Epistemology

First published Wed Dec 14, 2005; substantive revision Sat Oct 26, 2024

The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek words“episteme” and “logos”. “Episteme”can be translated as “knowledge” or“understanding” or “acquaintance”, while“logos” can be translated as “account” or“argument” or “reason”. Just as each of thesedifferent translations captures some facet of the meaning of theseGreek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet ofepistemology itself. Although the term “epistemology” isno more than a couple of centuries old, the field of epistemology isat least as old as any in philosophy.^[1] In different parts of its extensive history, different facets ofepistemology have attracted attention. Plato’s epistemology wasan attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge(unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower. Locke’sepistemology was an attempt to understand the operations of humanunderstanding, Kant’s epistemology was an attempt to understandthe conditions of the possibility of human understanding, andRussell’s epistemology was an attempt to understand how modernscience could be justified by appeal to sensory experience. Muchrecent work in formal epistemology is an attempt to understand how ourdegrees of confidence are rationally constrained by our evidence, andmuch recent work in feminist epistemology is an attempt to understandthe ways in which interests affect our evidence, and affect ourrational constraints more generally. In all these cases, epistemologyseeks to understand one or another kind ofcognitive success(or, correspondingly, cognitivefailure). This entry surveysthe varieties of cognitive success, and some recent efforts tounderstand some of those varieties.

1. The Varieties of Cognitive Success

There are many different kinds of cognitive success, and they differfrom one another along various dimensions. Exactly what these variouskinds of success are, and how they differ from each other, and howthey are explanatorily related to each other, and how they can beachieved or obstructed, are all matters of controversy. This sectionprovides some background to these various controversies.

1.1 What Kinds of Things Enjoy Cognitive Success?

Cognitive successes can differ from each other by virtue of qualifyingdifferent kinds of things. For instance, a cognitivesuccess—like that of making a discovery—may be the successof a person (e.g., Marie Curie), or of a laboratory (Los Alamos), orof a people (the Hopi), or even, perhaps, of a psychological fragmentof a person (the unconscious). But some kinds of cognitivesuccess—like that of having successfully cultivated a highlydiscriminating palate, say—may be the success of a person, andperhaps even of a people, but cannot be the success of a laboratory orof a psychological fragment. And other kinds of cognitivesuccess—like that of being conclusively established by all theavailable evidence—may be the success of a theory, but cannot bethe success of a person—or like that of being epistemicallyfruitful—may be the success of a research program, or of aparticular proof-strategy, but not of a theory. Indeed, there is avast range of things, spanning different metaphysical categories, thatcan enjoy one or another kind of cognitive success: we can evaluatethe cognitive success of a mental state (such as that of believing aparticular proposition) or of an act (such as that of drawing aparticular conclusion), or of a procedure (such as a particularprocedure for revising degrees of confidence in response to evidence,or a particular procedure for acquiring new evidence), or of arelation (such as the mathematical relation between an agent’scredence function in one evidential state and her credence function inanother evidential state, or the relation of trust between one personand another).

Some of the recent controversies concerning the objects of cognitivesuccess concern the metaphysical relations among the cognitivesuccesses of various kinds of objects: Does the cognitive success of aprocess involve anything over and above the cognitive success of eachstate in the succession of states that comprise the execution of that process?^[2] Does the cognitive success of a particular mental state, or of aparticular mental act, depend upon its relation to the larger processin which it exists?^[3] Is the cognitive success of an organization constituted merely by thecognitive successes of its members, or is it something over and abovethose individual successes?^[4] Is the cognitive success of a doxastic agent completely explicable interms of the successes of its doxastic states, orvice versa?And either way, what sorts of doxastic states are there, and withrespect to what kinds of possible success are they assessible? Thelatter dispute is especially active in recent years, with someepistemologists regarding beliefs as metaphysically reducible to high credences,^[5] while others regard credences as metaphysically reducible to beliefsthe content of which contains a probability operator (see Buchanan andDogramaci forthcoming), and still others regard beliefs and credencesas related but distinct phenomena (see Kaplan 1996, Neta 2008).

Other recent controversies concern the issue of whether it is ametaphysically fundamental feature of theobjects ofcognitive success that they are, in some sense, supposed to enjoy thekind of cognitive success in question. For instance, we might thinkthat what it is for some group of people to constitute alaboratory is that the group is, in some sense,supposed to make discoveries of a certain kind: that is thepoint of bringing that group into collaboration in a particular way,even if the individuals are spread out across different continents andtheir funding sources diverse. But even if a laboratory is plausiblycharacterized by a norm to which it is answerable, is somethinganalogous true of the other objects that can enjoy cognitive success?Is it, for instance, a metaphysically fundamental feature of a beliefthat it is, in some sense,supposed to be knowledge?^[6] Or can belief be metaphysically characterized without appeal to thisnorm? Is it, for instance, a metaphysically fundamental feature of aperson that such a creature is, in some sense,supposed to be rational?^[7] Or can persons be metaphysically characterized without appeal to thisnorm? Similar disputes arise for the other objects of cognitivesuccess: to what extent can we understand what these objects arewithout appeal to the kinds of success that they are supposed toenjoy?

In speaking, as we have just now, of the kinds of success that objectsare “supposed” to enjoy, we have left it open in whatsense the objects of cognitive success are “supposed” toenjoy their success: is it that their enjoyment of that success isgood? (If so, then how is it good?) Or is it rather that theirenjoyment of that success is demanded? (If so, then what demands it,and why?) We turn to that general topic next.

1.2 Demands and Values

Some kinds of cognitive success involve compliance with ademand, while others involve the realization or promotion ofvalues. We can contrast these two kinds of success bycontrasting the associated kinds of failure: failure to comply with ademand results inimpermissibility, whereas failure torealize some values results insub-optimality.^[8] Of course, if sub-optimality is always impermissible andviceversa, then theextension of these two categories endsup being the same, even if the two categories are not themselves thesame. But it is implausible to regard all sub-optimality asepistemically impermissible: cognitive success does notrequire us to be perfectly cognitively optimal in every way.If cognitive success is ever achievable even in principle, then atleast some degree of cognitive sub-optimality must be permissible.Achieving greater optimality than what’s required for cognitivepermissibility could then be understood as cognitivesupererogation. If such supererogation is possible, at leastin principle, then the permissible can fall short of the optimal.

Recent controversies concern not merely the relation betweenpermissibility and optimality, but also the metaphysical basis of eachkind of success. In virtue of what is some state, or act, or process,or relation, epistemically permissible? And in virtue of what is itoptimal to whatever degree it is? Epistemic consequentialists take theanswer to the former question to be determined by appeal to the answerto the latter. For instance, one popular form of epistemicconsequentialism claims that a particular way of forming one’sbeliefs about the world is epistemically permissible just in so far asit promotes the possession of true belief and the avoidance of false belief.^[9] Another form of consequentialism, consistent with but distinct fromthe first, says that a “credence function” (i.e., afunction from propositions to degrees of confidence) is optimal justin so far as it promotes a single parameter—overallaccuracy—which is measured in such a way that, the higherone’s confidence in true propositions and the lower one’sconfidence in false propositions, the greater one’s overall accuracy.^[10] There are also some forms of epistemic consequentialism according towhich optimality involves promotion of ends that are practical ratherthan simply alethic.^[11] An important controversy in the recent literature concerns thequestion of whether epistemic consequentialism is true (see Berker2013, which develops a line of argument found in Firth 1978 [1998]).Another prominent controversy is carried on among consequentialiststhemselves, and concerns the question of what values are such thattheir realization or promotion constitutes optimality.

We’ve used the term “constraint” to denote thebounds of what is epistemically permissible. Of course, as a matter ofdeontic logic, what is permissible must include at least what isrequired: for a condition to be required is simply for the complementof that condition to not be permissible. But this leaves it openwhether, in a particular domain, what is permissible includes morethan what is required. Permissivists argue that it does (seeSchoenfield 2014 and Titelbaum and Kopec 2019 for defenses ofpermissivism), while anti-permissivists argue that it does not (seeWhite 2005 and Schultheis 2018 for arguments against permissivism).Anti-permissivists concerning constraints on our credences aresometimes described as holding a “uniqueness” view, butthis label can easily mislead. A philosopher who thinks that the rangeof permissible credences is no wider than the range of requiredcredences is an anti-permissivist—but an anti-permissivist view,so understood, is consistent with the claim that the credences we arerequired to have are not point-valued but are rather interval-valued.Such a philosopher could, for instance, claim that there is only onecredence that you are permitted to assign to the proposition that thecat is on the mat, and this required credence is neither .6 nor .7,but is rather the open interval (.6, .7).

1.3 Substantive and Structural

Compare the following two rules:

(MP-Narrow) If you believe thatp is true, andyou also believe thatifp is true thenq istrue, then you ought to believe thatq istrue.
(MP-Wide) You ought not be such that you believe thatp is true, and believe thatifp istrue thenq is true, and not believe thatqis true.

The first rule, MP-Narrow, is obviously not a rule with which we oughtto comply: ifq is obviously false, then it’s not thecase that I ought to believe thatq istrue—not even if I believe thatp is true, andthatifp is true thenq is true.Nonetheless, ifq is obviously false, then (perhaps) I oughtnot both believe thatp is true and also believe thatifp is true thenq is true. That’s because,even if MP-Narrow is not a rule with which we ought to comply, MP-Widemay still be such a rule. The difference between the two rules is inthe scope of the “ought”: in MP-Narrow, its scope includesonly one belief (viz., the belief thatq is true), whereas inMP-Wide, its scope includes a combination of two beliefs (viz., thatp is true, and that ifp is true thenq istrue) and one lack of belief (viz., thatq is true).

