Echoing semanticists’ view on scientific theories, David Wallace has recently argued that physical theories are best understood if we conceive of them as mathematical structures. He supplements this idea by suggesting that they attach to the world by structural relations, e.g. isomorphism. This view, which he calls the math-first approach, contrasts with the language-first approach, according to which physical theories are collections of sentences latching onto the world by linguistic relations, e.g. truth. He then submits the structural realist stance is the appropriate metaphysics for this semantic framework. While agreeing that Wallace’s proposal is semantically and metaphysically tenable, I will argue that it is epistemically incomplete, since it leaves untouched the question “what are cognitive attitudes directed toward a physical theory?”. This issue becomes crucial especially when we notice that physical theories so construed cannot be the vehicle of propositional cognitive attitudes, e.g. belief and knowledge. Drawing on Elgin’s revisionary epistemology, I will suggest an augmentation to the math-first approach by certain non-propositional cognitive attitudes in such a way that both realist and anti-realist stances can be expressed within the resulting augmented math-first approach.

Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilist no-defeater clauses and develop a general taxonomy of defeater cases against which these clauses can be tested. Despite influential arguments that evidentialist understandings of justification are ill-equipped to handle the full spectrum of defeater cases, I will demonstrate that evidentialism has the right tools to make sense of all kinds of defeaters, including propositional and normative defeaters. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the proposed solution avoids recently influential objections against the notion of defeat.

The study of dis/misinformation is currently in vogue, however with much ambiguity about what the problem precisely is, and much confusion about the key concepts that are brought to bear on this problem. My aim of this paper is twofold. First, I will attempt to precisify the (dis/mis)information problem, roughly construing it as anything that undermines the “epistemic aim of information.” Second, I will use this precisification to provide a new grounded account of dis/misinformation. To achieve the latter, I will critically engage with three of the more popular accounts of dis/misinformation which are (a) harm-based, (b) misleading-based, and (c) ignorance-based accounts. Each engagement will lead to further refinement of these key concepts, ultimately paving the way for my own account. Finally, I offer my own information hazard-based account, which distinguishes between misinformation as content, misinformation as activity, and disinformation as activity. By introducing this distinction between content and activity, it will be shown that my account is erected on firmer conceptual/ontological grounds, overcoming many of the difficulties that have plagued previous accounts, especially the problem of the proper place of intentionality in understanding dis/misinformation. This promises to add clarity to dis/misinformation research and to prove more useful in practice.

Epistemic trust in others frequently cannot be disentangled from interpersonal trust more generally, but the epistemic implications of how we affectively express our trust in others are under-investigated. This essay claims that gratitude, despite its empirically undeniable importance to human flourishing generally, is also important epistemically and in several intersecting ways. To be grateful to a person is to represent the world differently in key respects. Gratitude, even if it is for past non-epistemic benefits, should play an important role in shaping who we epistemically rely on. Gratitude for specifically epistemic benefits is an important way in which we show our attunement to epistemic value and contribute to the incentive structures that make much of our public knowledge and informational ecosystems possible. Likewise, ingratitude is a crippling epistemic vice that renders our dependence on quality sources of information fragile and vulnerable to capture by misinformation.

In recent years, the topic of deep disagreement has gained considerable interest. A central question in the debate is metaphysical and concerns the very nature of deep disagreement. The so-called metaphysical program aims to provide ways of arbitrating between the different conceptions of the nature of deep disagreements provided by scholarship. Two possible ways of implementing the metaphysical program are examined. The first approach interprets theoretical concepts as descriptions of the lay concept of deep disagreement and employs the method of cases to arbitrate between them. The second approach regards theoretical concepts as revisions of the lay concept of deep disagreement, relying on the criteria provided by revisionary analysis for their assessment. Both alternatives are rejected as inadequate. Theoretical models of deep disagreement are better conceived as explanatory analyses of the lay concept. A consequence of this is that the different accounts of the nature of the phenomenon are not mutually exclusive, as practitioners of the metaphysical program often assume. A second implication is that the concept of deep disagreement is not methodologically dispensable, as some recent critics of the metaphysical program have argued.

The preface paradox is often taken to show that beliefs can be individually rational but jointly inconsistent. However, this received conflict between rationality and consistency is unfounded. This paper seeks to show that no rational beliefs are actually inconsistent in the preface paradox

The aim of this paper is to expose the intimate relationship between deep disagreements and skepticism. Philosophers have explored how deep disagreements lead to skepticism about their resolution at the metalevel (about whether one knows that P), but they have paid little attention to how they also lead to first- or object-level skepticism (about whether P is the case) and how skepticism also produces deep disagreements. I show how engaging in a discussion about any topic against a radical skeptic position always leads to deep disagreement. Furthermore, the disagreement engendered by radical skepticism is a kind of deep disagreement at the level of epistemic evaluation of propositions that covaries with deep disagreements at the object level. Deep disagreement and radical skepticism are intimately linked.

