ConheCimento por espeCialista, evidênCia e informação tommaso piazza* AbstrAct-In this paper I ar... more ConheCimento por espeCialista, evidênCia e informação tommaso piazza* AbstrAct-In this paper I argue that the existence of expert knowledge potentially poses a problem for Evidentialism, the view that a person's justification supervenes on the evidence this person has. An expert is the kind of person from which knowledge (or justified belief) is expected in situations in which a non-expert would normally not attain knowledge (or justified belief); so, potentially, the epistemic status of their beliefs differ even if the evidence they possess seems to be the same. A viable solution to this problem has to show that, appearances to the contrary, the expert and the non-expert, in the problematic cases, do not possess the same evidence. I propose a solution to this problem by defending a principle that specifies the conditions under which a piece of information should be counted as evidence.
This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other defin... more This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with inform...
Article Summary You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad ... more Article Summary You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad taste of your coffee, that it contained salt. Mundane experiences like these show that epistemic justification does not necessarily hold stable across possible changes of information. One can be justified in believing a proposition at a certain time (that the bowl contains sugar) and cease to be justified at a later time, as one enlarges one’s epistemic perspective (as one drinks a salty coffee). When this happens, one’s justification has been defeated. An epistemic defeater, broadly speaking, is that in terms of which the defeat of justification proceeds. The notion of an epistemic defeater is mostly associated with J. Pollock’s work on reasoning and inference. Pollock has provided the canonical definition of an epistemic defeater and proposed an influential taxonomy in terms of the way different types of defeaters induce their characteristic effects. The notion of an epistemic defeater...
First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology... more First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology of evidence, is unable to account for ordinary cases of inferential justification. As many epistemologists have maintained, however, when it is paired with a Propositionalist ontology of evidence, Evidentialism is unable to explain in a satisfactory way ordinary cases of perceptual justification. So, the Evidentialist is faced with a dilemma. Second aim of this paper is to give an argument in favour of Propositionalism about evidence, and so to motivate the conclusion that perceptual justification must be accounted for in non-evidentialist terms. By this I do not mean to defend a strongly Non-Evidentialist epistemology, according to which there are doxastic attitudes which are unsupported by any justifier. More modestly, I aim to motivate the weakly Non-Evidentialist epistemology according to which a subject’s perceptual beliefs may be justified by non-evidential justifiers. I conclude ...
This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Propon... more This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduce...
Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and agains... more Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridical experience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility of perceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut.
This paper addresses the proliferation of fake new from a philosophical-mainly epistemological-po... more This paper addresses the proliferation of fake new from a philosophical-mainly epistemological-point of view. We devote special attention to three questions: how to define fake news, which mechanisms cause the proliferation of fake news on social media; who is to be blamed epistemically in the process through which fake news are generated, published and distributed. Starting from the extant literature on the topic, we endeavor to: offer a novel definition of fake news immune from the main difficulties which afflict alternative accounts available in the literature (§1); describe the most salient causal factors underwriting the phenomenon of fake news (§2); offer a novel account of the normative dimension of this phenomenon (§3). Questo articolo prende in esame il fenomeno della proliferazione di fake news da un punto di vista filosofico-anzi, per meglio dire, prettamente epistemologico-con particolare attenzione a tre questioni fondamentali: cosa sono le fake news e come debbano essere definite; quali meccanismi ne favoriscono la proliferazione sui social media; chi debba essere ritenuto responsabile e degno di biasimo nel processo sotteso alla generazione, pubblicazione e diffusione di fake news. A partire dall'analisi dei principali lavori nella letteratura filosofica sul tema, ci proponiamo di: offrire una definizione di fake news che eviti le obiezioni sollevate contro altre definizioni discusse dalla letteratura (§1); mettere in luce le principali cause della propagazione di fake news, con particolare riferimento ai bias cognitivi e alle strutture comunitarie in cui si organizzano gli utenti dei social media (§2); infine, presentare una analisi originale della responsabilità epistemica dei consumatori di fake news (§3). Introduzione Non vi è dubbio che le nostre vite siano sempre più influenzate dalla nostra interazione con social media quali Facebook, Twitter e Instagram. Non solo le nostre identità sociali-il modo in cui guardiamo noi stessi, e come veniamo percepiti da chi ci sta intorno-ma anche la nostra vita intellettuale-in particolare, il modo in cui acquisiamo informazioni, formiamo credenze e ricerchiamo ragioni in loro supporto-sta diventando sempre più dipendente dalle nostre frequentazioni di ambienti virtuali e social network. Questo fatto pone indubbiamente dei problemi, se pensiamo al recente proliferare di fake news sui social media, ovvero alla facilità con cui informazioni inaccurate, false o ingannevoli vengono divulgate, distribuite e prese per vere. Basti pensare al fatto che, come hanno mostrato Vosoughy e colleghi, i contenuti falsi diffusi su Twitter hanno il 70% di probabilità in più di essere ritwittati dei contenuti veri (1149). La vita delle nostre comunità democratiche viene messa a rischio da questo fenomeno, basti pensare ai presunti report relativi alla cattiva condotta di personaggi politici, alle rappresentazioni fuorvianti circa l'impatto economico di alcune soluzioni politiche, o alle predizioni infondate sulle conseguenze di certi trattamenti medici di larga scala. Inevitabilmente, la nostra propensione ad accettare come vere credenze inaccurate cresce di pari passo con la tendenza ad accumulare informazioni online. Di conseguenza, crescono anche le probabilità che il nostro agire nella sfera pubblica-attraverso dibattiti, campagne, elezioni, etc.-si regga su fondamenta pericolanti.