This linguistic distinction between wide scope and narrow scope“oughts” is one expression of a general metaphysicaldistinction between two kinds of cognitive success. On one side ofthis distinction are those kinds of cognitive success that qualifyparticular objects, e.g., a particular belief, or a particularprocedure, or a particular credence function, or a particular researchprogram. Examples of such success include a belief’s beingjustified, a procedure’s being rationally required, a credencefunction’s being optimal. In each case, some object enjoys aparticular cognitive success, and this success obtains by virtue ofvarious features of that object: the features in question may beintrinsic or relational, synchronic or diachronic, biological orphenomenological, etc. We can call such cognitive successes“substantive”.

On the other side of this distinction are those kinds of cognitivesuccess that qualify the relations between various things, each ofwhich is itself individually assessable for cognitive success: e.g.,the relation between a set of beliefs all held by the same agent at aparticular time, or the relation between the use of a particularprocedure, on the one hand, and one’s beliefs about thatprocedure, on the other, or the relation between an agent’scredence function just before receiving new evidence, and her credencefunction just after receiving new evidence. Examples of this latterkind of success include an agent’s beliefs at a moment all beingconsistent, or the coherence between the procedures an agent uses andher beliefs about which procedures she ought to use. In each case, aparticular cognitive success qualifies the relations among variousobjects, quite independently of whether any particular one of thoseobjects itself enjoys substantive cognitive success. We can call suchcognitive successes “structural”. Some epistemologistshave attempted to reduce substantive successes of a particular kind tostructural successes.^[12] Others have attempted to reduce structural successes of some kind tosubstantive ones (see, for instance, Kiesewetter 2017, Lasonen-Aarnio2020, and Lord 2018). And still others have denied that any suchreduction is possible in either direction (see, for instance, Worsnip2018 and Neta 2018). In recent years, this controversy has been mostactive in connection withrational permissibility of beliefs,or of credences. But such a controversy could, in principle, ariseconcerning any of the varieties of cognitive success that we’vedistinguished so far.

1.4. What Explains What?

Many epistemologists attempt to explain one kind of cognitive successin terms of other kinds. For instance, Chisholm tries to explain allcognitive success notions in terms of just one primitive notion: thatof one attitude beingmore reasonable than another, for anagent at a time (see Chisholm 1966). Williamson, in contrast, treatsknowledge of facts as an explanatory primitive, and suggests thatother kinds of cognitive success be explained in terms of suchknowledge (see Williamson 2002). Several prominent philosophers treatthe notion of a normative reason as primitive (see Scanlon 1998). Andso on. In each case, what is at issue is which kinds of cognitivesuccess are explicable in terms of which other kinds of cognitivesuccess. Of course, whether this issue is framed as an issueconcerningthe explication of some concepts in terms of otherconcepts, or in terms ofthe grounding of some properties byother properties, or in some other terms still, depends on themetaphilosophical commitments of those framing the issue.

The issue of whichkinds of cognitive success explain whichother kinds of cognitive success is orthogonal to the issue of whichparticular cognitive successes explain which other particularcognitive successes. The former issue concerns whether, for instance,the property of knowledge is to be explained in terms of the relationof one thing being a reason for another, or whether the relation ofbeing a reason for is to explained in terms of knowledge. But thelatter issue concerns whether, for instance, I am justified in holdingsome particular belief—say, that the cat is on the mat—invirtue of my knowing various specific things, e.g., that my vision isworking properly under the present circumstances, and that the objectthat I am looking at now is a cat, etc. This latter issue is at theheart of various epistemological regress puzzles, and we will returnto it below. But those regress puzzles are largely independent of theissue of metaphysical priority being discussed here.

1.5 What Makes It Success?

What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitivesuccess? For instance, why think thatknowing the capitalof Pakistan is a cognitive success, rather than just anothercognitive state that an agent can occupy, likehaving 70%confidence that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan? Not everycognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding,mastering—these are cognitive successes. But being 70% confidentin a proposition is not, in and of itself, a cognitive success, evenif that state of confidence may be partly constitutive of anagent’s cognitive success when the agent holds it in the rightcircumstances and for the right reason. What makes the difference?

Recent work on this issue tends to defend one of the following threeanswers to this question: contractualism, consequentialism, orconstitutivism. The contractualist says that a particular cognitivestate counts as a kind of success because the practice of so countingit serves certain widely held practical interests. For instance,according to Craig (1990), we describe a person as“knowing” something as a way of signaling that hertestimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted. Thiscontractualist view is elaborated more fully in Dogramaci 2012, andemployed to solve a puzzle about deductive reasoning in Dogramaci2015. The consequentialist says that a particular cognitive statecounts as a kind of success because it tends to constitute or tends topromote some crucial benefit. According to some consequentialists, thebenefit in question is that of having true beliefs and lacking falsebeliefs (see BonJour 1985, Audi 1993, Singer 2023). According toothers, it is the benefit of having a comprehensive understanding ofreality. According to others, it is a benefit that is not narrowlyepistemic, e.g., living a good life, or being an effective agent (seeGibbard 2008), or spreading one’s gene pool (see Lycan 1988).Finally, the constitutivist may say that a particular cognitive statecounts as a kind of success if it is the constitutive aim of somefeature of our lives to achieve that state (see Korsgaard 2009 for adefense of constitutivism concerning norms of rationality). Forinstance, the constitutivist might say that knowledge is a kind ofcognitive success by virtue of being the constitutive aim of belief,or that understanding is a kind of cognitive success by virtue ofbeing the constitutive aim of reasoning, or that practical wisdom is akind of cognitive success by virtue of being the constitutive aim ofall human activity. Of course, there are philosophers who count as“constitutivists” by virtue of thinking, say, thatknowledge is the constitutive aim of belief, or that the generation ofknowledge is the constitutive aim of assertion (see Kelp and Simion2021)—but these same philosophers are not thereby committed tothe constitutivism described here, since they are not committed tothis explanation of whatmakes knowledge a kind of cognitivesuccess.

Of course, it’s possible that one of the three answers mentionedabove is correct for some kinds of success, while another of the threeanswers is correct for other kinds of success. Consider, for instance,the difference between the kind of success involved in having a statethat is fitting (for instance, holding a beliefknowledgeably), and the kind of success involved in having astate that is valuable (for instance, holding a belief the holding ofwhich isbeneficial). Perhaps the constitutivist can explainthe former kind of success better than the consequentialist can, butthe consequentialist can explain the latter kind of success betterthan the constitutivist can. Of course, if and when the demands ofthese different kinds of success conflict, the agent will face thequestion of how to proceed. Much recent work in epistemology hasattempted to adjudicate that question, or to interrogate theassumption of possible conflict that gives rise to it (see, forinstance, Marušić 2015, McCormick 2015, and Rinard 2017aand 2019b).

These different ways of understanding cognitive success each give riseto a different understanding of the range of ways in which cognitivesuccess can be obstructed, and so a different understanding of therange in which agents may be harmed, and sometimes even wronged, bysuch obstructions. For instance, on the contractualist view, epistemicharms may be built into the terms of the “contract”. Thatis to say, such harms may be done not merely by the specific ways inwhich we interpret or implement our practice of epistemic appraisal,but rather in the fundamental features of that practice itself. Forinstance, a practice that grants the status of knowledge to a beliefformed on the basis of clearly conceptualized sense perception, butnot to a belief formed on the basis of a less clearly conceptualizedsense of a personal need, is a practice that systematically discreditsbeliefs formed by exercises of empathy, relative to beliefs formed inother ordinary ways.^[13]

1.6 Epistemic Harms and Epistemic Wrongs

Obstructing an agent’s cognitive success constitutes anepistemic harm. Wrongly obstructing an agent’s cognitive successconstitutes an epistemic wrong. In a situation in which falsetestimony would be an epistemic harm, dishonest testimony would be anepistemic wrong. But the range of epistemic harms and epistemic wrongscan be much broader than those involving falsehood and deception.Insinuation, inattention, and indoctrination can all constituteepistemic harms or epistemic wrongs: each one can obstruct, andsometimes wrongly obstruct, an agent’s cognitive success. Forinstance, I can mislead you into drawing false conclusions, even ifwhat I say is true: for instance, when I say “the victims werekilled by an immigrant”, even if what I say is literally true,it can mislead my hearer into thinking that the killer’s beingan immigrant was in some way explanatorily relevant to her crime. (SeeGardiner 2022 for a discussion of such cases.) Alternatively, I canharm you, and perhaps even wrong you, by getting you to think poorlyof your own capacity to grasp a subject by not paying attention towhat you think or say. And finally, I can harm you, and perhaps evenwrong you, by indoctrinating you in a view so strongly that you losethe ability to consider alternative views.