Safety accounts of knowledge intend to explain why certain true and intuitively justified beliefs fail to be knowledge in terms of such beliefs falling prey to a modal veritic type of luck. In particular, they explain why true and intuitively justified beliefs in “lottery propositions” (highly likely propositions reporting that a particular statistical outcome obtains) are not knowledge. In this paper, I argue that there is a type of case involving lottery propositions that inevitably lies beyond the scope of any reasonable safety account of epistemic luck. I offer counterexamples to accounts of epistemic luck in terms of safety conditions that involve both “locally” and “globally” reliable ways of forming beliefs in nearby worlds. All such counterexamples present a lottery case illustrating the next possibility: the process of selecting the lottery winner might be such that any world in which it delivers a different outcome is extremely far away from the actual world. In addition to being a case of safe ignorance, this type of lottery case shows that, ultimately, either veritic epistemic luck is not unsafe true belief or beliefs in lottery propositions are not epistemically luckily true.

A defeater is, very broadly, a consideration that reduces or completely takes away justification from a subject’s belief about a certain proposition. According to a widely endorsed view, justifiers and defeaters require evidential support. However, a number of philosophers argue that unjustified beliefs can serve as defeaters as well. Call the former type of defeater an ‘evidential defeater’ and the latter a ‘doxastic defeater’. Doxastic defeaters are highly controversial. First of all, they seem to be flatly incompatible with evidentialism. Moreover and more alarmingly, if we accept that unjustified beliefs can be defeaters, we have to accept that unjustified beliefs can serve as justifiers as well. A further unwelcome implication is that epistemically irresponsible subjects could immunise themselves from defeat by generating their own defeater-defeaters. Problems like these have led philosophers to reject doxastic defeaters altogether. This paper argues that doxastic defeaters are intelligible given a dualistic conception of rationality.

The paper responds to two recent versions of the argument against ex contradictione quodlibet (the principle that says that a contradiction entails any proposition, also known as ‘explosion’) based on the normative role of logic for reasoning. Both versions of the argument I am concerned with assume that a subject has defeasible reasons to believe any logical consequence of her beliefs. After showing this assumption to be more controversial than it might seem, I argue that even if it is true, and assuming ex contradictione quodlibet, no absurdity follows about what reasons the subject with inconsistent beliefs has. There is an independent explanation of the fact that a subject with inconsistent beliefs is not in a position to rationally infer anything. The reasons that derive from the inconsistency, if there are any, are a of peculiar kind, which I call inert reasons.

Can we rationally double-check something we already know? Those who say “no” endorse the Ignorance Norm, which states that we should not ask a question whose answer we already know, thereby classifying double-checking as improper. Those who say “yes” reject the Ignorance Norm, instead proposing a broader norm that accommodates double-checking. I argue that both positions are unsatisfactory. Instead, I propose a novel solution that offers two key advantages over existing accounts. First, it preserves the Ignorance Norm. Second, it treats double-checking as a proper form of asking questions. The proposed solution draws on insights from speech act theory, arguing for a distinction between the default way of asking questions – governed by the Ignorance Norm – and the practice of double-checking which is subject to a stronger norm. While in default contexts we ask questions to acquire knowledge, in cases of double-checking we seek further epistemic goods, such as certainty or second-order knowledge.

Accounts of common knowledge typically focus on how to represent what agents would know when they achieve common knowledge, instead of asking how agents achieve common knowledge. In this paper, by modifying a definition proposed by David Lewis, I generate a set of conditions the satisfaction of which would entail that a group of agents has common knowledge, properly so-called. I then ask what it would take to satisfy these conditions. I argue that these conditions can be satisfied and common knowledge achieved in the course of a conversation if, but only if, we adopt a particularly strong interpretation of Austin’s claim that the successful performance of a speech act requires the securing of uptake. I then argue that the generalization of this result to conversations involving more than two people requires that the audience to whom a speech act is addressed be able to recognize themselves as the audience of the speech act, in an essentially plural act of recognition. I close by arguing that one of the so-called paradoxes of common knowledge (the coordinated attack problem) in fact gives us some reason to favor Austin’s account of speech acts and therefore some reason to believe that common knowledge can, on occasion, arise.

