Michael Blome-Tillmann

‘More Likely Than Not’ Knowledge First and the Role of Bare Statistical Evidence in Courts of Law

 

ABSTRACT: The paper takes a closer look at the role of knowledge and evidence in legal theory. In particular, the paper examines a puzzle arising from the evidential standard Preponderance of the Evidence and its application in civil procedure. As legal scholars have argued since at least the 1940s, the rule of the Preponderance of the Evidence gives rise to a puzzle concerning the role of statistical evidence in judicial proceedings, sometimes referred to as the Problem of Bare Statistical Evidence. While this puzzle has lead to the development of a multitude of accounts and approaches in the legal literature, I argue here that the problem can be resolved fairly straightforwardly within a knowledge-first framework.

 

Trent Dougherty

‘Knowledge First’ and Locke’s Dictum: Proportioning Knowledge to the Evidence

 

ABSTRACT: 

 

Mikkel Gerken

Against Knowledge-First Epistemology

 

ABSTRACT: I argue against an ambitious knowledge-first epistemology according to which the concept of knowledge can be used to reductively analyse other epistemic notions such as (epistemic) rationality, evidence and belief as well as epistemic norms of action and assertion. I begin the criticism by arguing that ambitious knowledge-first epistemologists commit the same mistake that they effectively charge their opponents with. This is the mistake of seeking to reductively analyse core epistemic notions in terms of other allegedly more fundamental epistemic notions. I then turn to the more specific cases of the epistemic norms of action and assertion in order to argue that knowledge-first epistemology fails in this application.  In conclusion, I return to the methodological considerations and argue that while the ambitious knowledge-first program fails, it contains a grain of truth. On the basis of this discussion, I seek to outline the contours of a “Strawsonian” epistemological methodology according to which a number of core epistemic notions are interrelated. According to this alternative to ambitious knowledge first methodology, the core epistemic notions are not reductively analysable although they may be co-analysed in a non-reductive manner.

 

Christoph Kelp

TBA

 

ABSTRACT: TBA

 

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins

On Putting Knowledge 'First'

 

ABSTRACT: On a traditional picture, prevalent in twentieth-century analytic epistemology, knowledge was to be explicated in terms of notions like truth, belief, and justification. These explanans-properties, along with whatever else one invoked in one's theory of knowledge, were themselves supposed to be in some sense 'prior to' or 'more basic than' or 'explicable without reference to' knowledge. In the twenty-first century, the traditional picture has been questioned, most notably by Timothy Williamson. The 'knowledge-first' program takes knowledge itself as basic, and uses it to explain notions that had traditionally been used in knowledge's analysans. The topic of this paper is to examine in what this kind of shift might consist. What does it mean for knowledge to be, in the relevant sense, 'first'? We distinguish conceptual from metaphysical interpretations of the knowledge-first program—according the former, the concept KNOWS is somehow primitive, basic, or unanalysable; according the latter, the state or relation of knowing is somehow ontologically privileged. We catalogue a series of possible views, and argue that some of them have been conflated in important ways in the literature. We conclude with a tentative examination into, for each 'knowledge-first' view, what considerations might count in favour of or against it.

 

Clayton Littlejohn

How and Why Knowledge is First

 

ABSTRACT: 

 

Heather Logue

Perception First?

 

ABSTRACT: In response to Gettier-style counterexamples, Timothy Williamson has argued that we should abandon the project of giving necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. Instead, we should hold that knowledge is unanalysable, although we can say something informative about it by identifying necessary conditions. In this paper, I will explore the prospects for an analogous treatment of the perceptual relation.  I will argue (pace Mark Johnston) a subject perceives something only if it caused the subject’s perceptual experience. While this is a plausible necessary condition on perception, it isn’t a sufficient condition (as counterexamples involving deviant causal chains show). I will consider whether there are any other necessary conditions we can add to the causal condition to yield jointly sufficient conditions for perception—for example, I will discuss Paul Coates’ recent analysis of perception in terms of an ability to act on something. I suspect (and expect to be in a position to argue) that all such attempts at analysis ultimately succumb to counterexamples, and that we should instead embrace an account of perception that is analogous to Williamson’s account of knowledge.

 

Aidan McGlynn

Mindreading Knowledge

 

ABSTRACT: Richard Fumerton has suggested that by taking the distinction between knowledge and ignorance as basic, proponents of knowledge-first philosophy are left without an account of how we succeed in recognising when someone knows and when they are ignorant. However, if knowing is a mental state, as Timothy Williamson and others have argued, then we would expect that we recognise knowledge the same way that we recognise belief and desire; such recognition is delivered by our mindreading capacities. As Jennifer Nagel notes, this account of the recognition of knowledge is already accepted as a matter of course by psychologists and philosophers working on mindreading. Moreover, Nagel argues that evidence concerning early mindreading and mindreading in non-human primates shows that tasks involving the attribution of knowledge are simpler than matched tasks involving the non-factive attitude of belief, suggesting that the recognition of knowledge doesn’t go via the recognition of belief. The principal interest in Nagel’s proposal lies in her novel suggestion of a way to get empirical purchase on conceptual issues concerning the relative priority of the concepts of knowledge and belief, and on metaphysical issues concerning whether knowing is a purely mental state in its own right or a hybrid of purely mental and non-mental components. In the first half of this paper, I will contest Nagel’s conclusion that knowledge/ignorance tasks are simpler than matched tasks involving belief. In the second half I turn to consideration of whether we do in fact recognise knowledge purely by mindreading and the import of this question for the debate concerning whether knowing is a purely mental state. I’ll argue that these issues become much murkier once we appreciate the role of presuppositions in both mindreading and the attribution of knowledge. Here presuppositions are understood as propositions which one must lack warrant to think false (and perhaps must have warrant to think true) if one’s attribution is to be in good standing, yet which one has not investigated. For example, if I see you catch sight of your sister and wave in her direction, I may attribute you knowledge that your sister is here. In doing so I’ll typically assume, rather than discover through any kind of investigation, that there aren’t a host of very convincing impersonators operating in the area. My claims will be that once we get clearer on the role of such presuppositions, questions about the role of mindreading in the recognition of knowledge look rather trickier, and that the answers may lack the kind of significance for debates about the mentality of knowing that Nagel wants to accord them.