The epistemic harms and wrongs that we’ve just mentioned occurfrequently in the course of daily life, and they are typicallyconstituted by some particular act that we perform (e.g., lendinggreater credence to the word of a man over that of a woman, or usingrhetorical devices to insinuate things that one doesn’t know tobe true). But some of these harms and wrongs are constituted not byany particular act, but rather by the procedures that give rise tothose acts: for instance, when a research program in the life sciencesimplicitly assumes an ideologically-driven conception of human nature(see Longino 1990 and Anderson 2004 for fascinating case studies). Andsometimes, the harms and wrongs might even be built into our practiceof epistemic appraisal—perhaps even a tendency that is somehowconstitutive of that very practice. Suppose, for instance, that it isconstitutive of our practice of epistemic appraisal to count someoneas knowing a fact only if they possess concepts adequate toconceptualize that fact. Whatever may be said in favor of ourpractice’s having such a feature, one of its effects is clear:those individuals who are cognitively most sensitive to facts forwhich adequate conceptual resources have not yet been devised (e.g.,someone living long before Freud who is sensitive to facts aboutrepression, or someone living in the nineteenth century who issensitive to facts about sexual harassment) will find that thedeliverances of their unique cognitive sensitivities are not countedas knowledge. And so, these same individuals will not be granted thesame authority or credibility as other individuals, even when thoselatter are less cognitively sensitive to the range of facts inquestion. Recent work in feminist epistemology has helped us to gainan appreciation of just how widespread this phenomenon is, and of itsvarieties (see the seminal discussion of epistemic injustice in M.Fricker 2007, and the development of that account in Dotson 2014).

2. What is Knowledge?

Knowledge is among the many kinds of cognitive success thatepistemology is interested in understanding. Because it has attractedvastly more attention in recent epistemology than any other variety ofcognitive success, we devote the present section to considering it insome detail. But the English word “knowledge” lumpstogether various states that are distinguished in other languages: forinstance, the verb “to know” can be translated into Frencheither as “connaitre” or as“savoir”, and the noun “knowledge”can be translated into Latin as either “cognitio”or as “scientia”. Exactly how to individuate thevarious kinds of cognitive success is not something that can bedetermined solely by appeal to the lexicon of any particular naturallanguage. The present section provides a brief survey of some of thekinds of cognitive success that are indicated by the use of“knowledge” in English, but this is not intended to signalthat these kinds of cognitive success are all species of some commongenus. Neither, however, is it intended to signal that these kinds ofcognitive success are not all species of some common genus: at leastsome philosophers have taken there to be a genus, awareness, of whichthe various kinds of knowledge are all species, and with respect towhich these various kinds may all be explained (see Silva 2019 for adefense of “awareness first” epistemology).

2.1 Knowing Individuals

Even if you know many facts about Napoleon, it doesn’t followthat you know Napoleon. You couldn’t ever have known Napoleon,since he died long before you were born. But, despite not having everknown Napoleon, you could still know a great many facts aboutNapoleon—perhaps you know even more facts about Napoleon thandid those who knew him most intimately. This shows that knowing aperson is not the same as knowing a great many facts about the person:the latter is not sufficient for the former. And perhaps the former isnot even sufficient for the latter, since I might know my next doorneighbor, and yet not realize that he is an undercover agent, and thatalmost everything he tells me about himself is false.

Knowing a person is a matter of being acquainted with that person, andacquaintance involves some kind of perceptual relation to the person.What kind of perceptual relation? Clearly, not just any perceptualrelation will do: I see and hear thousands of people while walkingaround a bustling city, but it doesn’t follow that I amacquainted with any of them. Must acquaintance involve an ability todistinguish that individual from others? It depends upon what such anability amounts to. I am acquainted with my next door neighbor, eventhough, in some sense, I cannot distinguish him from his identicaltwin: if they were together I couldn’t tell who was who.

Just as we can be acquainted with a person, so too can we beacquainted with a city, a species of bird, a planet, 1960s jazz music,Watson and Crick’s research, transphobia, and so on. Ifit’s not clear precisely what acquaintance demands in the caseof people, it’s even less clear what it demands across all ofthese various cases. If there is a genus of cognitive successexpressed by the verb “to know” with a direct object, orby the French “connaitre”, we have not yet understood thatgenus.

2.2 Knowing How

In his groundbreaking book,The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryleargued that knowing how to do something must be different from knowingany set of facts. No matter how many facts you might know aboutswimming, say, it doesn’t follow from your knowledge of thesefacts that you know how to swim. And, of course, you might know how toswim even without knowing very many facts about swimming. For Ryle,knowing how is fundamentally different fromknowingthat.

This Rylean distinction betweenknowing how andknowingthat has been prominently challenged, beginning in 1975 with thepublication of Carl Ginet’sKnowledge, Perception, andMemory. Ginet argued that knowing how to do something was simplyknowing that a particular act was a way to do that thing. Thischallenge was extended and systematized by Boër and Lycan (1975),who argued thatknowing who,knowing which,knowing why,knowing where,knowing when,andknowing how—all of the varieties ofknowingwh-, as they called it—were all just different forms ofknowing that. To know who isF, for instance, was simply toknow that a particular person isF. To know whyp is simply toknow that a particular thing is the reasonwhyp. And to know how toF was simply toknow that a particular act is a way toF. This viewwas elaborated in considerable detail by Stanley and Williamson 2001,and then challenged or refined by many subsequent writers (see, forinstance, the essays in Bengson and Moffett 2011, and also Pavese 2015and 2017).

2.3 Knowing Facts

Whenever a knower (S) knows some fact (p), severalconditions must obtain. A proposition thatS doesn’teven believe cannot be, or express, a fact thatS knows.Therefore, knowledge requires belief.^[14] False propositions cannot be, or express, facts, and so cannot beknown. Therefore, knowledge requires truth. Finally,S’s being correct in believing thatp mightmerely be a matter of luck. For example, if Hal believes he has afatal illness, not because he was told so by his doctor, but solelybecause as a hypochondriac he can’t help believing it, and itturns out that in fact he has a fatal illness, Hal’s being rightabout this is merely accidental: a matter of luck (bad luck, in this case).^[15] Therefore, knowledge requires a third element, one that excludes theaforementioned luck, and so that involvesS’s beliefbeing, in some sense,justifiably orappropriatelyheld. If we take these three conditions on knowledge to be not merelynecessary but also sufficient, then:S knows thatpif and only ifp is true andS justifiably believesthatp. According to this account, the threeconditions—truth, belief, and justification—areindividually necessary and jointly sufficient for knowledge of facts.^[16]

Recall that the justification condition is introduced to ensure thatS’s belief is not true merely because of luck. But whatmust justification be, if it can ensure that? It may be thought thatS’s belief thatp is true not merely becauseof luck when it is reasonable or rational, fromS’s ownpoint of view, to takep to be true. Or it may be thoughtthatS’s belief is true not merely because of luck ifthat belief has a high objective probability of truth, that is, if itis formed or sustained by reliable cognitive processes or faculties.But, as we will see in the next section, if justification isunderstood in either of these ways, it cannot ensure against luck.

It turns out, as Edmund Gettier showed, that there are cases of JTBthat are not cases of knowledge. JTB, therefore, is notsufficient for knowledge. Cases like that—known asGettier cases^[17]—arise because neither the possession of adequate evidence, nor originationin reliable faculties, nor the conjunction of these conditions, issufficient for ensuring that a belief is not true merely because ofluck. Consider the well-known case of barn-facades: Henry drivesthrough a rural area in which what appear to be barns are, with theexception of just one, mere barn facades. From the road Henry isdriving on, these facades look exactly like real barns. Henry happensto be looking at the one and only real barn in the area and believesthat there’s a barn over there. So Henry’s belief is true,and furthermore his visual experience makes it reasonable, from hispoint of view, to hold that belief. Finally, his belief originates ina reliable cognitive process: normal vision of ordinary, recognizableobjects in good lighting. Yet Henry’s belief is true in thiscase merely because of luck: had Henry noticed one of the barn-facadesinstead, his belief would have been false. There is, therefore, broadagreement among epistemologists that Henry’s belief does notqualify as knowledge.^[18]

To state conditions that are jointly sufficient for knowledge, whatfurther element must be added to JTB? This is known as theGettierproblem. Some philosophers attempt to solve the Gettier problemby adding a fourth condition to the three conditions mentioned above,while others attempt to solve it by either replacing or refining thejustification condition. How we understand the contrast betweenreplacing the justification condition and refining it depends, ofcourse, on how we understand the justification condition itself, whichis the topic of the next section.

Some philosophers reject the Gettier problem altogether: they rejectthe aspiration to understand knowledge by trying to add to JTB. Somesuch philosophers try to explain knowledge in terms of virtues: theysay that to know a fact is for the truth of one’s belief tomanifest epistemic virtue (see Zagzebski 1996 and Sosa 1997). Othersuch philosophers try to explain knowledge by identifying it as agenus of many familiar species: they say that knowledge is the mostgeneral factive mental state operator (see Williamson 2002). And stillother such philosophers try to explain knowledge by explaining itsdistinctive role in some other activity. According to some, to know afact is for that fact to be a reason for which one can do or think something.^[19] According to others, to know a fact is to be entitled to assert thatfact (see Unger 1975, Williamson 2002, DeRose 2002 for defenses ofthis view; see Brown 2008b and 2010 for dissent). According to stillothers, to know a fact is to be entitled to use it as a premise inreasoning (see Hawthorne & Stanley 2008 for defense of this view;see Neta 2009 and Brown 2008a for dissent). And according to stillothers, to know a fact is to be a trustworthy informant concerningwhether that fact obtains. Finally, there are those who think that thequestion “what is it to know a fact?” is misconceived: theverb “to know” does not do the work of denoting anything,but does a different kind of work altogether, for instance, the workof assuring one’s listeners concerning some fact or other, orthe work of indicating to one’s audience that a particularperson is a trustworthy informant concerning some matter (see Lawlor2013 for an articulation of the assurance view, and Craig 1990 for anarticulation of the trustworthy informant view).

