Unreliable Knowledge

There is a virtual consensus in contemporary epistemology that knowledge must be reliably produced. Everyone, it seems, is a reliabilist about knowledge in that sense. I present and defend two arguments that unreliable knowledge is possible. My first argument proceeds from an observation about the nature of achievements, namely, that achievements can proceed from unreliable abilities. My second argument proceeds from an observation about the epistemic efficacy of explanatory inference, namely, that inference to the best explanation seems to produce knowledge, even if it isn't reliable. I also propose a successor to standard versions of reliabilism, which I call ‘ecumenical reliabilism’. Ecumenical reliabilism is consistent with unreliably produced knowledge and helps explain why unreliably produced knowledge is possible.

Irksome Assertions

The Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) says that knowledge is the norm of assertion: you may assert a proposition only if you know that it’s true. The primary support for KAA is an explanatory inference from a broad range of linguistic data. The more data that KAA well explains, the stronger the case for it, and the more difficult it is for the competition to keep pace. In this paper we critically assess a purported new linguistic datum, which, it has been argued, KAA well explains. We argue that KAA does not well explain it.

Inference to the best explanation

Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than another may include depth, comprehensiveness, simplicity and unifying power. According to Harman (1965), explanatory inference plays a central role in both everyday and scientific thinking. In ordinary life, a person might make the inference that a fuse has blown to explain why several kitchen appliances stopped working all at once. Scientists also seem to engage in inference to the best explanation; for example, astronomers concluded that another planet must exist in order to account for aberrations in the orbit of Uranus. However, despite the suggestiveness of cases like these, the extent to which we do and should rely on inference to the best explanation is highly controversial.

Procesamiento de inferencias emocionales. Un análisis sobre el efecto de la valencia y la dirección causal mediante una tarea de decisión léxica.

In two experiments we investigated the role that activation of emotional inferences when readers represent fictional characters' emotional states using an affective lexical decision task. Subjects read short stories that described concrete actions. In the first experiment, we analyzed whether the valence (positive or negative) was an important factor of inference´s activation. The results showed that valence was determinant factor in the moment that emotional inference was generated, being the positive valence faster than negative. In the second experiment we studied whether the emotion inference activation was influenced by the causal direction of the story, where the causal direction of the text was manipulated in order to induce towards an emotional inference predictive (the reader looking for a consequence that promote a particular emotion) or inducing an explanatory inference (reader looking for a cause that “explain” a particular emotion). The results suggest that emotional inferences are made online, and that valence and causal directions are two decisive components of emotional trait, but only positive valence increase their processing.

Psychological challenges for the analysis of style

Analyses of styles in design have paid little attention to how peopleseestyle and how designers use perceptions of style to guide designing. Although formal and computational methods for analyzing styles and generating designs provide impressively parsimonious accounts of what some stylesare, they do not address many of the factors that influence how humans understand styles. The subtlety of human style judgments raises challenges for computational approaches to style. This paper differentiates between a range of distinct meanings of “style” and explores how designers and ordinary people learn and apply perceptual similarity classes and style concepts in different situations to interpret and create designed artifacts. A range of psychological evidence indicates that style perception is dependent on knowledge and involves the interaction of perceptual recognition of style features and explanatory inference processes that create a coherent understanding of an object as an exemplar of a style. This article concludes by outlining how formal style analyses can be used in combination with psychological research to develop a fuller understanding of style perception and creative design.