Knowledge

Chapter 2 uses the idea that inquiry into specific questions is an activity with a constitutive aim and that knowledge is this constitutive aim to develop a non-reductive account of knowledge. The key idea is that certain activities with constitutive aims do not lend themselves to reductive analysis and instead afford a so-called network analysis in which each element cannot be properly understood without grasping the connections with other elements in the network. After addressing objections, Chapter 2 compares the account developed here with Williamson’s non-reductive account of knowledge as a sui generis mental state and argues that the former is preferable to the latter.

The shared know-how in Linguistic Bodies

The authors of Linguistic Bodies appeal to shared know-how to explain the social and participatory interactions upon which linguistic skills and agency rest. However, some issues lurk around the notion of shared know-how and require attention and clarification. In particular, one issue concerns the agent behind the shared know-how, a second one concerns whether shared know-how can be reducible to individual know-how or not. In this paper, I sustain that there is no single answer to the first issue; depending on the case, shared know-how can belong to the participants of a social activity or to the system the participants bring forth together. In relation to the second issue, I sustain, following the authors, a non-reductive account of shared know-how. I also suggest that responsiveness to others, which is a fundamental element of shared know-how, can be extended by perceptual learning.Keywords: Shared know-how, participatory sense-making, social agency, responsiveness to others, enactivism.

Humean Supervenience and Possible Worlds

The position defended is compatible with a coherent development of a reductive account of modality. It is less significant for the principle of recombination than previously thought and the principle of recombination is unlikely to play successfully its role as a principle of plenitude in any event. The distinct existences principle is defended against an argument that it is necessarily false. In fact, by comparison, we have more reason to believe in the possibility of worlds in which Humean supervenience is true and there is causation, than in physicalism about phenomenal consciousness. The counterfactual theory of causation, and surrounding framework, explains why this is the appropriate verdict at which to arrive. Some aspects of the variety of causation may be understood as a determinate-determinable relation but the different vertically fundamental bases are better understood as partial realizations. Causation is one horizontally fundamental metaphysical category but there may be others.

Value, (use) values, and the ecologies of capital: On social form, meaning, and the contested production of nature.

This paper connects hitherto distant strands of literature to contribute to the ongoing turn to value theory in socio-ecological studies. Starting from Marx’s understanding of value as social form, I revisit Neil Smith’s contribution to the question of value and nature and argue for a reassessment of the internal relations between valorisation and the ‘vernacular’ dimensions of socio-ecological reproduction. I approach this problem through Bolívar Echeverría’s reconstruction of the category of use-value and his understanding of the pivotal role it plays in Marx’s critique, which allows for an open and non-reductive account of the subsumption of socio-ecologies under capitalism as contradictory entanglements of abstraction and meaning. The paper mobilises these insights alongside Marxian-inspired anthropological theories of value – the work of Terence Turner and David Graeber – in order to sketch elements for a symbolic-materialist framework to approach the question of value in its cultural-moral register, its relation to value as economic form, and issues of moral economy and ecology under capitalism.

What We Ought to Do: The Decisions and Duties of Non-agential Groups

In ordinary discourse, a single duty is often attributed to a plurality of agents. In Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals, Stephanie Collins claims that such attributions involve a “category error”. I critically discuss Collins’ argument for this claim and argue that there is a substantive sense in which non-agential groups can have moral duties. A plurality of agents can have a single duty to bring about an outcome by virtue of a capacity of each to practically reason about what they ought to do together. I also argue that Collins’ attempt to give a reductive account of such “we-reasoning” fails.

Shared Agency Without Shared Intention

The leading reductive approaches to shared agency model that phenomenon in terms of complexes of individual intentions, understood as plan-laden commitments. Yet not all agents have such intentions, and non-planning agents such as small children and some non-human animals are clearly capable of sophisticated social interactions. But just how robust are their social capacities? Are non-planning agents capable of shared agency? Existing theories of shared agency have little to say about these important questions. I address this lacuna by developing a reductive account of the social capacities of non-planning agents, which I argue supports the conclusion that they can enjoy shared agency. The resulting discussion offers a fine-grained account of the psychological capacities that can underlie shared agency, and produces a recipe for generating novel hypotheses concerning why some agents (including, arguably, the great apes) do not engage in shared agency.

Crystallized Regularities

This essay proposes a reductive account of robust macro-regularities (sometimes called “special science laws”). On the view proposed, regularities can earn their elite scientific status by featuring in good summaries of restricted regions in the space of physical possibilities: our “modal neighborhoods.” I argue that this view vindicates “nomic foundationalism” (that is, the view that the physical laws sustain all robust regularities), while doing justice to the practice of invoking physically contingent generalizations in higher-level explanations. Moreover, the view suggests an explanation for the particular significance of robust macro-regularities: we rely on summaries of our modal neighborhoods when reasoning hypothetically about “agentially accessible” possibilities.

Knowing Full Well from Testimony?

Testimony poses a challenge to systematic epistemology. I cite two kinds of testimony situation where the recipient's belief is not safe, yet intuitively counts as knowledge. Can Sosa's more sophisticated virtue reliabilism, which theorises animal knowledge as apt belief, yield the intuitively correct verdict on these cases? Sosa shows that a belief can be apt, though it is not safe, and so it may seem a quick positive answer is forthcoming. However, I explore complications in applying his AAA framework, regarding what we take as the circumstances in which the subject's attempt is made: the AAA framework does not mandate a particular choice, yet this affects whether the attempt (in particular, a believing in the endeavour to attain truth) comes out as apt or not. I conclude that Sosa's theory is subject to a familiar charge: it does not give a reductive account of knowledge, since we must deploy independent intuitions about whether knowledge is gained in a case, in order to apply it.

The many lives of border automation: Turbulence, coordination and care

Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but instead illustrate how both positions reproduce a powerful anthropocentrism that effaces the entanglements and coordinations between humans and nonhumans in border spaces. Drawing from fieldwork with customs officers, immigration officers and airport managers at a UK and a European airport, we illustrate how border agents navigate a turbulent ‘cycle’ of automation that continually overturns assumed hierarchies between humans and technology. The coordinated practices engendered by institutional culture, material infrastructures, drug loos and sniffer dogs cannot be captured by a reductive account of automated borders as simply confirming or denying a predetermined, data-driven in/out decision.

Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible.