ABSTRACT. Epistemic agents are finite and fallible. Our range is limited and some of what we accept is, no doubt, flawed. To achieve our epistemic and practical objectives, we devise methods and practices that foster correction, refinement, and expansion of our current epistemic commitments. Traditional epistemology maintains that epistemic acceptability requires non-fortuitously justified true belief, where non-fortuitousness insures that the justification and the truth maker align. If so, reflective equilibrium is at best indicative of acceptability. I argue otherwise. Reflective equilibrium is constitutive of epistemic acceptability. Because a network of cognitive commitments in reflective equilibrium is as reasonable as any available alternative in the epistemic circumstances, it is worthy of acceptance. That does not make it perfect or permanently acceptable. Such a network is susceptible of and probably in need of improvement. But it is the best we can currently do and provides a suitable platform for improvement. So it is acceptable here and now. I argue further that such a network should be designed to foster, not merely allow for, further gains. That requires that it enable critical reflection about its own ends and means, enabling epistemic agents to recognize opportunities and obstacles to improvement.

ABSTRACT. Along with several other knowledge-firsters, I hold that justification is potential knowledge. But knowledge, and potential knowledge, is an all-or-nothing affair, yet justification comes in degrees. In response I argue that the degree to which a proposition is justified for a subject is a function of epistemic risk, where epistemic risk is understood as the risk of not knowing a given proposition. I present a novel formal model where risk values can be calculated. I propose that the risk of an event is a function of both the proportion and closeness of the possible worlds in which the event obtains.

ABSTRACT. Some kinds of disagreements seem to give rise to synergy effects that appear to be incompatible with so-called conciliatory views, which suggest a certain way of revising one's beliefs in the face of controversies with equally competent and well-informed people. I will argue that synergy should not affect our degrees of belief, as it is usually assumed, but rather our degrees of justification, and thus can be made compatible with conciliatory views. This also leads to a specific understanding of what degrees of justification are, and how they are interrelated with degrees of belief.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, a growing number of authors have endorsed moral encroachment—the view that epistemic status depends partially on moral factors. The theoretical framework, however, after scrutiny is underwhelming. This paper endorses a novel theoretical framework for moral encroachment. I argue that interest-dependent contextualism—the view that interest holders can shift the epistemic context—offers a framework by which to understand moral encroachment. After first formulating interest-dependent contextualism. I then contrast it with a competing position: subject-sensitive invariantism. After analyzing novel pairs of cases, I argue that my view makes better sense of these cases. I then demonstrate how interest-dependent contextualism allows for framework for moral encroachment: any morally impermissible interest-undermining—occurring in virtue of belief—is harder to justify epistemically because those interests shift the epistemic context such that it is more difficult to achieve justification.

ABSTRACT. The incorporation of value theories in epistemology has sparked a discussion about teleological epistemology and epistemic consequentialism. I will suggest distinguishing a consequentialist project that situates epistemic justification in a social epistemology setting from a teleological non-consequentialist quality control view of epistemic justification. Many confusions surround the terms ‘teleology’ and ‘consequentialism’, and I will argue that drawing the correct analogies from normative ethics reveals that widely held criticisms of teleological epistemology, such as epistemic trade-off objections, are misplaced. The conceptualization I am suggesting will also help epistemologists to not be misled by some analogies from ethical consequentialism.

ABSTRACT. One feature that has remained in common for both traditional philosophical debates about coherentism and the formal literature on numerical measures of coherence, is the important role played by comparisons with the case of witness reports. Formal models of how agreement amongst witness statements can raise the probability that those statements are true almost always make the crucial assumption that the witness reports are independent. But when it comes to our beliefs, these are not formed independently of each other – and nor should they be. So it is unclear what relevance the example of independent witnesses has for understanding coherence amongst beliefs. After pointing out some tricky issues with formalizing this independence constraint, I discuss how coherentist justification for beliefs should be understood given that belief formation must flout independence. I discuss how a coherentist should think of the basing relation and consider a position I call ‘rule-coherentism’ (by analogy with rule-utilitarianism).

ABSTRACT. I defend an inductive tracking condition to explain the use of inductive results as evidence of inductive reliability.

ABSTRACT. Coherence considerations play an important role in science and in everyday reasoning. But why do we prefer more coherent information over less coherent information? What makes more coherent information better than less coherent information? To answer these questions, we first explore how to explicate the dazzling notion of “coherence” and how to measure the coherence of an information set. To do so, we first critique prima facie plausible proposals that incorporate normative principles such as Agreement or Dependence and then argue that the coherence of an information set is best understood as an indicator of the truth of the set under certain conditions. Using computer simulations, we then show that a new probabilistic measure of coherence that combines aspects of the two principles above, but without strictly satisfying either principle, performs particularly well in this regard.

ABSTRACT. To explicate the concept of coherence, several probabilistic measures for degree of coherence have been proposed in the philosophical literature. These measures are conceptually similar to what is known in statistics as association measures for binary variables. Two main types of those measures are analyzed, and their properties compared. They can be interpreted as measuring degree of co-implication and degree of dependence, respectively. It is argued that the second type adequately captures the intuitive idea of coherence being strictly truth-conducive, given the marginal probabilities. One of these measures, Yule’s Y, emerges as a strong contender for the correct measure of coherence.

ABSTRACT. There exists a notion that sources of information (SOI) must be independent of each other, so that the coherence of their total testimony is epistemically significant. In other words, if SOI had an opportunity to adjust their individual testimonies according to each other’s, then coherence of their testimony is of no epistemic value: it’s not truth or reliability conducive. Main goal of this talk is to point to some ideas that take into question whether senses qualify as legitimate SOI for the coherentist. I will point to cognitive penetration, cross-modal effects and also the doctrine of equivalent information, to try to demonstrate this point.

ABSTRACT. Analogical reasoning is a form of non-deductive reasoning that gives special weight to similarity considerations. Here, we pursue an approach to formalizing this type of reasoning that was initiated by Carnap in posthumously published work. In it, Carnap abandoned his long-time project of trying to define inductive and analogical reasoning syntactically and introduced attribute spaces to model the meanings of predicates. While these spaces remain underdeveloped in Carnap's late work, it is clear that what he envisioned is, or is close to, what are presently known as 'conceptual spaces.' We use the conceptual spaces framework as it has been developed over the past two decades to make progress on formally representing analogical reasoning. This will also allow us to address the question of the normative status of analogical reasoning, which was raised by Carnap and others but which has hitherto remained unanswered. Finally, we work out some of the empirical content of our proposal and reanalyze a publicly available dataset to test it.