In the first part of this paper I suggest that Dogmatism about perceptual justification – the vie... more In the first part of this paper I suggest that Dogmatism about perceptual justification – the view that in the most basic cases, perceptual justification is immediate – commits to rejecting Evidentialism, as it commits, specifically, to accounting for the mechanics of perceptual justification otherwise than by maintaining that perceptual experiences justify by providing evidence. In the second part of the paper, by following W. Hopp’s recent interpretation of Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation, I suggest that Husserl’s theory of fulfilment provides the basis of the non-evidential account of the mechanics of perceptual justification needed to vindicate Dogmatism.
To say that evidence is normative is to say that what evidence one possesses, and how this eviden... more To say that evidence is normative is to say that what evidence one possesses, and how this evidence relates to any proposition, determines which attitude among believing, disbelieving and withholding one ought to take toward this proposition if one deliberates about whether to believe it. It has been suggested by McHugh that this view can be vindicated by resting on the premise that truth is epistemically valuable. In this paper, I modify the strategy sketched by McHugh so as to overcome the initial difficulty that it is unable to vindicate the claim that on counterbalanced evidence with respect to P one ought to conclude deliberation by withholding on P. However, I describe the more serious difficulty that this strategy rests on principles whose acceptance commits one to acknowledging non-evidential reasons for believing. A way to overcome this second difficulty, against the evidentialists who deny this, is to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations. If this is so, one fundamental motivation behind the evidentialist idea that non-epistemic considerations could not enter as reasons in deliberation would lose its force. In the second part of this paper I address several strategies proposed in the attempt to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations and show that they all fail. So, I conclude that the strategy inspired by McHugh to ground the normativity of evidence of the value of truth ultimately fails. which truth is a reliable means. In addition, it can be maintained that truth is the sole, or the most fundamental, epistemic value (see for instance Pritchard 2011, 2014, 2 or, for a recent example, Sylvan 2018). With this, it is meant that any other epistemic good--like for instance justification, reliability and the like--derives its value from the fact that it is a means to realizing the value of truth. This latter claim is more controversial, and I will stay neutral with respect to it. 3 However, I will take for granted the weaker claim that truth is at least one among a variety of intrinsic epistemic values. What I want to address is the question about whether the claim that truth is valuable in this sense may help us to better understand a different epistemic phenomenon, that I will call the normativity of evidence. In the sense I will assume for the purpose of this paper, a subject S has evidence that a given proposition is true just in case S is aware of an indication of P's truth. To say that evidence is normative is to say, roughly, that given any proposition P, what evidence one has, and how this evidence relates to P, determines what doxastic attitude one ought to take toward P if one deliberates about whether to believe it. 4 The question that I shall
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2017
It is an alleged virtue of Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism (ed) that it makes available... more It is an alleged virtue of Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism (ed) that it makes available a promising line of resistance against the sceptic about perceptual knowledge. According to José Zalabardo’s reconstruction of it, however, this line of resistance—in particular, the solution it supplies to what Pritchard calls the Evidential Problem—is ultimately flawed. Whether or not the solution criticized by Zalabardo is the one supplied by ed—which Pritchard has denied—my aim in this paper is to show that Zalabardo’s criticism of this solution fails. To begin with, I show that it is based on excessively demanding epistemic principles. Moreover, I argue that on a more plausible epistemic principle Zalabardo’s conclusion doesn’t go through.
