This paper is about the epistemology of perceptual experiences that have enriched high-level content. Enriched high-level content is content about features other than shape, color, and spatial relations that has a particular etiology. Its etiology runs through states of the agent that process other perceptual content and output sensory content about high-level features. My main contention is that the justification provided by such experiences (for claims about the high-level content) is not foundational justification. This is because the justification provided by such experiences is epistemically dependent on having justification to believe certain claims about the content relevant for enrichment—claims about what I call the corresponding features.

Although belief formation is sometimes automatic, there are occasions in which we have the power to put it off, to wait on belief-formation. Waiting in this sense seems assessable by epistemic norms. This paper explores what form such norms might take: the nature and their content. A key question is how these norms relate to epistemic norms on belief-formation: could we have cases in which one ought to believe that p but also ought to wait on forming a belief on whether p? Plausibly not. But if not, how can we explain this impossibility? I suggest that the best resolution is to view the traditional core norms on belief as themselves conditional in a certain sense, one that I think has independent plausibility. The results of this investigation may also tell us something about epistemic norms on suspension, on the assumption, which I defend elsewhere, that suspension is waiting.

In the contemporary epistemological literature, ignorance is normally understood as the absence of an epistemic standing, usually either knowledge or true belief. It is argued here that this way of thinking about ignorance misses a crucial ingredient, which is the normative aspect of ignorance. In particular, to be ignorant is not merely to lack the target epistemic standing, but also entails that this is an epistemic standing that one ought to have. I explore the motivations for this claim, and show how it can help us make sense of a range of cases concerning ignorance that the conventional, non-normative, accounts of ignorance struggle with. I also use this normative conception of ignorance to help elucidate the specific kind of epistemic standing the lack of which is entailed by ignorance.

A number of formal epistemologists have argued that perfect rationality requires probabilistic coherence, a requirement that they often claim applies only to ideal agents. However, in “Rationality as an Absolute Concept,” Roy Sorensen contends that ‘rational’ is an absolute term. Just as Peter Unger argued that being flat requires that a surface be completely free of bumps and blemishes, Sorensen claims that being rational requires being perfectly rational. When we combine these two views, though, they lead to counterintuitive results. If being rational requires being perfectly rational, and only the probabilistically coherent are perfectly rational, then this indicts all ordinary agents as irrational. In this paper, I will attempt to resolve this conflict by arguing that Sorensen is only partly correct. One important sense of ‘rational’, the sanctioning sense of ‘rational’, is an absolute term, but another important sense of ‘rational’, the sense in which someone can have rational capacities, is not. I will, then, show that this distinction has important consequences for theorizing about ideal rationality, developing an account of the relationship between ordinary and ideal rationality. Because the sanctioning sense of ‘rational’ is absolute, it is rationally required to adopt the most rational attitude available, but which attitude is most rational can change depending on whether we are dealing with ideal agents or people more like ourselves.

Uniqueness is the view that a body of evidence justifies a unique doxastic attitude toward any given proposition. Contemporary defenses and criticisms of Uniqueness are generally indifferent to whether we formulate the view in terms of the coarse-grained attitude of belief or the fine-grained attitude of credence. This paper articulates and discusses a hybrid view I call Hybrid Impermissivism that endorses Uniqueness about belief but rejects Uniqueness about credence. While Hybrid Impermissivism is an attractive position in several respects, I show that it faces a special problem, the diachronic coordination problem, which has to do with coordinating an agent’s beliefs and credences over time. I argue that the problem is fatal for Hybrid Impermissivism. I also formulate a logically weaker version of Hybrid Impermissivism which avoids the diachronic coordination problem, but under substantive assumptions about rational credence.

