The idea that the concept ‘knowledge’ has a distinctive function or social role is increasingly influential within contemporary epistemology. Perhaps the best-known account of the function of ‘knowledge’ is that developed in Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature (1990, Oxford University Press), on which (roughly) ‘knowledge’ has the function of identifying good informants. Craig's account of the function of ‘knowledge’ has been appealed to in support of a variety of views, and in this paper I'm concerned with the claim that it supports a sort of epistemic contextualism, which is (roughly) the view that the semantic contents and truth-conditions of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions – instances of ‘S knows that p’ – depend on and vary with the context of ascription (see, for instance, John Greco's ‘What's wrong with contextualism’, Philosophical Quarterly [2008]). Prima facie, this claim should strike us as surprising. A number of concepts and linguistic items (words, sentences) serve functions that have little or nothing to do with semantics. However, I argue that, on the best interpretation of talk of the function of a concept such as ‘knowledge’, the function of ‘knowledge’ is relevant to semantics. Along the way I also suggest how to improve on what I call the ‘usual argument’ that Craig's account of the function of ‘knowledge’ supports epistemic contextualism.

I propose an account of the supply domain for testimonial knowledge: intentional acts in which a speaker offers her word on a matter to her intended audience. Such acts are effected by speech acts of telling exploiting a shared language. From this account I derive an account of the proper doxastic response to such a telling that P, namely accepting the speaker’s offered word that P. I show that one who takes the speaker’s word is committed to holding that she was epistemically so placed as to properly offer her word – namely, that she knows that P. I use my account of the supply domain for and proper response to testimony, to show what is wrong with a thin reliabilist conception of the good supply domain for testimony. The thin conception has it that any reliable testifier is an apt source. I argue that only those who know what they state properly offer their word, and only from them can knowledge be gained through the Core Mechanism, taking the speaker’s word for what she states.

Jennifer Lackey's case “Creationist Teacher,” in which students acquire knowledge of evolutionary theory from a teacher who does not herself believe the theory, has been discussed widely as a counterexample to so-called transmission theories of testimonial knowledge and justification. The case purports to show that a speaker need not herself have knowledge or justification in order to enable listeners to acquire knowledge or justification from her assertion. The original case has been criticized on the ground that it does not really refute the transmission theory, because there is still somebody in a chain of testifiers – the person from whom the creationist teacher acquired what she testifies – who knows the truth of the testified statements. In this paper, we provide a kind of pattern for generating counterexample cases, one that avoids objections discussed by Peter Graham and others in relation to such cases.

Testimony is an indispensable source of information. Yet, contrary to ‘literalism’, speakers rarely mean just what they say; and even when they do, that itself is something the hearer needs to realize. So, understanding instances of testimony requires more than merely reading others' messages off of the words they utter. Further, a very familiar and theoretically well-entrenched approach to how we arrive at such understanding serves to emphasize, not merely how deeply committed we are to testimony as a reliable source of information, but that epistemological questions about testimonial belief are – perhaps even must be – posterior to such a commitment. This result does not itself dictate any particular views on the epistemology of testimony. However, not only does the failure of literalism not support the view that the justificatory basis of testimony-based beliefs is importantly inferential; it in fact undermines a key premise in one important argument for the view that one needs independent, positive reasons for accepting a given testimonial report. More generally, the present paper illustrates how discussions of the epistemology of testimony might usefully interact with an examination of the epistemology of understanding.

Assertions are the centre of gravity in social epistemology. They are the vehicles we use to exchange information within scientific groups and society as a whole. It is therefore essential to determine under which conditions we are permitted to make an assertion. In this paper we argue and provide empirical evidence for the view that the norm of assertion is justified belief: truth or even knowledge are not required. Our results challenge the knowledge account advocated by, e.g. Williamson (1996), in general, and more specifically, put into question several studies conducted by Turri (2013, 2016) that support a knowledge norm of assertion. Instead, the justified belief account championed by, e.g. Douven (2006), seems to prevail.

