No guts, no glory: underestimating the benefits of providing children with mechanistic details

Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children’s ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure to mechanism benefits children via the formation of abstract causal knowledge that supports epistemic evaluation. We tested 240 6–9 year-olds’ memory for concrete details and the ability to distinguish expertise before, immediately after, or a week after viewing a video about how combustion engines work. By around age 8, children who saw the video remembered mechanistic details and were better able to detect car-engine experts. Beyond detailed knowledge, the current results suggest that children also acquired an abstracted sense of how systems work that can facilitate epistemic reasoning.

What is a Conspiracy Theory?

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.

Is Deontic Evaluation Capable of Doing What it is For?

Many philosophers think the distinctive function of deontic evaluation is to guide action. This idea is used in arguments for a range of substantive claims. In this paper, we entirely do one completely destructive thing and partly do one not entirely constructive thing. The first thing: we argue that there is an unrecognized gap between the claim that the function of deontic evaluation is to guide action and attempts to put that claim to use. We consider and reject four arguments intended to bridge this gap. The interim conclusion is thus that arguments starting with the claim that the function of deontic evaluation is to guide action have a lacuna. The second thing: we consider a different tack for making arguments of this sort work. We sketch a methodology one could accept that would do the trick. Unfortunately, as we’ll explain, although this methodology would bridge the gap in arguments that put claims about the function of deontic evaluation to work, it would do so in a way that vitiates any interest we might have in such arguments. As an aside, we’ll also point out how epistemologists, who have recently become interested in the function of epistemic evaluation, appear to already recognize this fact. The conclusion is hence a dilemma: either arguments from deontic function to substance have a lacuna or such arguments lack teeth.

Epistemic evaluation and the need for ‘impure’ epistemic standards

That knowledge ascriptions exhibit some form of sensitivity to context is uncontroversial. How best to account for the context-sensitivity at issue, however, is the topic of heated debates. A certain version of nonindexical contextualism seems to be a promising option. Even so, it is incumbent upon any contextualist account to explain in what way and to what extent the epistemic standard operative in a particular context of epistemic evaluation is affected by non-epistemic factors (such as practical interests). In this paper, I investigate how non-epistemic factors come into play when knowledge is ascribed. I argue that knowledge ascriptions often serve the purpose of providing actionable information. This, in turn, requires that epistemic interests be balanced against non-epistemic interests. Moreover, it raises the question of whose interests matter, those of the ascriber, the addressee (of the knowledge ascription), or the subject of ascription. Eventually, an answer to the question is suggested.

Giving Up the Enkratic Principle

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality.

Relevance and Normative Conditions in the Use of Reasons

The article presents a case for the thesis that everyday linguistic ascriptions of justification depend, among other conditions, upon epistemic norms about the way in which the agent has set the scope of relevant reasons and evidence for the belief. These norms, it is argued, and not criteria for the possession of evidence, determine whether a belief is properly justified in various cases when the agent has missed some relevant and possessed by her evidence. Unlike psychological retrievability, the skill of determining the relevance permits the imposition of rational conditions. Internalist approaches to justification do not explicitly include epistemic requirements for the cognitive mechanisms of setting the scope of relevant reasons in the epistemic evaluation of beliefs but intuitions from everyday ascriptions suggest that the existence of such is likely and that further investigation is necessary to establish whether they should be incorporated.

Must Knowers Be Agents?

This chapter explores agency as it applies to epistemic evaluation, using epistemic analogues of the well-known Frankfurt cases against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. It argues that the satisfaction of manipulable counterfactual conditions is neither necessary nor sufficient for either moral or epistemic responsibility, nor is it necessary for knowledge. But what a person does in counterfactual circumstances is a sign of the presence of agency, and the argument here is that agency is necessary for epistemic responsibility and for knowledge. The chapter argues that agency is operative in getting epistemic credit and knowledge. The scope of agency includes those evaluative aspects of belief investigated by epistemology. In other work the author has argued that it is artificial to separate epistemology from ethics. The role of agency in beliefs as well as in acts further supports this position.

Knowledge as Achievement, More or Less

This chapter enhances and extends a powerful and promising research program, performance-based epistemology, which stands at the crossroads of many important currents that one can identify in contemporary epistemology, including the value problem, epistemic normativity, virtue epistemology, and the nature of knowledge. Performance-based epistemology offers at least three outstanding benefits: it explains the distinctive value that knowledge has, it places epistemic evaluation into a familiar and ubiquitous pattern of evaluation, and it solves the Gettier problem. But extant versions of performance-based epistemology have been the object of serious criticism. This chapter shows how to meet the objections without sacrificing the aforementioned benefits.

The Radicalism of Truth-insensitive Epistemology: Truth's Profound Effect on the Evaluation of Belief

Many philosophers claim that interesting forms of epistemic evaluation are insensitive to truth in a very specific way. Suppose that two possible agents believe the same proposition based on the same evidence. Either both are justified or neither is; either both have good evidence for holding the belief or neither does. This does not change if, on this particular occasion, it turns out that only one of the two agents has a true belief. Epitomizing this line of thought are thought experiments about radically deceived “brains in vats.” It is widely and uncritically assumed that such a brain is equally justified as its normally embodied human “twin.” This “parity” intuition is the heart of truth-insensitive theories of core epistemological properties such as justification and rationality. Rejecting the parity intuition is considered radical and revisionist. In this paper, I show that exactly the opposite is true. The parity intuition is idiosyncratic and widely rejected. A brain in a vat is not justified and has worse evidence than its normally embodied counterpart. On nearly every ordinary way of evaluating beliefs, a false belief is significantly inferior to a true belief. Of all the evaluations studied here, only blamelessness is truth-insensitive.