Frege puzzles exploit cognitive differences between co-referential terms (such as ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’). Traditionally, they were handled by some version of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, which avoided disruptive consequences for epistemology. However, the Fregean programme did not live up to its original promise, and was undermined by the development of theories of direct reference; for semantic purposes, its prospects now look dim. In particular, well-known analogues of Frege puzzles concern pairs of uncontentious synonyms; attempts to deal with them by distinguishing idiolects or postulating ‘narrow contents’ or elaborate forms of context-sensitivity are inadequate or semantically implausible. Although ascriptions of knowledge, belief, and other attitudes are ubiquitous in epistemology, epistemologists have not properly come to terms with the surprising consequences of anti-Fregean semantic accounts of attitude ascriptions. In ‘A Puzzle about Belief ’, Saul Kripke shows that natural-seeming disquotational principles for ascribing belief lead to apparently unacceptable consequences, including outright contradictions, in problem cases. Such disquotation principles, I argue, are best regarded not as conceptual connections but just as heuristics in the psychological sense, quick and easy ways of assessing belief ascriptions, usually accurate under normal conditions but far from 100% reliable. I discuss similar heuristics for ascribing knowledge and other attitudes. That the principles have a merely heuristic status need not be pre-theoretically manifest to their users. This view vindicates Kripke’s conclusion that it would be wrong-headed to draw semantic conclusions from Frege puzzles. I discuss the epistemological consequences of an anti-Fregean approach to Frege puzzles, including for Kripke’s cases of the contingent a priori and the necessary a posteriori, but also for evidence, for epistemic modalities, and for epistemic and subjective conceptions of probability. Anna Mahtani’s recent identification of Frege puzzles for the ex ante Pareto Principle as used in welfare economics provides an interesting example. I suggest a model-building methodology as the most promising way of handling at least some of the difficulties. A final issue is the choice between different anti-Fregean approaches to semantics, from very coarse-grained intensional approaches on which sentences express functions from (metaphysically) possible worlds to truth-values to more fine-grained hyperintensional approaches on which sentences express functions from possible or impossible worlds to truth-values or else Russellian structured propositions. Some of the hyperintensional theories violate semantic compositionality. More generally, since our attitude ascriptions rely on heuristics, they should be expected to exhibit some level of error; although hyperintensional approaches may be able slightly to reduce the level of postulated error, they do so at the cost of vastly increased theoretical complexity, and so have weak explanatory power. Methodologically, a simple intensional approach does better.

Can agents rationally inquire into things that they know? On my view, the answer is yes. Call this view the Compatibility Thesis. One challenge to this thesis is to explain why assertions like “I know that p, but I’m wondering whether p” sound odd, if not Moore-Paradoxical. In response to this challenge, I argue that we can reject one or both premises that give rise to it. First, we can deny that inquiry requires interrogative attitudes. Second, we can deny the ignorance norm, on which agents are not permitted to both know and have interrogative attitudes, such as wondering. I argue that there are compelling reasons to deny the former and reasons to question the latter. Both options pave the way for further work on further inquiry.

Anti-exceptionalism about logic, in its original Quinean incarnation, may be summarized as the thesis that logic is, in effect, simply a deeply entrenched part of empirical-scientific theory. It may thus be taken to involve two principal, distinguishable claims: First, Corroboration—that the epistemic good standing of logical principles is properly earned in the same way as the confirmation of all empirical scientific laws. We are justified in accepting such principles by, and only by, their participation in ongoing successful empirical-scientific theory. Second, Rejection—that, as with empirical-scientific hypotheses, logical principles are one and all in principle open to rational rejection or revision on purely empirical grounds if the system in which they are participant runs into “recalcitrant experience” and such an adjustment promises to smooth out the wrinkles. It is argued that neither claim can be sustained in full generality.

The notion of credit plays a central role in virtue epistemology and in the literature on moral worth. While virtue epistemologists and ethicists have devoted a significant amount of work to providing an account of creditable success, a unified theory of credit applicable to both epistemology and ethics, as well as a discussion of the general form it should take, are largely missing from the literature. Our goal is to lay out a theory of credit that seems to underlie much of the discussion in virtue epistemology, which we dub the Cake Theory. We argue that given the goals that virtue epistemologists and ethicists who discuss moral worth have, this theory is problematic, for it makes credit depend on the wrong facts.

In this paper, I want to discuss a problem that arises when we try to understand the connections between justification, knowledge, and suspension. The problem arises because some prima facie plausible claims about knowledge and the justification for judging and suspending are difficult to reconcile with the possibility of a kind of knowledge or apt belief that a thinker cannot aptly judge to be within her reach. I shall argue that if we try (as we should) to accommodate the possibility of this kind of knowledge, we should reject a widely held view about justification. We can correct this mistaken view about the connection between justification and knowledge by connecting justification to a kind of competence, but not the one we might have expected. In the course of this discussion, I shall flag some questions about the explanatory ambitions of the telic virtue-theoretic approach

Ernest Sosa’s new monograph, Epistemic Explanations, develops an important new account of epistemic evaluation, epistemic normativity, and the explanatory role of these. The first two sections of the present paper develop an interpretation of Sosa’s metaphysics of the mental states of rational agents as a version of hylomorphism (a view according to which such states can be understood as composed of matter and form). The second half of the paper uses this hylomorphic view to argue that Sosa can account for differences among the various kinds of knowledge by appeal to nothing more than differences among the belief-like attitudes involved in those kinds of knowledge. My argument for this last claim will also challenge Sosa’s own argument for two of the book’s most heterodox epistemological claims, viz., that knowledge can be recognizably insecure, and that knowledge can be based on mere assumptions.