Post-truth politics has been diagnosed as harmful to both knowledge and democracy. I argue that it can also fundamentally undermine epistemic autonomy in a way that is similar to the manipulative technique known as gaslighting. Using examples from contemporary politics, I identify three categories of post-truth rhetoric: the introduction of counternarratives, the discrediting of critics, and the denial of more or less plain facts. These strategies tend to isolate people epistemically, leaving them disoriented and unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. Like gaslighting, post-truth politics aims to undermine epistemic autonomy by eroding someone's self-trust, in order to consolidate power. Shifting the focus to the effects on the victim allows for new insights into the specific harms of post-truth politics. Applying the concept of gaslighting to this domain may also help people recognize a pernicious dynamic that was invisible to them before, giving them an important tool to resist it.

In this paper I consider the meaning of the term “epistemic.” I discuss the idea that “epistemic” means “of or relating to knowledge,” and consider some uses of “epistemic” that do not jibe with this characterization of its meaning. I argue that “epistemic” is ambiguous: it is sometimes used to mean “of or relating to knowledge” and sometimes to mean “of or relating to belief.” I raise some worries about this ambiguity, and sympathetically consider the prospects for eliminating “epistemic” from our philosophical lexicon.

I consider the structural differences between reasons to believe and reasons to act. I argue that Mark Schroeder's project of providing a unified account of reasons to believe and reasons to act faces serious difficulties. I also investigate the difference between rational requirement and rational permission. While the difference between these notions in the case of action is a matter of the strength of one's reasons, I argue that in the case of belief, the difference depends on what one is attending to.

Indicators of the reliability of informants are essential for social learning in a society that is initially dominated by ignorance or superstition. Such reliability indicators should be based on meta-induction over records of truth-success. This is the major claim of this paper, and it is supported in two steps. (1) One needs a non-circular justification of the method of meta-induction, as compared to other (non-inductive) learning methods. An approach to this problem (a variant of Hume's problem) has been developed in earlier papers and is reported in section 2. It is based on the predictive optimality of meta-inductive learning, under the assumption that objective success records are globally available. (2) The rest of the paper develops an extension of this approach, so-called local meta-induction. Here individuals can access only success records of individuals in their immediate epistemic neighborhood. It is shown that local meta-inductive learning can spread reliable information over the entire population, and has clear advantages compared to success-independent social learning methods such as peer-imitation and authority-imitation.

The notion of a reason often plays a central role in epistemological theories. Justification is often explained in terms of the having of appropriate reasons, and a variety of epistemological distinctions are most naturally explained, it seems, by adverting to reasons. This paper examines the extent to which we may, instead, make do without appeal to such a notion. It is argued that the extent to which the notion of a reason should play an important role in epistemological theorizing will depend on how our psychological theories of belief acquisition and belief change are best conceptualized.

The new evil demon problem is often considered to be a serious obstacle for externalist theories of epistemic justification. In this paper, I aim to show that the new evil demon problem (‘NEDP’) also afflicts the two most prominent forms of internalism: moderate internalism and historical internalism. Since virtually all internalists accept at least one of these two forms, it follows that virtually all internalists face the NEDP. My secondary thesis is that many epistemologists – including both internalists and externalists – face a dilemma. The only form of internalism that is immune to the NEDP, strong internalism, is a very radical and revisionary view – a large number of epistemologists would have to significantly revise their views about justification in order to accept it. Hence, either epistemologists must accept a theory that is susceptible to the NEDP or accept a very radical and revisionary view.

Privacy is valued by many. But what it means to have privacy remains less than clear. In this paper, I argue that the notion of privacy should be understood in epistemic terms. What it means to have (some degree of) privacy is that other persons do not stand in significant epistemic relations to those truths one wishes to keep private.

Democracies, Dewey and others have argued, are ideally spaces of reasons – they allow for an exchange of reasons both practical and epistemic by those willing to engage in that discourse. That requires that citizens have convictions they believe in, but it also requires that they be willing to listen to each other. This paper examines how a particular psychological attitude, “epistemic arrogance,” can undermine the achievement of these goals. The paper presents an analysis of this attitude and then examines four arguments for how its adoption – especially by the powerful – undermines the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons.

This is an investigation of the emergence of signaling using one kind of trial and error learning: probe and adjust.