A subject S's belief that Q is well-founded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that give... more A subject S's belief that Q is well-founded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that gives S propositional justification for Q. Depending on the nature of S's reason, the process whereby S bases her belief that Q on it can vary. If S's reason is non-doxastic-like an experience that Q-S will need to form the belief that Q as a spontaneous and immediate response to that reason. If S's reason is doxastic-like a belief that P-S will need to infer her belief that Q from it. The distinction between these two ways in which S's beliefs can be based on S's reasons is widely presupposed in current epistemology but-we argue in this paper-is not exhaustive. We give examples of quite ordinary situations in which a well-founded belief of S appears to be based on S's reasons in neither of the ways described above. To accommodate these recalcitrant cases, we introduce the notion of enthymematic inference and defend the thesis that S can base a belief that Q on doxastic reasons P1, P2, …, Pn via inferring enthymematically Q from P1, P2, …, Pn.
In this paper I criticize Wright’s claim that Cog nitive Command is a significant test for discer... more In this paper I criticize Wright’s claim that Cog nitive Command is a significant test for discerning realist from antirealist discourses. The antirealist semantics explicitly advocated by Wright, entails that every discourse whose truth predicate is superassertibility exerts Cognitive Command, and so that every assertoric discourse deserves a realistic treatment. Whenever two disputants disagree as to the truth value of a sentence expressible within the discourse, provided that they master the relevant vocabulary, they must have committed a cognitive mistake. for they disagree as to the warranted assertibility of the sentence in the light of the available evidence: hence either one of them (or both) misrepresents it, or one of them (or both) fails to to take into account its evidential status.
ConheCimento por espeCialista, evidênCia e informação tommaso piazza* AbstrAct-In this paper I ar... more ConheCimento por espeCialista, evidênCia e informação tommaso piazza* AbstrAct-In this paper I argue that the existence of expert knowledge potentially poses a problem for Evidentialism, the view that a person's justification supervenes on the evidence this person has. An expert is the kind of person from which knowledge (or justified belief) is expected in situations in which a non-expert would normally not attain knowledge (or justified belief); so, potentially, the epistemic status of their beliefs differ even if the evidence they possess seems to be the same. A viable solution to this problem has to show that, appearances to the contrary, the expert and the non-expert, in the problematic cases, do not possess the same evidence. I propose a solution to this problem by defending a principle that specifies the conditions under which a piece of information should be counted as evidence.
This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other defin... more This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with inform...
Article Summary You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad ... more Article Summary You reach for the bowl with ‘sugar’ written on it only to discover, from the bad taste of your coffee, that it contained salt. Mundane experiences like these show that epistemic justification does not necessarily hold stable across possible changes of information. One can be justified in believing a proposition at a certain time (that the bowl contains sugar) and cease to be justified at a later time, as one enlarges one’s epistemic perspective (as one drinks a salty coffee). When this happens, one’s justification has been defeated. An epistemic defeater, broadly speaking, is that in terms of which the defeat of justification proceeds. The notion of an epistemic defeater is mostly associated with J. Pollock’s work on reasoning and inference. Pollock has provided the canonical definition of an epistemic defeater and proposed an influential taxonomy in terms of the way different types of defeaters induce their characteristic effects. The notion of an epistemic defeater...
First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology... more First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology of evidence, is unable to account for ordinary cases of inferential justification. As many epistemologists have maintained, however, when it is paired with a Propositionalist ontology of evidence, Evidentialism is unable to explain in a satisfactory way ordinary cases of perceptual justification. So, the Evidentialist is faced with a dilemma. Second aim of this paper is to give an argument in favour of Propositionalism about evidence, and so to motivate the conclusion that perceptual justification must be accounted for in non-evidentialist terms. By this I do not mean to defend a strongly Non-Evidentialist epistemology, according to which there are doxastic attitudes which are unsupported by any justifier. More modestly, I aim to motivate the weakly Non-Evidentialist epistemology according to which a subject’s perceptual beliefs may be justified by non-evidential justifiers. I conclude ...
This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Propon... more This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduce...
Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and agains... more Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridical experience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility of perceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut.