3. What is Justification?

Whatever precisely is involved in knowing a fact, it is widelyrecognized thatsome of our cognitive successes fall short ofknowledge: an agent may, for example, conduct herself in a way that isintellectually unimpeachable, and yet still end up thereby believing afalse proposition. Julia has every reason to believe that her birthdayis July 15: it says so on her birth certificate and all of her medicalrecords, and everyone in her family insists that it is July 15.Nonetheless, if all of this evidence is the result of sometime-keeping mistake made at the time of her birth, her belief abouther birthday could be false, despite being so thoroughly justified.Debates concerning the nature of justification^[20] can be understood as debates concerning the nature of suchnon-knowledge-guaranteeing cognitive successes as the one that Juliaenjoys in this example.^[21]

3.1 Deontological and Non-Deontological Justification

How is the term “justification” used in ordinary language?Here is an example: Tom asked Martha a question, and Martha respondedwith a lie. Was she justified in lying? Jane thinks she was, forTom’s question was an inappropriate one, the answer to which wasnone of Tom’s business. What might Jane mean when she thinksthat Martha was justified in responding with a lie? A natural answeris this: She means that Martha wasunder no obligation torefrain from lying. Due to the inappropriateness of Tom’squestion, it wasn’t Martha’sduty to tell thetruth. This understanding of justification, commonly labeleddeontological, may be defined as follows:S isjustified in doingx if and only ifS is not obligedto refrain from doingx.^[22]

If, when we apply the word justification not to actions but tobeliefs, we mean something analogous, then the following holds:

Deontological Justification (DJ)
S is justified in believing thatp if and only ifS is not obliged to refrain from believing thatp.^[23]

What kind of obligations are relevant when we wish to assess whether abelief, rather than an action, is justified or unjustified?Whereas when we evaluate an action, we are interested in assessing theaction from either a moral or a prudential point of view, when itcomes to beliefs, what matters may be something else,^[24] e.g., the pursuit oftruth, or ofunderstanding, orofknowledge.

Exactly what, though, must we do in the pursuit of some suchdistinctively epistemic aim? According to one answer, the one favoredby evidentialists, we ought to believe in accord with our evidence.^[25] For this answer to be helpful, we need an account of what ourevidence consists of, and what it means to believe in accord with it.Other philosophers might deny this evidentialist answer, but still saythat the pursuit of the distinctively epistemic aims entails that weought to follow the correct epistemic norms. If this answer is goingto help us figure out what obligations the distinctively epistemicaims impose on us, we need to be given an account of what the correctepistemic norms are.^[26]

The deontological understanding of the concept of justification iscommon to the way philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Moore andChisholm have thought about justification. Recently, however, twochief objections have been raised against conceiving of justificationdeontologically. First, it has been argued thatDJ presupposes that we can have a sufficiently high degree of controlover our beliefs. But beliefs—this objection alleges—areakin not to actions but rather things such as digestive processes,sneezes, or involuntary blinkings of the eye. The idea is that beliefssimply arise in or happen to us. Therefore, beliefs are not suitablefor deontological evaluation (see Alston 1985 & 1988; also, seeChrisman 2008). To this objection, some advocates of DJ have repliedthat lack of control over our beliefs is no obstacle to thinking ofjustification as a deontological status (see R. Feldman 2001a). Otheradvocates of DJ have argued that we enjoy no less control over ourbeliefs than we do over our intentional actions (see Ryan 2003; Sosa2015; Steup 2000, 2008, 2012, 2017; and Rinard 2019b).

According to the second objection toDJ, deontological justification cannot suffice for an agent to have ajustified belief. This claim is typically supported by describingcases involving either a benighted, culturally isolated society orsubjects who are cognitively deficient. Such cases involve subjectswhose cognitive limitations make it the case that they are under noobligation to refrain from believing as they do, but whose limitationsnonetheless render them incapable of forming justified beliefs (for aresponse to this objection, see Steup 1999).

Those who rejectDJ think of justification not deontologically, but rather as a propertythat a belief has when it is, in some sense, sufficiently likelyto be true.^[27] We may, then, define justification as follows:

Sufficient Likelihood Justification (SLJ)
S is justified in believing thatp if and only ifS believes thatp in a way that makes itsufficiently likely that her belief is true.

If we wish to pin down exactly what the likelihood at issue amountsto, we will have to deal with a variety of tricky issues.^[28] For now, let us just focus on the main point. Those who prefer SLJ toDJ would say that sufficient likelihood of truth and deontologicaljustification can diverge: it’s possible for a belief to bedeontologically justified without being sufficiently likely to betrue. This is just what cases involving benighted cultures orcognitively deficient subjects are designed to show (for elaborationon the non-deontological concept of justification, see Alston1988).

3.2 What Justifies Belief?

Whatmakes a belief thatp justified, when it is?Whether a belief is justified or unjustified, there is something thatmakes it so. Let’s call the things that make a beliefjustified or unjustified J-factors. Which features of a belief areJ-factors?

According to “evidentialists”, it is the believer’spossession of evidence forp. What is it, though, to possessevidence forp? Some evidentialists (though not all) wouldsay it is to be in an experience that presentsp as beingtrue. According to these evidentialists, if the coffee in your cuptastes sweet to you, then you have evidence that the coffee is sweet.If you feel a throbbing pain in your head, you have evidence that youhave a headache. If you have a memory of having had cereal forbreakfast, then you have evidence about what you had for breakfast.And when you clearly “see” or “intuit” thatthe proposition “If Jack had more than four cups of coffee, thenJack had more than three cups of coffee” is true, then you haveevidence for that proposition. On this view, evidence consists ofperceptual, introspective, memorial, and intuitional experiences, andto possess evidence is to have an experience of that kind. Soaccording to this “experientialist” version ofevidentialism, what makes you justified in believing thatpis your having an experience that representsp as being true(see Conee and Feldman 2008 and McCain 2014 for defenses of such aview). Other versions of evidentialism might identify other factors asyour evidence, but would still insist that those factors are theJ-factors.

Evidentialism is often contrasted with reliabilism, which is the viewthat a belief is justified by resulting from a reliable source, wherea source is reliable just in case it tends to result in mostly truebeliefs. Reliabilists, of course, can also grant that the experiencesmentioned in the previous paragraph can matter to the justification ofyour beliefs. However, they deny that justification isessentially a matter of having suitable experiences. Rather,they say, those experiences matter to the justification of yourbeliefs not merely by virtue of being evidence in support of thosebeliefs, but more fundamentally, by virtue of being part of thereliable source of those beliefs. Different versions of reliabilismhave been defended: some philosophers claim that what justifies abelief is that it is produced by a process that is reliable (forinstance, see Goldman 1986), others claim that what justifies a beliefis that it is responsive to grounds that reliably covary with thetruth of that belief, other claim that what justifies a belief is thatit is formed by the virtuous exercise of a capacity, and so on.

3.3 Internal vs. External

Consider a science fiction scenario concerning a human brain that isremoved from its skull, kept alive in a vat of nutrient fluid, andelectrochemically stimulated to have precisely the same total seriesof experiences that you have had. Call such a brain a“BIV”: a BIV would believe everything that you believe,and would (it is often thought) be justified in believing those thingsto precisely the same extent that you are justified in believing them.Therefore, justification is determined solely by those internalfactors that you and your envatted brain doppelganger share. This viewis what has come to be called “internalism” about justification.^[29]

Externalism is simply the denial of internalism. Externalists say thatwhat we want from justification is the kind of likelihood of truthneeded for knowledge, and the internal conditions that you share withyour BIV doppelganger do not generate such likelihood of truth. Sojustification involves external conditions.^[30]

Among those who think that justification is internal, there is nounanimity on how to understand the notion of internality—i.e.,what it is about the factors that you share with your BIV doppelgangerthat makes those factors relevant to justification. We can distinguishbetween two approaches. According to the first, justification isinternal because we enjoy a special kind of access to J-factors: theyarealways recognizable on reflection.^[31] Hence, assuming certain further premises (which will be mentionedmomentarily), justification itself is always recognizable on reflection.^[32] According to the second approach, justification is internal becauseJ-factors are always mental states (see Conee and Feldman 2001).Let’s call the formeraccessibility internalism and thelattermentalist internalism.

Evidentialism is typically associated with internalism of at least oneof these two varieties, and reliabilism with externalism.^[33] Let us see why. Evidentialism says, at a minimum, two things:

E1 What makesone justified in believingp is nothing over and above theevidence that one possesses.
E2 Whatevidence one possesses is fixed by one’s mentalstates.

E2 seems to make evidentialism a version of mentalist internalism. Ishould note, however, that the conjunction of E1 and E2 is not alwaysinternalist. Williamson (2002) defends a version of evidentialism onwhich evidence is not shared by you and your corresponding BIV.Whether evidentialism is also an instance of accessibility internalismis a more complicated issue. The conjunction of E1 and E2 by itselfimplies nothing about the accessibility of justification. Butmentalist internalists who endorse the first principle below will alsobe committed to accessibility internalism, and evidentialists who alsoendorse the second principle below will be committed to theaccessibility of justification:

Luminosity
One’s own mind is cognitively luminous: Whenever one is in aparticular mental state, one can always recognize on reflection whatmental states one is in, and in particular, one can always recognizeon reflection what evidence one possesses.^[34]

Necessity
The principles that determine what is evidence for what area priori recognizable.^[35] Relying ona priori insight, one can therefore alwaysrecognize on reflection whether, or the extent, to which a particularbody of evidence is evidence forp.^[36]

AlthoughE1 andE2 by themselves do not imply access internalism, their conjunction withLuminosity and Necessity may imply access internalism.^[37]

Next, let us consider why reliabilism is an externalist theory.Reliabilism says that the justification of one’s beliefs is afunction of the reliability of one’s belief sources such asmemorial, perceptual and introspective states and processes. Even ifthe operations of the sources are mental states, their reliability isnot itself a mental state. Therefore, reliabilists reject mentalistinternalism. Moreover, insofar as the reliability of one’sbelief sources is not itself recognizable by means of reflection, howcould reflection enable us to recognize when such justification obtains?^[38] Reliabilists who take there to be no good answer to this questionalso reject access internalism.^[39]

4. The Structure of Knowledge and Justification

Anyone who knows anything necessarily knows many things. Our knowledgeforms a body, and that body has a structure: knowing some thingsrequires knowing other things. But what is this structure?Epistemologists who think that knowledge involves justification tendto regard the structure of our knowledge as deriving from thestructure of our justifications. We will, therefore, focus on thelatter.

