According to conciliatory views about the epistemology of disagreement, when epistemic peers have conflicting doxastic attitudes toward a proposition and fullydisclose to one another the reasons for their attitudes toward that proposition (and neither has independent reason to believe the other to be mistaken), each peer should always change his attitude toward that proposition to one that is closer to the attitudes of those peers with which there is disagreement. According to pure higher-order evidence views, higher-order evidence for a proposition always suffices to determine the proper rational response to disagreement about that proposition within a group of epistemic peers. Using an analogue of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, I shall argue that no conciliatory and pure higher-order evidence view about the epistemology of disagreement can provide a true and general answer to the question of what disagreeing epistemic peers should do after fully disclosing to each other the (first-order) reasons for their conflicting doxastic attitudes.

By examining particular cases of belief perseverance following the undermining of their original evidentiary grounds, this paper considers two theories ofrational belief revision: foundation and coherence. Gilbert Harman has argued for coherence over foundationalism on the grounds that the foundations theory absurdly deems most of our beliefs to be not rationally held. A consequence of the unacceptability of foundationalism is that belief perseverance is rational. This paper defends the intuitive judgement that belief perseverance is irrational by offering a competing explanation of what goes on in cases like the debriefing paradigm which does not rely upon foundationalist principles but instead shows that such cases are properly viewed as instances of positive undermining of the sort described by the coherence theory.

I argue that John MacFarlane's attempt to reconcile his proposed truthrelativist account of future contingents with a plausible account of assertion is self-defeating. Specifically, a paradoxical result of MacFarlane's view is that assertions of future contingents are impermissible for anyone who already accepts MacFarlane's own truth-relativist account of future contingents.

Is knowledge necessary or sufficient or both necessary and sufficient for acceptable practical reasoning and rational action? Several authors (e.g., Williamson,Hawthorne, and Stanley) have recently argued that the answer to these questions is positive. In this paper I present several objections against this view (both in its basic form as well in more developed forms). I also offer a sketch of an alternative view: What matters for the acceptability of practical reasoning in at least many cases (and in all the cases discussed by the defenders of a strong link between knowledge and practical reasoning) is not so much knowledge but expected utility.

In a series of recent papers Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star argue that normative reasons to φ simply are evidence that one ought to φ, and suggest that“evidence” in this context is best understood in standard Bayesian terms. I contest this suggestion.

In this paper, I defend my original objection to Hales’ suicide machine argument against Hales’ response. I argue Hales’ criticisms are either misplaced orunderestimate the strength of my objection; if the constraints of the original objection are respected, my original objection blocks Hales’ reply. To be thorough, I restate an improved version of the objection to the suicide machine argument. I conclude that Hales fails to motivate a reasonable worry as to the supposed suicidal nature of presentist time travel.

Both perspectives, the one of the first and the one of the third person and their interrelation are necessary for the progress of consciousness research. This progress presupposes the systematic and productive collaboration between philosophy and neuroscience and cognitive science. While the philosophy of mind deals with working out clear conceptual implications and argumentative coherency in this area and critically follows the state of the art in this regard, the mission of neuro- and cognitive sciences is to develop and employ useful methods for the approach of the main problems of consciousness. I discuss this necessity by the example of research on implicit and explicit memory processes. Implicit and explicit memory processes are essential for the understanding and treating several psychological and neurological disorders. Among these, memory deficits play a crucial role in stress-related disorders, such as PTSD, dissociative disorders,and borderline personality disorders. Criticism has been exercised with regard to neglect of subjective experience in the research of memory processes, as well as the inadequate application of the concept of consciousness, usually leading to confusion. However, a step forward has already been taken in the research of memory processes. For example, the psychotraumatology research provided important advances in understanding the undelying distorsions in implicit and explicit memory procesess by employing combined assessments of both first-person and third-person data. Such multimodal research approaches delivered an exemplary model for the scientific investigation of mental processes and disorders and their neuronal substrates.

This paper argues that we know the future by applying a recent solution of the problem of future contingents to knowledge attributions about the future. MacFarlane has put forward a version of assessment-context relativism that enables us to assign a truth value 'true' (or 'false') to future contingents such as “There Will Be A Sea Battle Tomorrow.” Here I argue that the same solution can be applied to knowledge attributions about the future by dismissing three disanalogies between the case of future contingents and the case of knowledge attributions about the future. Therefore none of the traditional conditions for knowledge can be utilized to deny that we know the future, as I argue in the last section.

The traditional generality problem for process reliabilism concerns the difficulty in identifying each belief forming process with a particular kind of process. Thatidentification is necessary since individual belief forming processes are typically of many kinds, and those kinds may vary in reliability. I raise a new kind of generality problem, one which turns on the difficulty of identifying beliefs with processes by which they were formed. This problem arises because individual beliefs may be the culmination of overlapping processes of distinct lengths, and these processes may differ in reliability. I illustrate the force of this problem with a discussion of recent work on the bootstrapping problem.