In this paper, I explore an underappreciated tension between two epistemic values: epistemic autonomy and the love of truth. On the one hand, it seems as though any healthy intellectual life includes thinking about a number of issues for oneself. On the other hand, it seems as though taking inquiry seriously requires you to take the best available route to the answer, and typically that is not thinking for yourself. For nearly any question you want to investigate, there is someone who is in a better epistemic position than you are to determine the answer. In what follows, I will first clarify our central question and sharpen this novel puzzle regarding epistemic autonomy. Having done so, I will argue that autonomous deliberation can be epistemically valuable to inquirers both when it is successful, as well as when it is unsuccessful. I conclude by gesturing at how these considerations point us toward an account of epistemic autonomy as an intellectual virtue.

In this article we develop an account of justice in the distribution of knowledge. We first argue that knowledge is a fundamental interest that grounds claims of justice due to its role in individuals’ deliberations about the common good, their personal good and the pursuit thereof. Second, we identify the epistemic basic structure of a society, namely, the institutions that determine individuals’ opportunities for acquiring knowledge and discuss what justice requires of them. Our main contention is that a systematic lack of opportunity to acquire knowledge one needs as an individual and a citizen because of the way the epistemic basic structure of a society is organized is an injustice. Finally, we discuss how our account relates to John Rawls's influential theory of justice.

Citing some recent experimental findings, I argue for the surprising claim that in some cases the less time you have the more you know. More specifically, I present some evidence to suggest that our ordinary knowledge ascriptions are sometimes sensitive to facts about an epistemic subject's truth-irrelevant time constraints such that less (time) is more (knowledge). If knowledge ascriptions are sensitive in this manner, then this is some evidence of pragmatic encroachment. Along the way, I consider comments made by Jonathan Schaffer (2006) and Jennifer Nagel (2008, 2010) to construe a purist contextualist and a strict invariantist explanation of the data respectively, before giving reasons to resist them in favor of an account that indicates pragmatic encroachment. If successful, this may suggest a new way to argue for the controversial thesis that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge.

I evaluate Schurz's proposed meta-inductive justification of induction, a refinement of Reichenbach's pragmatic justification that rests on results from the machine learning branch of prediction with expert advice.

My conclusion is that the argument, suitably explicated, comes remarkably close to its grand aim: an actual justification of induction. This finding, however, is subject to two main qualifications, and still disregards one important challenge.

The first qualification concerns the empirical success of induction. Even though, I argue, Schurz's argument does not need to spell out what inductive method actually consists in, it does need to postulate that there is something like the inductive or scientific prediction strategy that has so far been significantly more successful than alternative approaches. The second qualification concerns the difference between having a justification for inductive method and for sticking with induction for now. Schurz's argument can only provide the latter. Finally, the remaining challenge concerns the pool of alternative strategies, and the relevant notion of a meta-inductivist's optimality that features in the analytic step of Schurz's argument. Building on the work done here, I will argue in a follow-up paper that the argument needs a stronger dynamic notion of a meta-inductivist's optimality.

Human beings regularly work together to get things done. In particular, people frequently collaborate on the production and dissemination of knowledge. For example, scientists often work together in teams to make new discoveries. How such collaborations produce knowledge, and how well they produce knowledge, are important questions for epistemology. In fact, several epistemologists (e.g., Hardwig 1991, Thagard 1997, Wray 2002) have addressed such questions regarding collaborative scientific research.

How does the intellectually virtuous person respond to the beliefs of those whom they judge to be their epistemic superiors? Linda Zagzebski argues that we ought to take the beliefs of those we judge to be our epistemic authorities as a preemptive reason to believe the same. Zagzebski's argument for this preemption is intended to be an extension of Joseph Raz's argument for political authority. After exploring Zagzebski's specific formulation of epistemic preemption, I argue that epistemic authority is significantly different from political authority; hence Raz's arguments cannot be extended to the epistemic case. Further, I demonstrate that a virtue epistemic perspective will recommend against epistemic preemption. Such preemption brings about a problematic closed-mindedness to ourselves and is an extreme reaction more suited to epistemic vice than to epistemic virtue.