4.1 Foundationalism

According to foundationalism, our justified beliefs are structuredlike a building: they are divided into a foundation and asuperstructure, the latter resting upon the former. Beliefs belongingto the foundation arebasic. Beliefs belonging to thesuperstructure arenonbasic and receive justification fromthe justified beliefs in the foundation.^[40]

Before we evaluate this foundationalist account of justification, letus first try to spell it out more precisely. What is it for ajustified belief to be basic? According to one approach, what makes ajustified belief basic is that it doesn’t receive itsjustification from any other beliefs. The following definitioncaptures this thought:

Doxastic Basicality (DB)
S’s justified belief thatp is basic if andonly ifS’s belief thatp is justified withoutowing its justification to any ofS’s otherbeliefs.

Let’s consider what would, according to DB, qualify as anexample of a basic belief. Suppose you notice (for whatever reason)someone’s hat, and you also notice that that hat looks blue toyou. So you believe

(B)It appearsto me that that hat is blue.

Unless something very strange is going on, (B) is an example of ajustified belief. DB tells us that (B) is basic if and only if it doesnot owe its justification to any other beliefs of yours. So if (B) isindeed basic, there might be some item or other to which (B) owes itsjustification, but that item would not be another belief of yours. Wecall this kind of basicality “doxastic” because it makesbasicality a function of how your doxastic system (your belief system)is structured.

Let us turn to the question of where the justification that attachesto(B) might come from, if we think of basicality as defined byDB. Note that DB merely tells us how (B) isnot justified. Itsays nothing abouthow (B) is justified. DB, therefore, doesnot answer that question. What we need, in addition to DB, is anaccount ofwhat it is that justifies a belief such as (B).According to one strand of foundationalist thought, (B) is justifiedbecause it can’t be false, doubted, or corrected by others. Onsuch a view, (B) is justified because (B) carries with it anepistemic privilege such as infallibility, indubitability, orincorrigibility (for a discussion of various kinds of epistemicprivilege, see Alston 1971 [1989]).

Note that(B) is a belief about how the hatappears to you. So (B) is abelief about a perceptual experience of yours. According to theversion of foundationalism just considered, a subject’s basicbeliefs are introspective beliefs about the subject’s own mentalstates, of which perceptual experiences make up one subset. Othermental states about which a subject can have basic beliefs may includesuch things as having a headache, being tired, feeling pleasure, orhaving a desire for a cup of coffee. Beliefs about external objectscannot qualify as basic, according to this kind of foundationalism,for it is impossible for such beliefs to enjoy the kind of epistemicprivilege necessary for being basic.

According to a different version of foundationalism,(B) is justified by some further mental state of yours, but not by afurtherbelief of yours. Rather, (B) is justified by the veryperceptual experience that (B) itself is about: thehat’s looking blue to you. Let “(E)” represent thatexperience. According to this alternative proposal, (B) and (E) aredistinct mental states. The idea is that what justifies (B) is (E).Since (E) is an experience, not a belief of yours, (B) can, accordingtoDB, still be basic.

Let’s call the two versions of foundationalism we havedistinguishedprivilege foundationalism andexperientialfoundationalism. Privilege foundationalism is generally thoughtto restrict basic beliefs so that beliefs about contingent,mind-independent facts cannot be basic, since beliefs about such factsare generally thought to lack the privilege that attends ourintrospective beliefs about our own present mental states, or ourbeliefs abouta priori necessities. Experientialfoundationalism is not restrictive in the same way. Suppose instead of(B), you believe

(H) That hatis blue.

Unlike(B), (H) is about the hat itself, and not the way the hat appears to you.Such a belief is not one about which we are infallible or otherwiseepistemically privileged. Privilege foundationalism would, therefore,classify (H) as nonbasic. It is, however, quite plausible to thinkthat (E) justifies not only (B) but (H) as well. If (E) is indeed whatjustifies (H), and (H) does not receive any additional justificationfrom any further beliefs of yours, then (H) qualifies, according toDB, as basic.

Experiential Foundationalism, then, combines two crucial ideas: (i)when a justified belief is basic, its justification is not owed to anyother belief; (ii) what in fact justifies basic beliefs areexperiences.

Under ordinary circumstances, perceptual beliefs such as(H) are not based on anyfurther beliefs about one’s ownperceptual experiences. It is not clear, therefore, how privilegefoundationalism can account for the justification of ordinaryperceptual beliefs like (H).^[41] Experiential foundationalism, on the other hand, has no trouble atall explaining how ordinary perceptual beliefs are justified: they arejustified by the perceptual experiences that give rise to them. Thiscould be viewed as a reason for preferring experientialfoundationalism to privilege foundationalism.

DB articulates one conception of basicality. Here’s an alternativeconception:

Epistemic Basicality (EB)
S’s justified belief thatp is basic if andonly ifS’s justification for believing thatpdoes not depend on any justificationS possesses forbelieving a further proposition,q.^[42]

EB makes it more difficult for a belief to be basic thanDB does. To see why, we turn to the chief question (let’s call itthe “J-question”) that advocates of experientialfoundationalism face:

The J-Question
Why are perceptual experiences a source of justification?

One way of answering the J-question is as follows: perceptualexperiences are a source of justification only when, and only because,we have justification for taking them to be reliable.^[43] Note that your having justification for believing thatpdoesn’t entail that you actually believep. Thus, yourhaving justification for attributing reliability to your perceptualexperiences doesn’t entail that you actually believe them to bereliable.

What might give us justification for thinking that our perceptualexperiences are reliable? That’s a complicated issue. For ourpresent purposes, let’s consider the following answer: Weremember that they have served us well in the past. We are supposing,then, that justification for attributing reliability to yourperceptual experiences consists of memories of perceptual success. Onthis view, a perceptual experience (E) justifies a perceptual beliefonly when, and only because, you have suitable track-record memoriesthat give you justification for considering (E) reliable. (Of course,this raises the question why those memories give us justification, butthere are many different approaches to this question, as we’llsee more fully below.)

If this view is correct, then it is clear howDB andEB differ. Your having justification for(H) depends on your having justification for believing something else inaddition to (H), namely that your visual experiences are reliable. Asa result (H) is not basic in the sense defined by EB. However, (H)might still be basic in the sense defined by DB. If you are justifiedin believing (H) and your justification is owed solely to (E) and (M),neither of which includes any beliefs, then your belief isdoxastically—though not epistemically—basic.

We’ve considered one possible answer to theJ-question, and considered howEB andDB differ if that answer is correct. But there are other possibleanswers to the J-question. Another answer is that perceptualexperiences are a source of justification when, and because, they areof types that reliably produce true beliefs.^[44] Another answer is that perceptual experiences are a source ofjustification when, and because, they are of types that reliablyindicate the truth of their content. Yet another answer is thatperceptual experiences are a source of justification when, andbecause, they have a certain phenomenology: that of presenting theircontent as true.^[45]

To conclude this section, let us briefly consider how justification issupposed to be transferred from basic to nonbasic beliefs. There aretwo options: the justificatory relation between basic and nonbasicbeliefs could be deductive or non-deductive. If we take the relationto be deductive, each of one’s nonbasic beliefs would have to besuch that it can be deduced from one’s basic beliefs. But if weconsider a random selection of typical beliefs we hold, it is not easyto see from which basic beliefs they could be deduced.Foundationalists, therefore, typically conceive of the link betweenthe foundation and the superstructure in non-deductive terms. Theywould say that, for a given set of basic beliefs, B, to justify anonbasic belief, B*, it isn’t necessary that B entails B*.Rather, it is sufficient that, the inference from B to B* is arational one—however such rationality is to be understood.^[46]

4.2 Coherentism

Foundationalism says that knowledge and justification are structuredlike a building, consisting of a superstructure that rests upon afoundation. According to coherentism, this metaphor gets things wrong.Knowledge and justification are structured like aweb wherethe strength of any given area depends on the strength of thesurrounding areas. Coherentists, then, deny that there are any basicbeliefs. As we saw in the previous section, there are two differentways of conceiving of basicality. Consequently, there are twocorresponding ways of construing coherentism: as the denial ofdoxastic basicality or as the denial of epistemic basicality. Considerfirst coherentism as the denial of doxastic basicality:

Doxastic Coherentism
Every justified belief receives its justification from other beliefsin its epistemic neighborhood.

Let us apply this thought to the hat example we considered inSection 3.1. Suppose again you notice someone’s hat and believe

(H) That hat isblue.

Let’s agree that (H) is justified. According to coherentism, (H)receives its justification from other beliefs in the epistemicvicinity of (H). They constitute your evidence or your reasons fortaking (H) to be true. Which beliefs might make up this set ofjustification-conferring neighborhood beliefs?

