Stephen Hetherington
Meta-Gettier
It is routinely believed within contemporary epistemology that Edmund Gettier, in 1963, showed that a belief can be true and justified without being knowledge. So much so, that for epistemologists it is natural to treat this as a result, a genuine insight, on Gettier’s part – hence as epistemological knowledge on their part. But this paper questions that epistemological self-image. The paper argues that, even if epistemologists are correct in regarding no Gettiered belief as knowledge, the reason why they are correct could also be a reason, mutatis mutandis, why all or almost all of us do not know that a given Gettiered belief is not knowledge. In which case, they also do not know that Gettier showed that a belief can be true and justified without being knowledge.
Max Deutsch
Methodology and Gettierology
In this talk, I first describe similarities and differences between Stephen Hetherington and me concerning the role of intuitions in post-Gettier epistemology. Then I criticize Hetherington’s argument against “Gettieristic” explanations of the (alleged) lack of knowledge in Gettier cases. Lastly, I object to Hetherington’s idea that intuitions about Gettier cases might be explained by an implicit – and, given the context, illicit – infallibilism about justification.
Simon Goldstein and Daniel Waxman
Luminosity and Confidence
A mental state is luminous when any agent in the state knows that they are in it. Following Williamson 2000, a wave of recent work has explored whether any interesting mental states are luminous. One powerful argument against luminosity comes from the connection between knowledge and confidence: that if an agent knows p, then p is true in any nearby world where she has a similar level of confidence in p. Unfortunately, the relevant notion of confidence here is relatively underexplored.
In this paper, we remedy this gap, providing a precise theory of degrees of confidence: an agent's degree of confidence in p is the objective chance they will act in ways that satisfy their desires if p. We use this theory of confidence to propose a variety of interesting constraints on knowledge. We argue that knowledge is not luminous, but for quite different reasons than the existing literature has considered.
In this paper, we remedy this gap, providing a precise theory of degrees of confidence: an agent's degree of confidence in p is the objective chance they will act in ways that satisfy their desires if p. We use this theory of confidence to propose a variety of interesting constraints on knowledge. We argue that knowledge is not luminous, but for quite different reasons than the existing literature has considered.
Jennifer Nado
Engineering Knowledge
TBA.
Jiji Zhang
Parsimony in Causal Inference
Inspired by Mackie's influential INUS account of causal regularities, the Boolean approach to inferring deterministic causal structures usually employs a criterion of parsimony or non-redundancy. In this talk I argue that the currently used criteria of parsimony in this approach are either too weak or too strong.