This paper addresses the proliferation of fake new from a philosophical-mainly epistemological-po... more This paper addresses the proliferation of fake new from a philosophical-mainly epistemological-point of view. We devote special attention to three questions: how to define fake news, which mechanisms cause the proliferation of fake news on social media; who is to be blamed epistemically in the process through which fake news are generated, published and distributed. Starting from the extant literature on the topic, we endeavor to: offer a novel definition of fake news immune from the main difficulties which afflict alternative accounts available in the literature (§1); describe the most salient causal factors underwriting the phenomenon of fake news (§2); offer a novel account of the normative dimension of this phenomenon (§3). Questo articolo prende in esame il fenomeno della proliferazione di fake news da un punto di vista filosofico-anzi, per meglio dire, prettamente epistemologico-con particolare attenzione a tre questioni fondamentali: cosa sono le fake news e come debbano essere definite; quali meccanismi ne favoriscono la proliferazione sui social media; chi debba essere ritenuto responsabile e degno di biasimo nel processo sotteso alla generazione, pubblicazione e diffusione di fake news. A partire dall'analisi dei principali lavori nella letteratura filosofica sul tema, ci proponiamo di: offrire una definizione di fake news che eviti le obiezioni sollevate contro altre definizioni discusse dalla letteratura (§1); mettere in luce le principali cause della propagazione di fake news, con particolare riferimento ai bias cognitivi e alle strutture comunitarie in cui si organizzano gli utenti dei social media (§2); infine, presentare una analisi originale della responsabilità epistemica dei consumatori di fake news (§3). Introduzione Non vi è dubbio che le nostre vite siano sempre più influenzate dalla nostra interazione con social media quali Facebook, Twitter e Instagram. Non solo le nostre identità sociali-il modo in cui guardiamo noi stessi, e come veniamo percepiti da chi ci sta intorno-ma anche la nostra vita intellettuale-in particolare, il modo in cui acquisiamo informazioni, formiamo credenze e ricerchiamo ragioni in loro supporto-sta diventando sempre più dipendente dalle nostre frequentazioni di ambienti virtuali e social network. Questo fatto pone indubbiamente dei problemi, se pensiamo al recente proliferare di fake news sui social media, ovvero alla facilità con cui informazioni inaccurate, false o ingannevoli vengono divulgate, distribuite e prese per vere. Basti pensare al fatto che, come hanno mostrato Vosoughy e colleghi, i contenuti falsi diffusi su Twitter hanno il 70% di probabilità in più di essere ritwittati dei contenuti veri (1149). La vita delle nostre comunità democratiche viene messa a rischio da questo fenomeno, basti pensare ai presunti report relativi alla cattiva condotta di personaggi politici, alle rappresentazioni fuorvianti circa l'impatto economico di alcune soluzioni politiche, o alle predizioni infondate sulle conseguenze di certi trattamenti medici di larga scala. Inevitabilmente, la nostra propensione ad accettare come vere credenze inaccurate cresce di pari passo con la tendenza ad accumulare informazioni online. Di conseguenza, crescono anche le probabilità che il nostro agire nella sfera pubblica-attraverso dibattiti, campagne, elezioni, etc.-si regga su fondamenta pericolanti.
In the first part of this paper I suggest that Dogmatism about perceptual justification – the vie... more In the first part of this paper I suggest that Dogmatism about perceptual justification – the view that in the most basic cases, perceptual justification is immediate – commits to rejecting Evidentialism, as it commits, specifically, to accounting for the mechanics of perceptual justification otherwise than by maintaining that perceptual experiences justify by providing evidence. In the second part of the paper, by following W. Hopp’s recent interpretation of Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation, I suggest that Husserl’s theory of fulfilment provides the basis of the non-evidential account of the mechanics of perceptual justification needed to vindicate Dogmatism.
