Speakers' Abstracts

Keynote Speaker

• Martin Kusch (Vienna)

  'Knowledge and Certainties in the Epistemic State of Nature'

ABSTRACT: This paper approaches “social cognitive ecology” through the perspectives provided by the “state-of-nature epistemology” or “genealogy of knowledge” proposed by Edward Craig and Bernard Williams. The first half of the paper summarises this proposal and develops it in a number of directions. The second half relates this approach to Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on “common-sense certainties”. The aim is to show that several of Wittgenstein's difficult or even obscure claims⎯e.g., that common-sense certainties cannot be known or doubted⎯fall into place as truisms when interpreted on the basis of (a revised version of) the genealogy of knowledge.

Invited Speakers

• Lorraine Code (York)

  'An Ecology of Epistemic Authority'

ABSTRACT: In this paper I will address the power and putative authority of institutional knowledge, taking as my point of entry an observation from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which refers to the activities of a commission of inquiry: “All questions were furnished with excellent answers, and answers not open to doubt, since they were not the product of human thought, which is always subject to error, but were the products of institutional activity.” The issue is about an ecology of epistemic authority in social epistemology, as it is operative in the credentialing certain institutions perform and the interplay of credulity and incredulity they initiate. The larger purpose of the analysis, then, is to examine the pretensions of certain forms of institutional knowledge to function as arbiters of truth, and to consider the capacity of such publicly sanctioned knowledge to enact or prevent epistemic injustice especially in places and populations where people are peculiarly vulnerable, epistemically.

• Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern)

  'Knowledge and the Division of Epistemic Labour'

ABSTRACT: We depend on others for much of what we know. After enumerating various kinds of dependencies of this sort, I attempt to draw some tentative conclusions about the division of epistemic labour. I am particularly interested in determining how various theories of knowledge fare in acknowledging these sorts of dependencies, and in seeing why the epistemic division of labour might be valuable for a community of epistemic agents.

• Hilary Kornblith (UMass)

  'Why Should We Care about the Concept of Knowledge?'

ABSTRACT: Why is it important to have a concept of knowledge? It is certainly possible to have knowledge without having the concept of knowledge. Infants do it, and non-human animals do it as well. So what epistemic advantages do we gain by having a concept of knowledge? This paper attempts to answer this question by examining some of the differences between human adult cognition and cognition in infants and non-human animals.

• Ram Neta (UNC, Chapel Hill)

  'Safety and the State of Nature'

ABSTRACT: Sosa, Williamson, Pritchard, and many other philosophers have argued that knowledge requires the safety of one's belief: S knows that p only if S cannot easily have falsely believed that p. In this paper, I review these arguments, provide some new counterexamples to their conclusions, and then explain away the plausibility of the arguments for safety by appeal to Edward Craig’s “state of nature” hypothesis concerning the concept of knowledge.

• Matthew Chrisman (Edinburgh)

  'The Concept of Knowledge and the Aspectual Classification of ‘Knows’'

ABSTRACT: It’s commonplace in epistemology to refer to the states of belief and knowledge. However, from the point of view of understanding the normativity or value involved in the concept of knowledge, it’s tempting to treat of belief as a sort of cognitive performance, activity, or accomplishment, which, when all goes well, counts as knowledge. In this paper, I use aspectual data from the semantics of ‘knows’ to confirm the idea that the concepts of belief and knowledge are state-concepts. Then I explore an alternative strategy for accounting for the normativity or value involved in the concept of knowledge. This involves the notion of ‘state norms’, whose validity admits of an ecological form of explanation linking them to the epistemic communities they constitute.

• Peter Graham (UC, Riverside)

  'Perceptual Entitlement and Natural Norms'

ABSTRACT: Teleological reliabilist theories of warrant--epistemic justifiedness--share a common structure: warrant involves the reliability of the belief-forming process while normal functioning in normal conditions, where the process has forming true beliefs--or forming true beliefs reliable--as a function. They differ over their emphasis on these teleological notions and the precise role they play. They also differ on the metaphysical underpinning. In this paper I critically discuss Burge’s account of perceptual warrant. He relies on anti-individualism as a metaphysical support. I argue that he fails to explain why a brain-in-a-vat should continue to enjoy perceptual warrant. I argue instead for an alternative underpinning. Perceptual warrant consists in the normal functioning of the perceptual belief-forming process, for perception has forming true beliefs reliably as an etiological function. An emphasis on etiology, and the constitutive association with normal functioning and function fulfillment, explains why perceptual warrant should persist even when reliability collapses.

• Stephen Grimm (Fordham)

  'Which Knowledge is of Most Worth?'

