Decision-theoretic approach and a nonlinguistic theory of norms are applied in the paper in an attempt to explain the nature of scientific rationality. It is considered as a normative system accepted by scientific community. When we say that a certain action is rational, we express a speaker‘s acceptance of some norms concerning a definite action. Scientists can choose according to epistemic utility or other rules and values, which themselves have a variable nature. Rationality can be identified with a decision to accept a norm. This type of decision cannot be reduced only to its linguistic formulation; it is an act of evolvement of the normative regulation of human behavior. Norms are treated as decisions of a normative authority: a specific scientific community is the normative authority in science. These norms form a system and they are absolutely objective in the context of individual scientists. There exists an invariant core in all the norms of rationality, accounting for their not being liable to change, as compared with the flexibility of legal norms. The acceptance of and abidance by these norms is of social importance—it affects the aims of the community. A norm only defines the common framework and principles of scientific problem-solving; its application is a matter of professional skills and creative approach to a particular problem. It is of no importance at all, if an agent‘s cognitive abilities do not live up to the requirements of a norm. Such discrepancy can be compensated for by the fact that a scientist carries out work in a conceptual and normative framework established by a respective scientific community.

This article offers a simple technical resolution to the problem of induction, which is to say that general facts are not always inferred from observations of particular facts, but are themselves sometimes defeasibly observed. The article suggests a holistic account of observation that allows for general statements in empirical theories to be interpreted as observation reports, in place of the common but arguably obsolete idea that observations are exclusively particular. Predictions and other particular statements about unobservable facts can then appear as deductive consequences of such general observation statements, rather than inductive consequences of other particular statements. This semantic shift resolves the problem by eliminating induction as a basic form of inference, and folding the justification of general beliefs into the more basic problem of perception.

There are noncontroversial ways in which our words are context dependent. Gradable adjectives like 'flat‘ or 'bald‘, for example. A more controversial proposition is that nouns can be context dependent in a reasonably similar way. If this is true, then it looks like we can develop a positive account of semantic content as sensitive to context. This might be worrying for the epistemology of testimony. That is, how can we garner knowledge from testimony if it‘s the case that, though our syntactic utterances are identical, the semantic content of them may fail to be uniform? What if we mean different things by the same words? I argue that these kinds of semantic divergences provide the groundwork for a new kind of Gettier case. That is, given the likelihood of divergent semantic content, we can see a way to scenarios in which, despite that the semantic content is uniform, we might get justified true beliefs that nevertheless fail as knowledge. This, because it just as likely could have been the case that relevant contexts were dissimilar, and thus relevant semantic content would have been divergent. Lastly, where the phenomenon does occur, we never would have known the difference.

In this paper, I argue that Dual Process Theories of cognition, as recently defended by Keith Frankish and Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich, Peter Carruthers, Richard Samuels, and others, offer a useful framework that can transform our conception of the nature and role of concepts in cognitive science and the role of intuitions in epistemology. The result is that recent debates concerning competing accounts of concepts, the role of intuition in epistemology, and debates between internalists and externalists concerning the nature of epistemic justification and knowledge, can be usefully advanced given the resources of such Dual Process Theories.

An intuitive view regarding the epistemic significance of disagreement says that when epistemic peers disagree, they should suspend judgment. This abstemious view seems to embody a kind of detachment appropriate for rational beings; moreover, it seems to promote a kind of conciliatory inclination that makes for irenic and cooperative further discussion. Like many strategies for cooperation, however, the abstemious view creates opportunities for free-riding. In this essay, the authors argue that the believer who suspends judgment in the face of peer disagreement is vulnerable to a kind of manipulation on the part of more tenacious peers. The result is that the abstemious view can have the effect of encouraging dogmatism.

In charging argumentum ad hominem, we accuse someone of attacking the source of a claim. In charging argumentum ad verecundiam, we attack the source of a claim. This is reason for attending to "attacking the source." It is important to distinguish probabilistic reasons for doubting a claim and evidentiary reasons. Evidence that the source of a claim is likely to be wrong is not evidence against the claim. The tendency to overlook this is the essential feature of the ad hominem fallacy. This is relevant in assessing the view that someone who regards his thinking as made possible by Godless arrangements of matter largely determined by chance is, in taking this attitude, advancing a hypothesis which undermines his theorizing about the world or himself.

This paper develops an account of what it is for a proposition to be self-evident to someone, based on the idea that certain propositions are such that to fully understand them is to believe them. It argues that when a proposition p is self-evident to one, one has non-inferential a priori justification for believing that p and, a welcome feature, a justification that does not involve exercising any special sort of intuitive faculty; if, in addition, it is true that p and there exists no reason to believe that the proposition that p is incoherent, then one knows a priori that p. The paper argues that certain deeply contingent truths, e.g., the truth that I would now express by saying "I exist," can be self-evident to, and thus known a priori by, the person they are about at the time they are about; but, since they cannot be known a priori, or even expressed, by anyone else or at any other time, they should not count as a priori truths.

Closure is the epistemological thesis that if S knows that P and knows that P implies Q, then if S infers that Q, S knows that Q. Fred Dretske acknowledges that closure is plausible but contends that it should be rejected because it conflicts with the plausible thesis: Conclusive reasons (CR): S knows that P only if S believes P on the basis of conclusive reasons, i.e., reasons S wouldn‘t have if it weren‘t the case that P. Dretske develops an analysis of knowing that centers on CR, and argues that the requirement undermines skepticism by implying the falsity of closure. We develop a Dretske-style analysis of knowing that incorporates CR, and we argue that this analysis not only accords with closure, but also implies it. In addition, we argue that the analysis accounts for the prima facie plausibility of closure-invoking skeptical arguments, and nonetheless implies that they are fallacious. If our arguments turn out to be sound, the acceptability of Dretske‘s analysis of knowing will be significantly enhanced by the fact that, despite implying closure, it undermines closure-based skepticism.

The specter of epistemic closure haunts current epistemology: some regard the refutation of closure as obvious, while others take its denial to be an epistemicoutrage. To some extent, the strong difference of opinion has its source in certain misapprehensions. This paper tries to formulate and clarify the key issues dividing the two sides and contends that, in certain respects, the difference between the friend and the foe of closure may be more a matter of semantics than substance. The paper goes on to argue that once the substantial issues have been properly formulated, there is a limit to how far deductive reasoning can take the parties to the dispute.

It’s a cornerstone of epistemology that knowledge requires truth – that is, that knowledge is factive. Allan Hazlett boldly challenges orthodoxy by arguing thatthe ordinary concept of knowledge is not factive. On this basis Hazlett further argues that epistemologists shouldn’t concern themselves with the ordinary concept of knowledge, or knowledge ascriptions and related linguistic phenomena. I argue that either Hazlett is wrong about the ordinary concept of knowledge, or he’s right in a way that leaves epistemologists to carry on exactly as they have, paying attention to much the same things they always did.

The question in the title is addressed in three parts. First, I associate the democratisation of science with the rise of ‘Protscience’ (i.e. ‘Protestant Science’), which pertains to the long-term tendency of universities to place the means of knowledge production in everyone’s hands, thereby producing universal knowledge that is also universally spread. Second, I discuss how the current neo-liberal political economy of knowledge production is warping the ways that universities deal with this long-term tendency. These include: the segmentation of research and teaching; the alienation of the student constituency; the lack of incentive to defend the university. I then discuss strategies for addressing the resulting deformities and re-building solidarity within the knowledge producing community. These include the establishment of a student-based co-curriculum and the introduction of employee ownership policies to the university as whole. Third, I reprise the entire argument by focusing on the economic challenges facing the integrity of the university and knowledge as a public good. Some of these arise from Protscience itself and others from the neo-liberal environment that it inhabits. But in any case, it is important that the democratisation of science is not reduced to its marketisation.

In this paper it is argued that three of the most prominent theories of conditional acceptance face very serious problems. David Lewis' concept of imaging, theRamsey test annd Jonathan Bennett's recent hybrid view all face viscous regresses, or they either employ unanalyzed components or depend upon an implausibly strong version of doxastic voluntarism.

Anti-intellectualist theories of knowledge claim that in some way or other, practical stakes are involved in whether knowledge is present (or, where the view iscontextualist, whether sentences about knowledge are true in a given context). Interest in pragmatic encroachment arose with the development of contextualist theories concerning knowledge ascriptions. In these cases, there is an initial situation in which hardly anything is at stake, and knowledge is easily ascribed. The subsequent situation is one where the costs of being wrong are fairly significant from a practical point of view, and the claim made by pragmatic encroachers is that knowledge should not be ascribed in such situations and typically is not by competent speakers. My goal here is to show how mistaken the idea of pragmatic encroachment is.

Eric Barnes’ The Paradox of Predictivism is concerned primarily with two facts: predictivism (the fact that novel predictions play an important part in scientificconfirmation) and pluralism (the fact that scientific development is not just a matter of isolated individuals judging the truth, but at least partly a matter of trusting legitimate experts). In the middle part of the book, he peers through these two lenses at the tired realist scarecrow of the no-miracles argument. He attempts to reanimate this weatherworn realist argument, contra suggestions by people like me that it should be abandoned. In this paper, I want to get clear on Barnes’ contribution to the debate. He focuses on what he calls the miraculous endorsement argument, which explains not the success of a specific theory but instead the history of successes for an entire research program. The history of successes is explained by reliable and improving methods, which are the flipside of approximately true background theories. Yet, as Barnes notes, the whole story must begin with methods that are at least minimally reliable. Barnes demands that the realist explain the origin of the minimally reliable take-off point, and he suggests a way that the realist might do so. I contend that his explanation still relies on contingent developments and so fails to completely explain the development of take-off theories. However, this line of argument digs into familiar details of the no-miracles argument and overlooks what’s new in Barnes’ approach. By calling attention to pluralism, he reminds us that we need an account of scientific expertise. This is important, I suggest, because expertise is not indefinite. We do not trust specific experts for everything, but only for things within the bounds of their expertise. Drawing these boundaries relies on our own background theories and is only likely to be reliable if our background theories are approximately true. I argue, then, that pluralism gives us reason to be realists (about some things).

This paper tries to discuss some of the theories concerning the relation between literature and knowledge. On the one hand, most of the time, philosophers donot believe in the force of literature to generate knowledge. On the other, litterateurs are more optimistic, considering that there is a specific kind of knowledge that literature (sometimes they emphasize: only literature) is able to deliver. These are the two antagonistic theories I have to arbitrate in this paper. In my opinion, literature is an ally of science and philosophy and it can provide a large amount of knowledge about some aspects of reality that cannot be put into concepts. Some examples like dreams and love regarded both by philosophers and writers try to demonstrate that sometimes only literature can conquer some territories of the human mind and sensibility. At the end, the paper asserts, along with Peter Swirski, that interdisciplinarity is a compulsory condition if we want to take advantage from the whole knowledge that sciences, as well as arts, among which literature is to be mentioned, can offer us. The conclusion is borrowed from Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel: Knowledge is the literature’s only morality.