works. Key to the answer I defend is that knowledge makes us the knowers we are in a way that equally justified and anti-Gettiered true beliefs that lack epistemic autonomy do not and cannot.

Internalism, Externalism, and Autonomous Belief

What must be the case for an autonomous belief condition on knowledge (motivated in Chapter 1) to be satisfied by a knower? Chapter 2 takes up this question by investigating whether or not the knowledge-relevant (viz., epistemic) autonomy of a belief is determined entirely by the subject’s present mental structure. What I’ll call ‘internalists’ about epistemically autonomous belief say ‘yes’, and externalists say ‘no.’ Internalism about epistemic autonomous belief turns out to be problematic for reasons entirely independent from those we might have for rejecting internalist approaches to epistemically justified belief. What is shown to fare much better is a kind of ‘history-sensitive’ externalist approach to epistemically autonomous belief. On the particular account I go in for, which draws from externalist thinking about attitudinal autonomy more generally (as well as from virtue epistemology), a belief lacks the kind of epistemic autonomy that’s needed for propositional knowledge if the subject comes to possess the belief in a way that (put simply) bypasses or pre-empts the subject’s cognitive abilities and is such that the subject lacks easy (enough) opportunities to competently shed that belief.

Know-How, Performance Enhancement, and Guidance Control

If intellectualism about knowledge-how is true (and so, if knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that), then to the extent that we need an autonomy condition on know-how, it will be (simply) an autonomy condition on know-that: a condition on propositional knowledge-apt belief. However, the anti-intellectualist—according to whom know-how is fundamentally dispositional rather than propositional—would need an entirely different story here––one that places an autonomy-related restriction not on propositional-knowledge-apt belief but, instead, on know-how-apt dispositions. Chapter 4 develops exactly this kind of restriction, by cobbling together some ideas about know-how and virtue epistemology with recent thinking in the moral responsibility literature about freedom, responsibility, and manipulation. The proposal is that one is in a state of knowing how to do something, φ‎, only if one has the skill to φ‎ successfully with guidance control, and one’s φ‎-ing exhibits guidance control (and furthermore, manifests know-how) only if one’s φ‎-ing is caused by a reasons-responsive mechanism that one owns. Unsurprisingly, the devil is in these details—and this chapter aims to spell them out in a way that rules out certain kinds of radical performance enhancing cases while not ruling out that, say, one knows how to do a maths problem when one’s performance is just mildly boosted by Adderall.

Autonomous Knowledge

A central conclusion developed and defended throughout the book is that epistemic autonomy is necessary for knowledge (both knowledge-that and knowledge-how) and in ways that epistemologists have not yet fully appreciated. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 motivates (using a series of twists on Lehrer’s TrueTemp case) the claim that propositional knowledge requires autonomous belief. Chapters 2 and 3 flesh out this proposal in two ways, by defending a specific form of history-sensitive externalism with respect to propositional knowledge-apt autonomous belief (Chapter 2) and by showing how the idea that knowledge requires autonomous belief—understood along the externalist lines proposed—corresponds with an entirely new class of knowledge defeaters (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 extends the proposal to (both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist) knowledge-how and performance enhancement, and in a way that combines insights from virtue epistemology with research on freedom, responsibility, and manipulation. Chapter 5 concludes with a new twist on the Value of Knowledge debate, by vindicating the value of epistemically autonomous knowledge over that which falls short, including (mere) heteronomous but otherwise epistemically impeccable justified true belief.

Epistemic Autonomy and Knowledge Defeat

Chapter 3 highlights an important epistemological implication of the view developed so far—which is that the inclusion of an autonomous belief condition on propositional knowledge implies that knowledge can be defeated in ways other than via the standard modes of rebutting and undercutting defeat. An account of two types of what I call ‘heteronomous defeat’ for propositional knowledge is developed and defended: one on which propositional knowledge is defeated when the subject acquires a belief that either indicates the target belief is epistemically heteronymous (i.e. Type 1) or calls into doubt the reliability of the subject’s belief-forming process as one that would (reliably enough) result in an epistemically autonomous belief (i.e. Type 2). Recognizing heteronomous defeat as a genuine form of knowledge defeat fits snugly with the wider idea that knowledge defeaters, as such, are indicators of ignorance.

The Epistemic Role of Consciousness from a Practical Point of View

This paper concerns the way that phenomenal consciousness helps us to know things about the world. Most discussions of how consciousness contributes to our store of knowledge focus on propositional knowledge. In this paper, I recast the problem in terms of practical knowledge by reconstructing some neglected strands of argument in William James’s analyses of bodily affect and habitual action in The Principles of Psychology (1890/1950). I will argue that my reading of James’s view provides a plausible account of how phenomenally conscious states feed practical knowledge. I will also show that my reconstruction of James view harmonizes well with recent empirical findings.

Expertise as a domain in interaction

We start this article from Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between propositional knowledge, ‘knowing-that’, and procedural knowledge, ‘knowing-how’, and investigate how participants in interaction display orientation to the latter in various settings. As the knowledge of how things are done, know-how can be analyzed in terms of its relevance and consequentiality for parties in interaction. Similarly, as participants adjust their actions and understandings according to their sense of what they know and assume others to know, their know-how and its distribution may form the basis for adjusting and reshaping their actions, forms of participation and identities. In this sense, we aim at opening an investigation of know-how, and its conventionalized form, expertise, in interaction. In as much as it forms a distinct domain, a new research object – expertise in interaction – is formulated. Methodological issues of how to study expertise in interaction are discussed. The data are in English and Finnish.

The Role of Information in Knowledge-How

Knowledge-how is the kind of knowledge implicated in skill employment and acquisition. Intellectualists claim that knowledge-how is a special type of propositional knowledge. Anti-intellectualists claim that knowledge-how is not propositional. We argue that both views face two open challenges. The first challenge pertains to the relationship between informational states and motor variability. The second pertains to the epistemic function of practice that leads to skill (and knowledge-how). The aim of this paper is to suggest a general conceptual framework based on functional information with both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist features. Our proposal, we argue, avoids the above challenges, and can further the debate on knowledge-how and skill.

Suppose We Know Things

When contemporary philosophers discuss the nature of knowledge, or conduct debates that the nature of knowledge is relevant to, they typically treat all knowledge as propositional. However, recent introductory epistemology texts and encyclopedia entries often mention three kinds of knowledge: (i) propositional knowledge, (ii) abilities knowledge, and (iii) knowledge of things/by acquaintance. This incongruity is striking for a number of reasons, one of which is that what kinds of knowledge there are is relevant to various debates in philosophy. In this paper I focus on this point as it relates to the third kind of knowledge mentioned above – knowledge of things. I start by supposing that we have knowledge of things, and then I show how this supposition reshapes various debates in philosophy.