ABSTRACT: Acquiring knowledge with respect to certain topics clearly seems more worthwhile than acquiring knowledge with respect to other topics—at least, when we consider things from “a practical point of view.” Thus knowing the truth about whether North Korea has nuclear weapons clearly seems more worthwhile, from a practical point of view, than knowing the truth about how many grains of sand are in some random patch of the Sahara. But how do things look when we consider things “from a purely epistemic point of view?” Do certain items of knowledge still seem more worth having than others? It would appear so. Take the knowledge about the grains of sand again, and compare it to the sorts of “pure” knowledge that promises to be gained by the researchers at CERN in Switzerland: for instance, knowledge concerning whether corresponding particles of dark matter exist for every known particle of matter. By most lights, finding out whether this thesis about dark matter is true would seem to be of vastly greater epistemic or intellectual importance than knowing certain truths about the grains of sand, even if no practical benefit were to emerge from either item of knowledge. But what is it that accounts for the greater epistemic interest or importance of certain items of knowledge over others—of knowledge concerning the topics addressed at CERN, for instance, as opposed to knowledge about the grains of sand? What is it, in other words, that makes the one item of knowledge of greater epistemic interest or importance than the other? These are the questions that I will address in this paper, and I will argue that the greater epistemic interest or importance of certain items of knowledge derives from the greater epistemic interest or importance of certain kinds of questions. I will then sketch an account of what it is that makes certain questions of greater epistemic interest or importance than others. These sorts of issues are relevant to the “ecology of knowledge,” moreover, because they help to shed light on which questions are most worthy of our attention, and why—questions of great concern when we are trying to decide how best to dedicate our limited intellectual and economic resources.

• David Henderson (Nebraska-Lincoln)

  'More Motivated Contextualism'

ABSTRACT: I have argued elsewhere that one significantly improved contextualist accounts of knowledge by drawing on some themes regarding knowledge suggested by Edward Craig. If one recognized that a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for variously engaged communities is central to the point and purpose of the concept of knowledge, one would be led to intriguing results. Of course, when the community of contextual concern was engaged with matters of practical moment, one would expect to see the contextually variable demands of the sort that have encouraged contextualists like DeRose and Cohen. More surprisingly, perhaps, when the community of contextual concern is one that serves as a source of information for indefinately many other communities, when it is what I termed a general purpose source community, one (as a contextualist) should expect judgments of sorts that have been championed by invariantists like Williamson. There are some limitations to this account motivated contextualist account. Significantly, it does not adequately respect some of the judgments on which fans of pragmatic encroachment and subject sensitive invarantism (like Fantl and McGrath, or Hawthorne) have focused their attention. Here I want to explore the idea that there are multiple points or purposes motivating the concept of knowledge⎯and that some are not fully accommodated under my earlier talk of “gatekeeping for an epistemic community”. One is a kind of crediting use that is evident when doing the history of science or ideas that has no bearing on who we feature in our contemporary epistemic community.

• Alan Millar (Stirling)

  ‘The Epistemological Significance of Practices’

ABSTRACT: Practices are conceived as essentially rule-governed activities or clusters of such activities. The normative dimension of practices is explained in terms of the idea that participants in practices are subject to, and incur a normative commitment to following, the rules governing those practices. Reasons are given for thinking that there are practices with such a normative dimension. The ensuing discussion explores their epistemological significance. A central theme is that grasp of what participation in a practice requires of participants enables us to understand people within the practice, and make reasonable predictions regarding what they will do, with little if any knowledge of their beliefs and intentions, and behavioural characteristics, beyond what is implied by their being recognizable as participants. The discussion will be based on, but will take further, the discussion of practices in my Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford UP, 2004).

• Mike Ridge (Edinburgh)

  'How to be an Epistemic Expressivist'

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I examine the arguments for moral expressivism to see whether they carry over to the epistemic case. Interestingly, they seem to me to carry over much better at the level of ‘all things considered’ judgments in the epistemic case than at the level of judgments about pro tanto epistemic reasons for belief. I try to follow this argument where it leads, and see whether a hybird view, according to which epistemic expressivism is true about the ‘all things considered’ but not the pro tanto, is intelligible or even plausible. I then explore the issue of why we might have come to have a set of epistemic concepts with this somewhat unexpectedly bifurcatated shape.

• Finn Spicer (Bristol)

  'The Economics of Knowledge'

ABSTRACT: Knowledge has three distinctive features: knowledge can be possessed by individuals; knowledge has a value to the possessor; and knowledge can be transmitted from one individual to another. These three features suggest that economics can provide a framework for understanding the distribution and flow of knowledge. In this paper I begin this line of enquiry, applying the methods of economic and evolutionary game theory to the spread of knowledge, and drawing some early conclusions for epistemologists.

Sponsors and supporters

This conference is funded by The Leverhulme Trust and is hosted by the Epistemology research group at the University of Edinburgh. The organisors of the conference are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support, and also for the support of Episteme and The University of Edinburgh.

 

Last updated: May 24th 2010 by Duncan Pritchard.