To say that evidence is normative is to say that what evidence one possesses, and how this eviden... more To say that evidence is normative is to say that what evidence one possesses, and how this evidence relates to any proposition, determines which attitude among believing, disbelieving and withholding one ought to take toward this proposition if one deliberates about whether to believe it. It has been suggested by McHugh that this view can be vindicated by resting on the premise that truth is epistemically valuable. In this paper, I modify the strategy sketched by McHugh so as to overcome the initial difficulty that it is unable to vindicate the claim that on counterbalanced evidence with respect to P one ought to conclude deliberation by withholding on P. However, I describe the more serious difficulty that this strategy rests on principles whose acceptance commits one to acknowledging non-evidential reasons for believing. A way to overcome this second difficulty, against the evidentialists who deny this, is to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations. If this is so, one fundamental motivation behind the evidentialist idea that non-epistemic considerations could not enter as reasons in deliberation would lose its force. In the second part of this paper I address several strategies proposed in the attempt to show that we sometimes manage to believe on the basis of non-epistemic considerations and show that they all fail. So, I conclude that the strategy inspired by McHugh to ground the normativity of evidence of the value of truth ultimately fails. which truth is a reliable means. In addition, it can be maintained that truth is the sole, or the most fundamental, epistemic value (see for instance Pritchard 2011, 2014, 2 or, for a recent example, Sylvan 2018). With this, it is meant that any other epistemic good--like for instance justification, reliability and the like--derives its value from the fact that it is a means to realizing the value of truth. This latter claim is more controversial, and I will stay neutral with respect to it. 3 However, I will take for granted the weaker claim that truth is at least one among a variety of intrinsic epistemic values. What I want to address is the question about whether the claim that truth is valuable in this sense may help us to better understand a different epistemic phenomenon, that I will call the normativity of evidence. In the sense I will assume for the purpose of this paper, a subject S has evidence that a given proposition is true just in case S is aware of an indication of P's truth. To say that evidence is normative is to say, roughly, that given any proposition P, what evidence one has, and how this evidence relates to P, determines what doxastic attitude one ought to take toward P if one deliberates about whether to believe it. 4 The question that I shall
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2017
It is an alleged virtue of Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism (ed) that it makes available... more It is an alleged virtue of Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism (ed) that it makes available a promising line of resistance against the sceptic about perceptual knowledge. According to José Zalabardo’s reconstruction of it, however, this line of resistance—in particular, the solution it supplies to what Pritchard calls the Evidential Problem—is ultimately flawed. Whether or not the solution criticized by Zalabardo is the one supplied by ed—which Pritchard has denied—my aim in this paper is to show that Zalabardo’s criticism of this solution fails. To begin with, I show that it is based on excessively demanding epistemic principles. Moreover, I argue that on a more plausible epistemic principle Zalabardo’s conclusion doesn’t go through.
A subject S's belief that Q is well-founded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that give... more A subject S's belief that Q is well-founded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that gives S propositional justification for Q. Depending on the nature of S's reason, the process whereby S bases her belief that Q on it can vary. If S's reason is non-doxastic-like an experience that Q-S will need to form the belief that Q as a spontaneous and immediate response to that reason. If S's reason is doxastic-like a belief that P-S will need to infer her belief that Q from it. The distinction between these two ways in which S's beliefs can be based on S's reasons is widely presupposed in current epistemology but-we argue in this paper-is not exhaustive. We give examples of quite ordinary situations in which a well-founded belief of S appears to be based on S's reasons in neither of the ways described above. To accommodate these recalcitrant cases, we introduce the notion of enthymematic inference and defend the thesis that S can base a belief that Q on doxastic reasons P1, P2, …, Pn via inferring enthymematically Q from P1, P2, …, Pn.
In this paper I criticize Wright’s claim that Cog nitive Command is a significant test for discer... more In this paper I criticize Wright’s claim that Cog nitive Command is a significant test for discerning realist from antirealist discourses. The antirealist semantics explicitly advocated by Wright, entails that every discourse whose truth predicate is superassertibility exerts Cognitive Command, and so that every assertoric discourse deserves a realistic treatment. Whenever two disputants disagree as to the truth value of a sentence expressible within the discourse, provided that they master the relevant vocabulary, they must have committed a cognitive mistake. for they disagree as to the warranted assertibility of the sentence in the light of the available evidence: hence either one of them (or both) misrepresents it, or one of them (or both) fails to to take into account its evidential status.
It is widely accepted that when it perceptually seems to a subject S that reality is a certain wa... more It is widely accepted that when it perceptually seems to a subject S that reality is a certain way S acquires some degree of defeasible justification for believing that reality is that way. The main objective of this paper is to account for the specific way in which this justification can be lost when a subject acquires a reason D for supposing that her perceptual seemings are unreliable. Along with a widely accepted answer, which traces back to J. Pollock, D undercuts S’s justification from the seeming. This answer conflates two different senses––the direct and indirect one––in which S’s seeming that P can contribute to the justification of S’s belief that P. While D undercuts S’s indirect justification from the seeming, namely the inferential justification based on S’s introspective belief that it seems to her that P, it does not undercut also the direct justification from the seeming, which is non-inferential justification. In the final part of the paper I invoke a principle distilled by N. Silins––according to which S’s direct justification for believing P from the seeming cannot exceed S’s justification for believing that S sees P from the seeming––and argue that D defeats the first justification by rebutting the second.
Secondo M. Fricker, i pregiudizi che permeano l'atmosfera discorsiva della società producono la m... more Secondo M. Fricker, i pregiudizi che permeano l'atmosfera discorsiva della società producono la marginalizzazione e l’esclusione dei membri dei gruppi che tali pregiudizi prendono di mira dagli scambi testimoniali. In tal modo, si produce una forma di ingiustizia che Fricker caratterizza come epistemica (e testimoniale), in ragione del fatto che comporta una degradazione di chi ne è vittima nella sua dimensione specifica di agente e veicolo di conoscenza. Per Fricker, per prevenire questo tipo di ingiustizia dovremmo sviluppare una virtù ibrida, al contempo morale ed intellettuale, che consiste nella capacità di correggere verso l’alto le nostre valutazioni di credibilità quando ci rendiamo conto che sono influenzate da pregiudizi. Contrariamente a Fricker, in questo capitolo cerco di mostrare che che le disfunzioni testimoniali descritte da Fricker, per essere efficacemente corrette, richiedano la coltivazione di due virtù separate: la giustizia e il discernimento testimoniali
In this paper we defend the claim that tasting a wine is a way of improving one's epistemic stand... more In this paper we defend the claim that tasting a wine is a way of improving one's epistemic standing towards it. To support this conclusion, we describe a scenario in which Clara the super-oenologist, who is omniscient about the natural properties of wine but has never herself sampled it, one day has a chance to try out a glass of L'Apparita 1985. Beforehand, Clara knew all the natural properties of that sample of wine. However, by tasting it she intuitively learns something new about it. To vindicate this intuition, we supply a metaphysical account of the properties of the wine with which Clara gets acquainted upon tasting it – its aesthetic properties – as response-dependent properties. We finally indicate that our account can be used to vindicate some strains of wine criticism from the charge of epistemic untrustworthiness. §1. Clara the Super-Oenologist Imagine that oenology achieved a much firmer knowledge of the chemical, biological, geological, environmental, and physiological constituents of wine – in brief, of the natural properties of wine – and of the way these interact with gustative organs and give rise to different gustatory experiences. 1 Let Clara be a distinguished representative of this * The first draft of this paper dates back to 2011. Since then, several relevant publications appeared in print; the present version strives to acknowledge all such publications, while at the same time retaining part of the original structure and punch of our argument. Over the years, we received much helpful feedback. We wish to thank all those who contributed to improve the paper. In particular, for their helpful comments on early drafts, we thank Davide Bordini, Nicola Ciprotti, Sanna Hirvonen, and Luca Moretti. We thank furthermore 1 For a discussion of the prospects of scenarios akin to super-oenology, see also Noble (2006). The scenario we are proposing could remind one of the 2030 and 2015 scenarios depicted by Burnham and Skilleas (2012: 48-53). Our aim, however, is to study the epistemological insights provided by the experience of
Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation, 2019
A subject S's belief that Q is well-grounded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that giv... more A subject S's belief that Q is well-grounded if and only if it is based on a reason of S that gives S propositional justification for Q. Depending on the nature of S's reason, the process whereby S bases her belief that Q on it can vary. If S's reason is non-doxastic–– like an experience that Q or a testimony that Q––S will need to form the belief that Q as a spontaneous and immediate response to that reason. If S's reason is doxastic––like a belief that P––S will need to infer her belief that Q from it. The distinction between these two ways in which S's beliefs can be based on S's reasons is widely presupposed in current epistemology but––we argue in this paper––is not exhaustive. We give examples of quite ordinary situations in which a well-grounded belief of S appears to be based on S's reasons in neither of the ways described above. To accommodate these recalcitrant cases, we introduce the notion of enthymematic inference and defend the thesis that S can base a belief that Q on doxastic reasons P1, P2, …, Pn via inferring enthymematically Q from P1, P2, …, Pn.
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Papers by Tommaso Piazza