We will consider two approaches to answering this question. The firstis known asinference to the best explanation. Suchinferences generate what is calledexplanatory coherence (seechapter 7 in Harman 1986). According to this approach, we must supposeyou form a belief about the way the hat appears to you in yourperceptual experiences, and a second belief to the effect that yourperceptual experience, the hat’s looking blue to you, is bestexplained by the hypothesis that (H) is true. So the relevant set ofbeliefs is the following:

(1) I amhaving a visual experience (E): the hat looks blue to me.
(2) My having(E) is best explained by assuming that (H) is true.

There are of course alternative explanations of why you have (E).Perhaps you are hallucinating that the hat is blue. Perhaps an evildemon makes the hat look blue to you when in fact it is red. Perhapsyou are the sort of person to whom hats always look blue. Anexplanatory coherentist would say that, compared with these, thehat’s actual blueness is a superior explanation. That’swhy you are justified in believing(H). Note that an explanatory coherentist can also explain thelack of justification. Suppose you remember that you justtook a hallucinatory drug that makes things look blue to you. Thatwould prevent you from being justified in believing (H). Theexplanatory coherentist can account for this by pointing out that, inthe case we are considering now, the truth of (H) would not be thebest explanation of why you are having experience (E).Rather, your having taken the hallucinatory drug would explain yourhaving (E) at least as well as the hypothesis (H) would explain it.That’s why, according to the explanatory coherentist, in thisvariation of our original case you are not justified in believing(H).

One challenge for explanatory coherentists is to explain what makesone explanation better than another. Let’s use the evil demonhypothesis to illustrate this challenge. What we need is anexplanation of why you are having (E). According to the evil demonhypothesis, you are having (E) because the evil demon is causing youto have (E), in order to trick you. The explanatory coherentist wouldsay that, if the bulk of our beliefs about the mind-independent worldare justified, then this “evil demon” hypothesis is a badexplanation of why you are having (E). But why is it bad? What we needto answer this question is a general and principled account of whatmakes one explanation better than another. Suppose we appeal to thefact that you are notjustified in believing in the existenceof evil demons. The general idea would be this: If there are twocompeting explanations, E1 and E2, and E1 consists of or includes aproposition that you are not justified in believing whereas E2 doesnot, then E2 is better than E1. The problem with this idea is that itputs the cart before the horse. Explanatory coherentism is supposed tohelp us understand what it is for beliefs to be justified. Itdoesn’t do that if it accounts for the difference between betterand worse explanations by making use of the difference betweenjustified and unjustified belief. If explanatory coherentism were toproceed in this way, it would be a circular, and thus uninformative,account of justification. So the challenge that explanatorycoherentism must meet is to give an account, without using the conceptof justification, of what makes one explanation better thananother.

Let us move on to the second way in which the coherentist approachmight be carried out. Recall what a subject’s justification forbelievingp is all about: possessing a link between thebelief thatp andp’s truth. Suppose thesubject knows that the origin of her belief thatp isreliable. So she knows that beliefs coming from this source tend to betrue. Such knowledge would give her an excellent link between thebelief and its truth. So we might say that the neighborhood beliefswhich confer justification on(H) are the following:

(1) I am having avisual experience (E): the hat looks blue to me.
(3)Experienceslike (E) are reliable.

Call coherentism of this kindreliability coherentism. If youbelieve (1) and (3), you are in possession of a good reason forthinking that the hat is indeed blue. So you are in possession of agood reason for thinking that the belief in question,(H), is true. That’s why, according to reliability coherentism, youare justified in believing (H).

Like explanatory coherentism, this view faces a circularity problem.If(H) receives its justification in part because you also believe (3), (3)itself must be justified. But where would your justification for (3)come from? One answer would be: from your memory of perceptual successin the past. You remember that your visual experiences have had a goodtrack record. They have rarely led you astray. The problem is that youcan’t justifiably attribute a good track record to yourperceptual faculties without using your perceptual faculties. So ifreliability coherentism is going to work, it would have to belegitimate to use a faculty for the very purpose of establishing thereliability of that faculty itself. But it is not clear that this is legitimate.^[47]

We have seen that explanatory coherentism and reliability coherentismeach face its own distinctive circularity problem. Since both areversions ofdoxastic coherentism, they both face a furtherdifficulty: Do people, under normal circumstances, really form beliefslike (1), (2), and (3)? It would seem they do not. It could beobjected, therefore, that these two versions of coherentism makeexcessive intellectual demands of ordinary subjects who are unlikelyto have the background beliefs that, according to these versions ofcoherentism, are needed for justification. This objection could beavoided by stripping coherentism of its doxastic element. The resultwould be the following version of coherentism, which results fromrejectingEB (the epistemic conception of basicality):

Dependence Coherentism
Whenever one is justified in believing a propositionp₁, one’s justification for believingp₁ depends on justification one has for believingsome further propositions,p₁,p₂, …p_n.

An explanatory coherentist might say that, for you to be justified inbelieving(H), it’s not necessary that you actuallybelieve(1) and(2). However, it is necessary that you havejustification forbelieving (1) and (2). It is your having justification for (1) and (2)that gives you justification for believing (H). A reliabilitycoherentist might make an analogous point. She might say that, to bejustified in believing (H), you need not believe anything about thereliability of your belief’s origin. You must, however, havejustification for believing that your belief’s origin isreliable; that is, you must have justification for (1) and(3). Both versions of dependence coherentism, then, rest on thesupposition that it is possible to have justification for aproposition without actually believing that proposition.

Dependence coherentism is a significant departure from the waycoherentism has typically been construed by its advocates. Accordingto the typical construal of coherentism, a belief is justified, onlyif the subject has certain furtherbeliefs that constitutereasons for the given belief. Dependence coherentism rejects this.According to it, justification need not come in the form of beliefs.It can come in the form of introspective and memorial experience, solong as such experience gives a subject justification for beliefsabout either reliability or explanatory coherence. In fact, dependencecoherentism allows for the possibility that a belief is justified, notby receivingany of its justification from other beliefs, butsolely by suitable perceptual experiences and memory experience.^[48]

Next, let us examine some of the reasons provided in the debate overfoundationalism and coherentism.

4.3 Why Foundationalism?

The main argument for foundationalism is called theregressargument. It’s an argument from elimination. With regard toevery justified belief, B₁, the question arises of whereB₁’s justification comes from. If B₁ isnot basic, it would have to come from another belief, B₂.But B₂ can justify B₁ only if B₂ isjustified itself. If B₂ is basic, the justificatory chainwould end with B₂. But if B₂ is not basic, weneed a further belief, B₃. If B₃ is not basic,we need a fourth belief, and so forth. Unless the ensuing regressterminates in a basic belief, we get two possibilities: the regresswill eitherloop back to B₁ or continueadinfinitum. According to the regress argument, both of thesepossibilities are unacceptable. Therefore, if there are justifiedbeliefs, there must be basic beliefs.^[49]

This argument suffers from various weaknesses. First, we may wonderwhether the alternatives to foundationalism are really unacceptable.In the recent literature on this subject, we actually find anelaborate defense of the position that infinitism is the correctsolution to the regress problem.^[50] Nor should circularity be dismissed too quickly. The issue is notwhether a simple argument of the formp thereforep can justify the belief thatp. Of course itcannot. Rather, the issue is ultimately whether, in the attempt toshow that trust in our faculties is reasonable, we may make use of theinput our faculties deliver. Whether such circularity is asunacceptable as ap-therefore-p inferenceis an open question. Moreover, the avoidance of circularity does notcome cheap. Experiential foundationalists claim that perception is asource of justification. Hence they need to answer theJ-question:Why is perception a source of justification? As we sawabove, if we wish to answer this question without committing ourselvesto the kind of circularity dependence coherentism involves, we mustchoose between externalism and an appeal to brute necessity.

The second weakness of the regress argument is that its conclusionmerely says this: If there are justified beliefs, there must bejustified beliefs that do not receive their justification from otherbeliefs. Its conclusion does not say that, if there are justifiedbeliefs, there must be beliefs whose justification is independent ofany justification for further beliefs. So the regress argument, if itwere sound, would merely show that there must bedoxasticbasicality. Dependence coherentism, however, allows for doxasticbasicality. So the regress argument merely defends experientialfoundationalism against doxastic coherentism. It does not tell us whywe should prefer experiential foundationalism to dependencecoherentism.

Experiential foundationalism can be supported by citing cases like theblue hat example. Such examples make it plausible to assume thatperceptual experiences are a source of justification. But they do notarbitrate between dependence coherentism and experientialfoundationalism, since both of those views appeal to perceptualexperiences to explain why perceptual beliefs are justified.

Finally, foundationalism can be supported by advancing objections tocoherentism. One prominent objection is that coherentism somehow failsto ensure that a justified belief system is in contact with reality.This objection derives its force from the fact that fiction can beperfectly coherent. Why think, therefore, that a belief system’scoherence is a reason for thinking that the beliefs in that systemtend to be true? Coherentists could respond to this objection bysaying that, if a belief system contains beliefs such as “Manyof my beliefs have their origin in perceptual experiences” and“My perceptual experiences are reliable”, it is reasonablefor the subject to think that her belief system brings her intocontact with external reality. This looks like an effective responseto the no-contact-with-reality objection. Moreover, it is not easy tosee why foundationalism itself should be better positioned thancoherentism when contact with reality is the issue. What is meant by“ensuring” contact with reality? If foundationalistsexpect alogical guarantee of such contact, basic beliefsmust be infallible. That would make contact with reality a ratherexpensive commodity. Given its price, foundationalists might want tolower their expectations. According to an alternative construal, weexpect merely thelikelihood of contact with reality. But ifcoherentists account for the epistemic value of perception in any way,then they can meet that expectation as well as foundationalistscan.