This paper considers W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story, “Jesus Christ in Texas,” in the perspective of his analysis of the concept of beauty in Darkwater (1920); his exposition of the idea that “all art is propaganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926); and his moral psychology of white supremacy. On my account, Du Bois holds that beautiful art can help to undermine white supremacy by using representations of moral goodness to expand the white supremacist’s ethical horizons. To defend this thesis, he relies on an image of “the cross and the lynching tree” to revise imagery that he draws from Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 painting, “The Adoration of Kings.”

Black women struggle to make the violence they experience visible for at least four reasons: the violence occurs in private, not in public; it is associated with sex, sexuality and intimacy; the violence is not amplified within the public and counterpublic spheres; and, finally and importantly, activists have not been as successful in constructing resonate narratives regarding the violence. Contemporary violence against black men, for example, is often understood through the lens of lynching, a phenomenon that earlier activists were able to link to the biblical crucifixion. The activists’ work ensured that lynching holds an important place in the story of black peoplehood; it helped to make blacks as a political people and has been crucial to black understandings of who we are and why we are here. Social visibility requires that black women tell stories that not only build social movements; they must also tell stories that help to build people.

As legal scholar Ariela Dubler notes, the institution of marriage casts a long shadow across contemporary social life. Much more than a way of conferring social sanction on sexual and romantic relationships, marriage unlocks a wide range of social goods, from inheritance rights to medical records access. In addition, though, and as generations of feminists, queer activists, and others have made clear, this institution is part of a wider network of power relationships that it helps to shore up and conceal. Critics most often point to the way the marital regime quietly reinforces patriarchal, bourgeois liberal, and heteronormative assumptions, hiding them in the shadow of putatively benign, private, and natural social structures. This article brings the overlooked connections between marriage and race out of the shadows and more fully into view. Using and refining a fourfold notion of racial invisibility developed in Taylor’s Black Is Beautiful, we consider two respects in which this ocularcentric metaphor for racialized epistemic short-circuiting is particularly appropriate for discussing the marital regime.

My paper focuses on the theme of visibility by teasing out some paradoxes of invisibility. In the ordinary social world, what is said to be invisible is generally what is here, right before our eyes, but to which we pay no attention. Care is invisible because it goes on without us seeing it. By suddenly making visible what is ordinarily invisible, the COVID pandemic has been a strange pedagogical moment, making visible the people who take care of “us”, and revealing our entire society’s ignorance of what allows it to live—whether in the context of everyday life or in the urgency of the risk of death. The grammar of care has thus imposed itself on everyone, because care is never so visible as in those situations where a form of life is shaken. Care work has been revealed as invisible work that keeps everyone going. “Invisible” does not refer to a difficulty in perceiving but rather a refusal to see. A refusal to see something that is not hidden, but which we do not see precisely because it is right before our eyes. Invisibility is thus denial, in both the social and the theoretical realms, especially when care work is envisioned in the terms of the further invisibilization of care work when it is done for the benefit of women as in the “care drain” from poor to rich countries. The asymmetry in the relations between North and South is part of the invisibility of what sustains societies. The invisible chains of care reveal the extent to which the question of service is the fundamental question of social invisibility.

Class, race, and tough-on-crime political platforms are three of the most discussed, and thus most visible, forces that contribute to mass incarceration. The analysis of each of these forces has been illuminating, yet these broad narratives tend to obscure the burden of prison for those locked up within them. The social narratives that have developed to help understand the prison industrial system often inadvertently obscure the complex experiences and losses endured by prisoners. The psychic and physical toll that accrues from decades of social exile, the affronts to dignity that “corrections” regularly impose, and the injuries to one’s sense of themselves and their relationships that prison foments haven’t received the attention they deserve. This essay explores the question of the permissibility of causing harm through imprisonment and social abandonment, arguing that any adequate answer must make the particular experiences and actual concerns of incarcerated people socially visible.

Some prominent contemporary ethicists, including Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, do not consider human beings with profound intellectual disabilities to have the same moral status as “normal” people. They hold that individuals who lack sufficiently sophisticated cognitive abilities have the same moral value as nonhuman animals with similar cognitive capacities, such as pigs or dogs. Their goal—to elevate the moral standing of sentient nonhuman animals—is an admirable one which I share. I argue, however, that their strategy does not, in fact, achieve this goal and that there are better ways to advance it than to attach lesser value to the lives of profoundly intellectually disabled persons.