24 Jun 2011 11:30 – 17:30

Room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD

Workshop

Epistemology Workshop - All welcome (no registration required). Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore

0131 651 1784

Speaker abstracts

Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (Aarhus University)
'Knowing the Answer to a Loaded Question'

Abstract: Based on considerations about the factual presuppositions we often make when asking questions, I propose a solution to the problem of convergent knowledge for binary accounts of knowledge-wh, and explore wider consequences for the contrastive account of knowledge.

Baron Reed (Northwestern University)
'Epistemic Possibility and Epistemic Agency'

Abstract: Fallibilism is roughly the view that one can have knowledge even though one’s belief could have been mistaken (while one had the very same justification for it that in fact allows it to count as knowledge). Such a view seems to be incompatible with the standard way of thinking about epistemic possibility: it is possible (for me) that p just in case I don’t know that not-p. It is also to reconcile fallibilism with the thought that knowledge ought to be action-guiding, given that the margin of error built into fallibilistic knowledge can sometimes become practically relevant. In this paper, I offer solutions to both of these puzzles for fallibilism that relies on neither contextualism nor subject-sensitive invariantism. I conclude by offering an account of the way we speak about knowledge and epistemic possibility.

Nick Treanor (Cambridge University)
'The Measure of Knowledge'

Abstract: What is it to know more? By what metric should the quantity of one's knowledge be measured? I start by examining and arguing against a very natural approach to the measure of knowledge, one on which how much is a matter of how many. I then turn to the quasi-spatial notion of counterfactual distance and show how a model that appeals to distance avoids the problems that plague appeals to cardinality. But such a model faces fatal problems of its own. Reflection on what the distance model gets right and where it goes wrong motivates a third approach, which appeals not to cardinality, nor to counterfactual distance, but to similarity. I close by advocating this model and briefly discussing some of its significance for epistemic normativity. In particular, I argue that the 'trivial truths' objection to the view that truth is the goal of inquiry rests on an unstated, but false, assumption about the measure of knowledge, and suggest that a similarity model preserves truth as the aim of belief in an intuitively satisfying way.

Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)
'A Deflationary Account of Group Testimony'

Abstract: Is group testimony an irreducible source of knowledge? Both negative and positive answers have been given to this question. According to a reductionist account, a group’s testimony that p is epistemologically reducible to the testimony of some individual(s). The standard reductionist theory is the summative view, according to which a group’s testifying that p can be understood in the minimal sense that all or some members of the group would testify that p were the relevant opportunity to arise. In contrast, a non-reductionist account of these phenomena maintains that a group’s state is irreducible to that of some individual(s). Such a view holds that in some very important sense, the group itself is the bearer of the state, where this is understood as over and above, or otherwise distinct from, the state of any individual(s). The classic version of non-reductionism is the non-summative view, according to which a group’s state cannot be understood in the sense that all or some members of the group are, or would be, in that state. In this paper, I raise problems for existing accounts of group testimony and then develop my own deflationary account, according to which the epistemic status of a group’s testimony is reducible to that of one or more individuals, though not necessarily ones who are members of the group in question. Thus my view is unlike any existing account of group testimony in the literature since it is both reductionist and non-summative in nature.