Since coherentism can be construed in different ways, it is unlikelythat there is one single objection that succeeds in refuting allpossible versions of coherentism. Doxastic coherentism, however, seemsparticularly vulnerable to criticism coming from the foundationalistcamp. One of these we considered already: It would seem that doxasticcoherentism makes excessive intellectual demands on believers. Whendealing with the mundane tasks of everyday life, we don’tnormally bother to form beliefs about the explanatory coherence of ourbeliefs or the reliability of our belief sources. According to asecond objection, doxastic coherentism fails by being insensitive tothe epistemic relevance of perceptual experiences. Foundationalistscould argue as follows. Suppose Kim is observing a chameleon thatrapidly changes its colors. A moment ago it was blue, now it’spurple. Kim still believes it’s blue. Her belief is nowunjustified because she believes the chameleon is blue even though itlooks purple to her. Then the chameleon changes its colorback to blue. Now Kim’s belief that the chameleon is blue isjustified again because the chameleon once againlooks blueto her. The point would be that what’s responsible for thechanging justificatory status of Kim’s belief is solely the waythe chameleon looks to her. Since doxastic coherentism does notattribute epistemic relevance to perceptual experiences by themselves,it cannot explain why Kim’s belief is first justified, thenunjustified, and eventually justified again.^[51]

4.4 Why Coherentism?

Coherentism is typically defended by attacking foundationalism as aviable alternative. To argue against privilege foundationalism,coherentists pick an epistemic privilege they think is essential tofoundationalism, and then argue that either no beliefs, or too fewbeliefs, enjoy such a privilege. Against experiential foundationalism,different objections have been advanced. One line of criticism is thatperceptual experiences don’t have propositional content.Therefore, the relation between a perceptual belief and the perceptualexperience that gives rise to it can only be causal. But it is notclear that this is correct. When you see the hat and it looks blue toyou, doesn’t your visual experience—its looking blue toyou—have the propositional contentthat the hat isblue? If it does, then why not allow that your perceptualexperience can play a justificatory role?^[52]

Another line of thought is that, if perceptual experiences havepropositional content, they cannot stop the justificatory regressbecause they would then be in need of justification themselves. That,however, is a strange thought. In our actual epistemic practice, wenever demand of others to justify the way things appear to them intheir perceptual experiences. Indeed, such a demand would seem absurd.Suppose I ask you: “Why do you think that the hat isblue?” You answer: “Because it looks blue to me”.There are sensible further questions I might ask at that point. Forinstance, I might ask: “Why do you think its looking blue to yougives you a reason for believing it is blue?” Or I might ask:“Couldn’t you be mistaken in believing it looks blue toyou?” But now suppose I ask you: “Why do you suppose theperceptual experience in which the hat looks blue to you isjustified?” In response to that question, you should accuse meof misusing the word “justification”. I might as well askyou what it is that justifies your headache when you have one, or whatjustifies the itch in your nose when you have one. The latterquestions, you should reply, would be as absurd as my request forstating a justifying reason for your perceptual experience.^[53]

Experiential foundationalism, then, is not easily dislodged. On whatgrounds could coherentists object to it? To raise problems forexperiential foundationalism, coherentists could press theJ-question: Why are perceptual experiences a source of justification? Iffoundationalists answer the J-question appealing to evidence thatwarrants the attribution of reliability to perceptual experiences,experiential foundationalism morphs into dependence coherentism. Toavoid this outcome, foundationalists would have to give an alternativeanswer. One way of doing this would be to adopt the epistemicconception of basicality, and view it as a matter of brute necessitythat perception is a source of justification. It remains to be seenwhether such a view is sustainable.

5. Sources of Knowledge and Justification

Beliefs arise in people for a wide variety of causes. Among them, wemust list psychological factors such as desires, emotional needs,prejudice, and biases of various kinds. Obviously, when beliefsoriginate in sources like these, they don’t qualify as knowledgeeven if true. For true beliefs to count as knowledge, it is necessarythat they originate in sources we have good reason to considerreliable. These are perception, introspection, memory, reason, andtestimony. Let us briefly consider each of these.

5.1 Perception

Our perceptual faculties include at least our five senses: sight,touch, hearing, smelling, and tasting. We must distinguish between anexperience that can be classified asperceiving thatp (for example, seeing that there is coffee in the cup andtasting that it is sweet), which entails thatp is true, anda perceptual experience in which it seems to us as thoughp,but wherep might be false. Let us refer to this latter kindof experience asperceptual seemings. The reason for makingthis distinction lies in the fact that perceptual experience isfallible. The world is not always as it appears to us in ourperceptual experiences. We need, therefore, a way of referring toperceptual experiences in whichp seems to be the case thatallows for the possibility ofp being false. That’s therole assigned to perceptual seemings. So some perceptual seemings thatp are cases of perceiving thatp, others are not.When it looks to you as though there is a cup of coffee on the tableand in fact there is, the two states coincide. If, however, youhallucinate that there is a cup on the table, you have a perceptualseeming thatp without perceiving thatp.

One family of epistemological issues about perception arises when weconcern ourselves with the psychological nature of the perceptualprocesses through which we acquire knowledge of external objects.According todirect realism, we can acquire such knowledgebecause we can directly perceive such objects. For example, when yousee a tomato on the table,what you perceive is the tomatoitself. According toindirect realism, we acquire knowledgeof external objects by virtue of perceiving something else, namelyappearances or sense-data. An indirect realist would say that, whenyou see and thus know that there is a tomato on the table, what youreally see is not the tomato itself but a tomato-like sense-datum orsome such entity.

Direct and indirect realists hold different views about the structureof perceptual knowledge. Indirect realists would say that we acquireperceptual knowledge of external objects by virtue of perceiving sensedata that represent external objects. Sense data enjoy a specialstatus: we know directly what they are like. So indirect realiststhink that, when perceptual knowledge is foundational, it is knowledgeof sense data and other mental states. Knowledge of external objectsis indirect: derived from our knowledge of sense data. The basic ideais that we have indirect knowledge of the external world because wecan have foundational knowledge of our own mind. Direct realists, incontrast, say that perceptual experiences can give you direct,foundational knowledge of external objects.^[54]

We take our perceptual faculties to be reliable. But how can we knowthat they are reliable? For externalists, this might not be much of achallenge. If the use of reliable faculties is sufficient forknowledge, and if by using reliable faculties we acquire the beliefthat our faculties are reliable, then we come to know that ourfaculties are reliable. But even externalists might wonder how theycan, via argument,show that our perceptual faculties arereliable. The problem is this. It would seem the only way of acquiringknowledge about the reliability of our perceptual faculties is throughmemory, through remembering whether they served us well in the past.But should I trust my memory, and should I think that the episodes ofperceptual success that I seem to recall were in fact episodes ofperceptual success? If I am entitled to answer these questions with“yes”, then I need to have, to begin with, reason to viewmy memory and my perceptual experiences as reliable. It would seem,therefore, that there is no non-circular way of arguing for thereliability of one’s perceptual faculties.^[55]

5.2 Introspection

Introspection is the capacity to inspect the present contents ofone’s own mind. Through introspection, one knows what mentalstates one is currently in: whether one is thirsty, tired, excited, ordepressed. Compared with perception, introspection appears to have aspecial status. It is easy to see how a perceptual seeming can gowrong: what looks like a cup of coffee on the table might be just be aclever hologram that’s visually indistinguishable from an actualcup of coffee. But can it introspectively seem to me that I have aheadache when in fact I do not? It is not easy to see how it could be.Thus introspection is widely thought to enjoy a special kind ofimmunity to error. But what does this amount to?

First, it could be argued that, when it comes to introspection, thereis no difference between appearance and reality; therefore,introspective seemings infallibly constitute their own success.Alternatively, one could view introspection as a source of certainty.Here the idea is that an introspective experience ofpeliminates any possible reason for doubt as to whetherp istrue. Finally, one could attempt to explain the specialness ofintrospection by examining the way we respond to first-person reports:typically, we attribute a special authority to such reports. Accordingto this approach, introspection is incorrigible: its deliverancescannot be corrected by any other source.

However we construe the special kind of immunity to error thatintrospection enjoys, such immunity is not enjoyed by perception. Somefoundationalists have therefore thought that the foundations of ourempirical knowledge can be furnished by introspection of our ownperceptual experiences, rather than perception of mind-independentthings around us.

Is it really true, however, that, compared with perception,introspection is in some way special? Critics of foundationalism haveargued that introspection is not infallible. Might one not confuse anunpleasant itch for a pain? Might I not think that the shape before meappears circular to me when in fact it appears slightly elliptical tome? If it is indeed possible for introspection to mislead, then it isnot clear in what sense introspection can constitute its own success,provide certainty, or even incorrigibility. Yet it also isn’teasy to see either how, if one clearly and distinctly feels athrobbing headache, one could be mistaken about that. Introspection,then, turns out to be a mysterious faculty. On the one hand, it doesnot seem to be an infallible faculty; on the other hand, it is noteasy to see how error is possible in many specific cases of introspection.^[56]

The definition of introspection as the capacity to know the presentcontents of one’s own mind leaves open the question of howsimilar the different exercises of this capacity may be from oneanother. According to some epistemologists, when we exercise thiscapacity with respect to our sensations, we are doing something verydifferent from what we do when we exercise this capacity with respectto our own conscious beliefs, intentions, or other rationallyevaluable states of mind: our exercises of this capacity with respectto our own conscious, rationally evaluable states of mind is, theyclaim, partlyconstitutive of our being in those very states.In support of this claim, they point out that we sometimes addressquestions of the form “do you believe thatp?” byconsidering whether it is true thatp, and reporting ourbelief concerningp not by inspecting our mind, but rather bymaking up our mind (see Moran 2001 and Boyle 2009 for defenses of thisview; see Gertler 2011 for objections to the view).

