/pdf/how-do-beliefs-simplify-reasoning-3usaggxdl3.pdf

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning

The concept of knowledge is used to certify epistemic agents as good sources (on a certain point or subject matter) for an understood audience. Attributions of knowledge and denials of knowledge are used in a kind of epistemic gate keeping for (epistemic or practical) communities with which the attributor and interlocutors are associated. When combined with reflection on kinds of practical and epistemic communities, and their situated epistemic needs for gate keeping, this simple observation regarding the point and purpose of the concept of knowledge has rich implications. First, it gives one general reason to prefer contextualism over various forms of sensitive invariantism. Second, when gate keeping for a select community of experts or authorities, with an associated body of results on which folk generally might then draw (when gate keeping for a general source community) the contextual demands approximate those with which insensitive invariantists would be comfortable.

Motivated contextualism

/pdf/now-you-know-who-hong-oak-yun-is-2ga5dsa8k9.pdf

Now you know who hong oak yun is

It is widely held that when you are deliberating about whether to believe some proposition p, only considerations relevant to the truth of p can be taken into account as reasons bearing on whether to believe p and motivate you accordingly. This thesis of exclusivity has significance for debates about the nature of belief, about control of belief, and about certain forms of evidentialism. In this paper I distinguish a strong and a weak version of exclusivity. I provide reason to think that strong exclusivity is an illusion and that weak exclusivity may also be an illusion. I describe a number of cases in which exclusivity seems not to hold, and I show how an illusion of exclusivity may be generated by a rather different feature of doxastic deliberation, which I call demandingness.

methods

The Illusion of Exclusivity

/pdf/on-intellectualism-in-epistemology-1fgs61itvw.pdf

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning

Motivated contextualism

Now you know who hong oak yun is

The Illusion of Exclusivity

On Intellectualism in Epistemology

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