 

Duncan Pritchard & Jesper Kallestrup

Epistemic Supervenience, Anti-Individualism and Knowledge-First Epistemology

 

ABSTRACT: In recent work we have argued that so-called robust virtue epistemology exemplifies a version of epistemic individualism according to which warrant⎯i.e., what converts true belief into knowledge⎯supervenes on internal physical properties of individuals, perhaps in conjunction with local environmental properties. We have presented robust virtue epistemology with various epistemic twin earth scenarios which demonstrate that warrant supervenes in part on wider environmental properties, and which hence provide support for epistemic anti-individualism. In this paper we argue first that so-called evidentialist mentalism also exemplifies a version of epistemic individualism which faces a related epistemic twin earth scenario. We then argue that even though a knowledge-first approach in epistemology is in principle consistent with epistemic anti-individualism, this approach fails to offer a plausible account of epistemic supervenience. The upshot is that further support is provided for epistemic anti-individualism, and a prima facie case is made for embedding such an approach outside of the knowledge-first framework. 

 

Anne Meylan

The distinction between our belief being justified and our belief being excusable is crucial to the reply that upholders of a knowledge-first epistemology provide to the so-called “New Evil Demon Problem”. The purpose of this contribution is to provide further support to this reply by achieving two things. I will, first, show why, if we take the ordinary sense of the term “justified” seriously, there is no reason to think that the subject’s belief is also justified in the bad case. Second, I will explain why the internalist intuition that is supposed to lie at the root of the claim according to which the subject’s belief is justified in the bad case does not, in fact, support this claim. The explanation is metaphysical. The entity that the internalist intuition might drive us to consider as “justified” is not a state and, therefore, not a belief.

 

Joshua Schechter

Scrutinising Problem Cases for Knowledge Norms

 

ABSTRACT: Knowledge-first epistemologists often endorse knowledge norms for assertion, belief, reasoning, and action. Such norms face apparent counterexamples. For instance, it seems fully appropriate for someone who has a strongly justified belief that p but doesn't know that p to assert that p. Advocates of knowledge norms typically explain away such problem cases by saying that the relevant assertion is inappropriate but that the thinker has excuse and is therefore not blameworthy. In this paper, I argue against this strategy. In many of the problem cases, it is not merely that the thinker's assertion is excuseable. Rather, the thinker would be criticisable for not making the assertion. Appealing to an excuse cannot explain this fact.

 

Martin Smith

The Price of Treating Knowledge as a Mental State

 

ABSTRACT: My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in kail. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think that it carries certain costs that have not been widely discussed.  One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental—the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states should supervene upon one’s internal physical states.  In order to know a proposition it is not, in general, enough for one’s internal physical state to be a certain way—one’s environment must also be a certain way.  If we accept that knowledge is a mental state, we must give up internalism.  One might think that this is no price to pay, since internalism is a view that has anyway fallen from favour in philosophy, succumbing to a number of famous arguments, some of which Williamson recounts (kail, §2.2).  This thought, though, is too quick.  As I will argue here, the claim that knowledge is a mental state would have us recoil *far further* from internalism than any of the famous arguments would support.  Whether or not the claim should ultimately be accepted, it does come with a price.

 

John Turri

Sustaining Rules: A Model and Application

 

ABSTRACT: I introduce an account of when a rule normatively sustains a practice. My basic proposal is that a rule normatively sustains a practice when the value achieved by following the rule explains why agents continue following that rule, thus establishing and sustaining a pattern of activity. I apply this model to practices of belief management and identify a substantive normative connection between knowledge and belief.

 

Timothy Williamson

Acting on Knowledge

 

ABSTRACT: This paper develops and refines the analogy between knowledge and action (intentional doing) in Knowledge and its Limits. The general schema is: knowledge is to belief as action is to intention. The analogy reverses direction of fit (mind to world, world to mind). The knowledge/belief side of the analogy corresponds to the inputs to practical reasoning, the action/intention side to its output. Insofar as desire is an input to practical reasoning, it belongs to the former side (the desire-as-belief thesis is considered sympathetically). When all goes globally well with practical reasoning, one acts on what one knows. Beliefs play the same local role as knowledge, and intentions the same local role as action, in practical reasoning. This is the appropriate setting in which to understand knowledge norms for belief and practical reasoning. Marginalizing knowledge in epistemology is as perverse as marginalizing action in the philosophy of action. Opponents of knowledge-first epistemology are challenged to produce an equally systematic and plausible account of the relation between the cognitive and the practical.