Critical thinking is supported by a rich and diverse literature, with particularly close ties to argumentation theory and informal logic. It has often been presented in terms of a set of skills and dispositions, with the latter exemplified through the figure of an ideal critical thinker. These accounts of the relevant dispositions are intuitive and tend to emphasize openness, clarity, and a concern for truth. Seemingly running against this impression, it is argued here that an ideal critical thinker can willfully engage in fallacious argumentation. This surprising possibility is grounded in the distinction between thinking and arguing, with the literature on critical thinking being implicitly and rightly limited to the former. The argument draws on an established account of critical thinking dispositions, a simple supporting view of the nature of dispositions, and analogies to familiar phenomena like lying. The result complements existing work on the subject in terms of what a critical thinker should do, contributing to our understanding of the conceptual boundaries of critical thinking and argumentation proper.

Higher-order uncertainty is uncertainty about what one’s evidence supports. In many cases, a rational reaction to such uncertainty is to engage in inquiring activities like double-checking or redeliberating, with the aim of securing a firmer grasp of the evidence. An attractive idea is to account for the epistemic impact of higher-order uncertainty in terms of these inquiring activities. However, I argue that zetetic accounts along these lines are, at best, incomplete, because they cannot deal satisfactorily with cases in which higher-order uncertainty persists even if further inquiry is not required (cases at the end of inquiry). In this paper, I put forward a more general account of the impact of higher-order uncertainty. On this view, higher-order uncertainty may defeat propositional justification by undermining one’s access to the relevant evidence. Losing access to some evidence often calls for further inquiry. However, when this further inquiring is ineffective, inadvisable, or merely optional, one may be justified to adopt instead revised attitudes that fit one’s limited access to the evidence. This proposal accounts for the impact of higher-order uncertainty at the end of inquiry and offers an appealing explanation of the relations between this type of uncertainty and inquiry.

A state is luminous if and only if, whenever one is in it, one is in a position to know that one is. A state is bright if and only if, whenever one is in it, one is in a position to believe that one is. Beliefs have long been regarded, both historically and from a contemporary perspective, as luminous and bright. This paper evaluates Timothy Williamson’s influential anti-luminosity arguments as they apply to the luminosity and brightness of belief. While his margin-for-error argument may effectively challenge the luminosity of knowledge, it cannot be straightforwardly extended to undermine either the luminosity or the brightness of belief. Some authors responded to the more general anti-luminosity argument based on a constitutive connection between states and attitudes. An influential reply on Williamson’s behalf by Srinavasan in terms of degrees of confidence opens way to the claim that there is a constitutive connection between confidence and belief. The more general argument, in the specific case of belief, can then be resisted by drawing on independently defensible views of how we form beliefs about our own beliefs.

The sensitivity principle in epistemology has faced numerous, considerable, and relentless challenges since it emerged in Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (1981). In this paper, I develop a version of sensitivity, based on Dretske’s notion of conclusive reasons (1971), that responds to the complaint that sensitivity is either incompatible with or makes an unprincipled mess of higher-level knowledge. There are three key moves in formulating reasons-based Dretskean sensitivity (RDS). First, sensitivity is conceived in terms of reasons, rather than beliefs, that track the truth. Second, focus shifts from whether S would have those reasons in the relevant counterfactual worlds to whether those reasons would be the case. Third, closer attention is paid to the structure of reasons. Critics of Nozick point out that, typically, even when S knows that they do not have a false belief that p, if S were to have a false belief that p, S would nonetheless believe that they do not have a false belief that p, violating Nozickean sensitivity. I explain how this fact does not preclude higher-level knowledge according to RDS, even if the false belief that p were based on their actual method.

Some philosophers have recently argued that one should not be curious about a question whose answer one knows. This norm is said to follow from the fact that curiosity aims at knowledge. This article contends that the view that curiosity is inappropriate when directed at what is known, though attractive, is false. In fact, we are frequently curious about questions whose answers we know, and this curiosity is entirely appropriate because, along with metacognitive judgments about the contents of memory, it plays an important role in the process by which we successfully retrieve knowledge from memory. If this argument is successful, it reveals that some curiosity-driven inquiries target knowledge that lies within one’s own mind and raises important questions about the status and interpretation of the claim that curiosity aims at knowledge.

Education aims to improve our innate abilities, teach new skills and habits, and nurture intellectual virtues. Poorly designed or misused generative AI disrupts these educational goals. I propose strategies to design generative AI that aligns with education’s aims. The paper proposes a design for a generative AI tutor that teaches students to question well. I argue that such an AI can also help students learn to lead noble inquiries, achieve deeper understanding, and experience a sense of curiosity and fascination. Students who learn to question effectively through such an AI tutor may also develop crucial intellectual virtues.