Three Views of Human Knowledge

This chapter considers a traditional account of knowledge along with its indirect realist view of perception. On a traditional approach, perceptual knowledge is a special case of “justified true belief plus.” Such justification is alleged to come from the evidence of our senses. The chapter also compares a radically opposed, knowledge-first account, one that claims an important advantage: it is said to make room for reasons that can establish answers to our questions, enabling us to vouch for those answers. There is, however, a further alternative to consider. While better aligned with the tradition, this further alternative, as the chapter describes, still claims the same advantage as the radical knowledge-first approach.

Knowledge: Instrumental and Testimonial

This chapter goes into how we know through our instruments and interlocutors. It offers a way of understanding such knowledge in line with performance-based virtue epistemology. Testimonial knowledge is a collaborative accomplishment involving one's informational sources across time. In order to constitute knowledge, a testimony-derived belief must be accurate, and must thereby manifest competence, which should not be thought to require that the most salient explanation of its being right must involve the individual competence manifested by the subject in holding that belief. The explanatorily salient factors will probably lie elsewhere; what mainly accounts for the belief's correctness will likely involve others and their cognitive accomplishments.

Contextualism

This chapter considers the extent to which contextualism constitutes a further rival view in epistemology proper, and offers reasons to doubt that it is. Contextualism has gained center stage in epistemology mainly through its way with the skeptic, from the early days of “relevant alternatives” to more recent incarnations. Contextualism in epistemology concerns mainly threshold-setting mechanisms. The words involved, mainly the verb “to know” and its cognates, mark whether the subject lies above a threshold along one or more dimensions. While this chapter proceeds with an acceptance of the elements of contextualism, the chapter also enters some doubts about its implications for epistemology proper.

Value Matters in Epistemology

This chapter takes up how value matters in epistemology, and considers the Meno problem (“In what way is knowledge better than merely true belief?”) as to the content and plausibility of the claim that knowledge is always better than would be the corresponding merely true belief. It first asks whether knowledge is always better—at least in epistemic respects—then explores the relation between knowledge and proper action. The chapter then goes on to show how the value-of-knowledge intuition acquires further interest through its equivalence with the view of knowledge as a norm of assertion. Finally, this chapter steps back to examine what we might mean in saying that to know is always necessarily better than to get it right by luck while remaining in ignorance.

Epistemic Agency

This chapter takes up ways in which the epistemic realm admits a kind of agency and how this bears on the performance normativity proper to that realm. It argues that epistemic normativity is just the special case of AAA (accurate, adroit, apt) normativity where the performances are epistemic performances, mainly beliefs. Performances with an aim fall under this AAA structure, according to which a performance will be accurate or successful only if it attains its aim. There must hence be such a thing as the aim of a performance. Performances of interest will then be restricted to those with an essential aim—the aim that defines a given performance as a particular endeavoring.

Propositional Experience

This chapter presents an account of experiential states to which the AAA (accurate, adroit, apt) structure is applicable. It refers to four different ways in which our experience (apprehension) of sensa (sense data) might be direct. The directness could be causal, justificatory, inferential, or referential; the chapter dwells on each one with more detail. The crucial problem for the theory of sensa is how to defend its move beyond the first to the second stage. The chapter introduces a fourfold distinction among forms of awareness to approach the question of whether sensory experience can ever fail to be self-intimating, whether we can ever fail to be aware of some sensory experience that we are then anyhow undergoing.

Knowing Full Well

This chapter considers the epistemic normativity that constitutes our knowledge. It introduces two of Plato's best-known dialogues, which are both inquiries about knowledge. The Theaetetus inquires into its nature; the Meno into its value. Each dialogue, the chapter suggests, involves the same basic question: What sort of normativity is constitutive of our knowledge? A belief that falls short of knowledge is thereby inferior. It is better to know than to get it wrong, of course, and also better than to get it right just by luck. The chapter then asks what is involved in such an evaluation, and in addressing this question the chapter draws out a solution for both Platonic problems.

Epistemic Circularity

This chapter defends the epistemic circularity involved in meta-aptness and thereby in the full aptness of knowing full well. It begins by explaining two forms of bootstrapping: the inference from the perceptual belief that a seen surface is red to the conclusion that in so believing we are not misled by a white surface in bad light, and the inductive inference from the track record of a gauge to the conclusion that it is a reliable gauge. Each is formally valid, yet neither could possibly provide adequate justification for its conclusion. The chapter offers an explanation for why this is so, before moving on to the reliability of a competence that is not reason-involving. Finally, this chapter advances an argument in defense of trust in our epistemic faculties, one that involves circularity of a sort, and how such circularity can be considered virtuous.