A further reply to Trent Dougherty, author of Evidentialism and its Discontents, on a range of issues regarding a proper understanding of epistemic normativity and doxastic responsibility. The relative importance of synchronic and diachronic concerns with epistemic agency is discussed, both with respect to epistemology ‘proper,’ as well as in connection with broader concerns with ‘ethics of belief’ and ‘epistemology of disagreement.’

This paper offers an account of the a priori/a posteriori distinction utilizing the insights of reliabilism, focusing on the inputs to reliable belief-forming processes. Ipropose that a belief possesses a priori justification if it is the result of a reliable belief-producing process whose input is ‘non-sensory’ and the reliability of this process does not ‘causally depend’ on the reliability of a prior process taking in ‘sensory’ input. One of the interesting consequences of this account is in the treatment of introspective knowledge of one’s belief-states; it was classically considered a posteriori, but comes out a priori on this model.

The Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz and the American theologian Cornelius Van Til are famous for challenging Aristotle’s Principle of Contradiction.Whereas apparent contradictions such as God and physical reality being both One and Not One (Many) are accepted in terms of an idealism held by Van Til, the Principle’s violations in theology and science reflect a realism held by Lukasiewicz. Lukasiewicz is favored for explaining why the Principle’s violation may be rational for a scientific and theological realism.

Rachael Briggs and Daniel Nolan have recently proposed an improved version of Nozick’s tracking account of knowledge. I show that, despite its virtues, the new proposal suffers from three serious problems.

Given the particular character of Ancient Literature, I considered it useful to approach the issue from the perspective of the Philosophy of Science: Epistemologyand the Philosophy of Science stem from the same source, and this aspect is all the more patent for Antiquity. In fact, the two perspectives that I mentioned in the subtitle, Empiricism and Rationalism, both represent epistemological choices and approaches specific to the Sciences, as well as to the Philosophy of Science, in the manner that they were practiced in Antiquity. This present study argues that Empiricism noticeably distinguishes itself from Rationalism, not merely in the philosophical works of the above-mentioned period, but also in its non-philosophical literature, especially the one pertaining to Science. Consequently, this study aims to indicate the major lines of thought in the Ancient Philosophy of Science, which reflect themselves in Epistemology in an unmediated manner.

Literature in epistemology tends to suppose that there are three main types of understanding – propositional, atomistic, and objectual. By showing that all apparent instances of propositional understanding can be more plausibly explained as featuring one of several other epistemic states, this paper argues that talk of propositional understanding is unhelpful and misleading. The upshot is that epistemologists can do without the notion of propositional understanding.

Recently a number of variously motivated epistemologists have argued that knowledge is closely tied to practical matters. On the one hand, radical pragmaticencroachment is the view that facts about whether an agent has knowledge depend on practical factors and this is coupled to the view that there is an important connection between knowledge and action. On the other hand, one can argue for the less radical thesis only that there is an important connection between knowledge and practical reasoning. So, defenders of both of these views endorse the view that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. This thesis has recently come under heavy fire and a number of weaker proposals have been defended. In this paper counter-examples to the knowledge norm of reasoning will be presented and it will be argued that this view – and a number of related but weaker views – cannot be sustained in the face of these counter-examples. The paper concludes with a novel proposal concerning the norm of practical reasoning that is immune to the counter-examples introduced here.

Surprisingly precise results are provided on how much more one should disvalue being wrong than one values being right.

In this brief re-reply to Axtell, I reply to key criticisms of my previous reply and flesh out a bit my notions of the relationship between internalist evidentialism and epistemic virtue and epistemic value.

The goal of the paper is to offer an explanation why Frege has changed his Begriffsschrift account of identity to the one presented in Über Sinn und Bedeutung.The main claim of the paper is that in order to better understand Frege’s motivation for the introduction of his distinction between sense and reference, which marks his change of views, one should place this change in its original setting, namely the broader framework of Frege’s fundamental preoccupations with the foundations of arithmetic and logic. The Fregean thesis that mathematics is contentful, and its defense against formalism and psychologism, provides us an valuable interpretative key. Thus, Fregean senses are not just the mere outcome of some profound reflections on language, rather they play an important role in the articulation of Frege’s program in the foundations of arithmetic.

This work investigates some of the most important logical limits of scientific knowledge. We argue that scientific knowledge is based on different logicalforms and paradigms. The logical forms, which represent the rational structure of scientific knowledge, show their limits through logical antinomies. The paradigms, which represent the scientific points of view on the world, show their limits through the theoretical anomalies. When these limits arise in science and when scientists become fully and deeply aware of them, they can determine logical or paradigmatic revolutions. These are different in their respective courses, although the logical forms and the paradigms are parts of the same type of knowledge. In the end, science can avoid or can integrate its different limits. In fact, the limits of science can become new opportunities for its growth and development.