5.3 Memory

Memory is the capacity to retain knowledge acquired in the past. Whatone remembers, though, need not be a past event. It may be a presentfact, such as one’s telephone number, or a future event, such asthe date of the next elections. Memory is, of course, fallible. Notevery experience as of remembering thatp is an instance ofcorrectly remembering thatp. We should distinguish,therefore, between remembering thatp (which entails thetruth ofp) andseeming to remember thatp(which does not entail the truth ofp).

What makes memorial seemings a source of justification? Is it anecessary truth that, if one has a memorial seeming thatp,one has thereby prima facie justification forp? Or is memorya source of justification only if, as coherentists might say, one hasreason to think that one’s memory is reliable? Or is memory asource of justification only if, as externalists would say, it is infact reliable? Also, how can we respond to skepticism about knowledgeof the past? Memorial seemings of the past do not guarantee that thepast is what we take it to be. We think that we are older than fiveminutes, but it is logically possible that the world sprang intoexistence just five minutes ago, complete with our dispositions tohave memorial seemings of a more distant past and items such asapparent fossils that suggest a past going back millions of years. Ourseeming to remember that the world is older than a mere five minutesdoes not entail, therefore, that it really is. Why, then, should wethink that memory is a source of knowledge about the past?^[57]

5.4 Reason

Some beliefs are (thought to be) justified independently ofexperience. Justification of that kind is said to beapriori. A standard way of defininga priorijustification is as follows:

A Priori Justification
S is justifieda priori in believing thatpif and only ifS’s justification for believing thatp does not depend on any experience.

When they are knowledgeably held, beliefs justified in this way areinstances ofa priori knowledge.^[58]

What exactly counts as experience? If by “experience” wemean justperceptual experiences, justification deriving fromintrospective or memorial experiences would count asapriori. For example, I could then knowa priori thatI’m thirsty, or what I ate for breakfast this morning. While theterm “a priori” is sometimes used in this way,the strict use of the term restrictsa priori justificationto justification derivedsolely from the use of reason.According to this usage, the word “experiences” in thedefinition above includes perceptual, introspective, and memorialexperiences alike. On this narrower understanding, paragons of what Ican knowa priori are conceptual truths (such as “Allbachelors are unmarried”), and truths of mathematics, geometryand logic.

Justification and knowledge that is nota priori is called“a posteriori” or “empirical”. Forexample, in the narrow sense of “a priori”,whether I’m thirsty or not is something I know empirically (onthe basis of introspective experiences), whereas I knowapriori that 12 divided by 3 is 4.

Several important issues arise abouta priori knowledge.First, does it exist at all? Skeptics about apriority deny itsexistence. They don’t mean to say that we have no knowledge ofmathematics, geometry, logic, and conceptual truths. Rather, what theyclaim is that all such knowledge is empirical.^[59]

Second, ifa priori justification is possible, exactly whatdoes it involve? Whatmakes a belief such as “Allbachelors are unmarried” justified? Is it an unmediated grasp ofthe truth of this proposition? Or does it consist of grasping that theproposition isnecessarily true? Or is it the purelyintellectual state of “seeing” (with the “eye ofreason”) or “intuiting” that this proposition istrue (or necessarily true)? (see Bengson 2015 and Chudnoff 2013 forsophisticated defenses of this view). Or is it, as externalists wouldsuggest, the reliability of the cognitive process by which we come torecognize the truth of such a proposition?

Third, ifa priori knowledge exists, what is its extent?Empiricists have argued thata priori knowledge islimited to the realm of theanalytic, consisting ofpropositions true solely by virtue of our concepts, and so do notconvey any information about the world. Propositions that conveygenuine information about world are calledsynthetic.apriori knowledge of synthetic propositions, empiricists wouldsay, is not possible.Rationalists deny this. They mightappeal to a proposition such as “If a ball is green all over,then it doesn’t have black spots” as an example of aproposition that is both synthetic and yet knowablea priori(see Ichikawa and Jarvis 2009 and Malmgren 2011 for a discussion ofthe content of sucha priori justified judgments; forliterature ona priori knowledge, see BonJour 1998, BonJourin BonJour & Devitt 2005 [2013]; Boghossian and Peacocke 2000;Casullo 2003; Jenkins 2008, 2014; and Devitt 2014).

5.5 Testimony

Testimony differs from the sources we considered above because itisn’t distinguished by having its own cognitive faculty. Rather,to acquire knowledge ofp through testimony is to come toknow thatp on the basis of someone’s saying thatp. “Saying thatp” must be understoodbroadly, as including ordinary utterances in daily life, postings bybloggers on their blogs, articles by journalists, delivery ofinformation on television, radio, tapes, books, and other media. So,when you ask the person next to you what time it is, and she tellsyou, and you thereby come to know what time it is, that’s anexample of coming to know something on the basis of testimony. Andwhen you learn by reading theWashington Post that theterrorist attack in Sharm el-Sheikh of 22 July 2005 killed at least 88people, that, too, is an example of acquiring knowledge on the basisof testimony.

The epistemological puzzle testimony raises is this: Why is testimonya source of knowledge? An externalist might say that testimony is asource of knowledge if, and because, it comes from a reliable source.But here, even more so than in the case of our faculties, internalistswill not find that answer satisfactory. Suppose you hear someonesaying “p”. Suppose further that person is infact utterly reliable with regard to the question of whetherp is the case or not. Finally, suppose you have no cluewhatever as to that person’s reliability. Wouldn’t it beplausible to conclude that, since that person’s reliability isunknown to you, that person’s saying “p”does not put you in a position to know thatp? But if thereliability of a testimonial source is not sufficient for making it asource of knowledge, what else is needed? Thomas Reid suggested that,by our very nature, we accept testimonial sources as reliable and tendto attribute credibility to them unless we encounter special contraryreasons. But that’s merely a statement of the attitude we infact take toward testimony. What is it that makes that attitudereasonable? It could be argued that, in one’s own personalexperiences with testimonial sources, one has accumulated a long trackrecord that can be taken as a sign of reliability. However, when wethink of the sheer breadth of the knowledge we derive from testimony,one wonders whether one’s personal experiences constitute anevidence base rich enough to justify the attribution of reliability tothe totality of the testimonial sources one tends to trust (see E.Fricker 1994 and M. Fricker 2007 for more on this issue). Analternative to the track record approach would be to declare it anecessary truth that trust in testimonial sources is at least primafacie justified. While this view has been prominently defended, itrequires an explanation of what makes such trust necessarily primafacie justified. Such explanations have proven to be controversial.^[60]

6. The Limits of Cognitive Success

6.1 General Skepticism and Selective Skepticism

Much of modern epistemology aims to address one or another kind ofskepticism. Skepticism is a challenge to our pre-philosophicalconception of ourselves as cognitively successful beings. Suchchallenges come in many varieties. One way in which these varietiesdiffer concerns the different kinds of cognitive success that theytarget: skepticism can challenge our claims toknow, or ourclaims tobelieve justifiably, or our claims to havejustification for believing, or our claims to have anygood reasons for belief whatsoever. But another way in whichthese varieties differ is in whether the skepticism in question isfully general—targeting the possibility of enjoying any instanceof the relevant cognitive success—or isselective—targeting the possibility of enjoying the relevantcognitive success concerning a particular subject matter (e.g., thepast, the minds of others, the world beyond our own consciousness) orconcerning beliefs formed by a particular method (e.g., perception,memory, reasoning, etc.). General skepticism and selective skepticismpose very different sorts of challenges, and use very different kindsof arguments. General skepticism is motivated by reasoning from someapparently conflicting features of the kind of cognitive success inquestion. For instance, a general skeptic might claim thatjustification requires a regress of justifiers, but then argue thatthis regress of justifiers cannot be contained in any finitemind—and thus, the skeptic might conclude, no finite being canbe justified in believing anything. Alternatively a general skepticmight claim that knowledge requires certainty, and that nobody can becertain of something unless there is nothing of which she could beeven more certain—thus, the skeptic might conclude, we can knowvirtually nothing (see Unger 1975).

Selective skepticism, in contrast, is typically motivated by appeal toone or another skeptical hypothesis. A skeptical hypothesis is ahypothesis according to which the facts that you claim to know(whether these facts concern the past, or the mind of others, or themind-independent world, or what have you) may, for all you can tell,be radically different from how they appear to you to be. Thus, askeptical hypothesis is a hypothesis that distinguishes between theway things appear to you, on the one hand, and the way they reallyare, on the other; and this distinction is deployed in such a way asto pose a challenge to your cognitive success concerning the latter.Here are some famous examples of skeptical hypotheses:

All the other humans around me are automata who simply act exactlyas if they have thoughts and feelings.
The whole universe was created no more than 5 minutes ago, repletewith fake memories and other misleading evidence concerning a distantpast.
I’m lying in my bed dreaming everything that I’m awareof right now.
I’m a mere brain-in-a-vat (a BIV, for short) beingelectrochemically stimulated to have all these states of mind thatI’m now having.

Skeptics can make use of such hypotheses in constructing variousarguments that challenge our pre-philosophical picture of ourselves ascognitively successful. Consider, for instance, the BIV hypothesis,and some ways in which this hypothesis can be employed in a skepticalargument.

Here is one way of doing so. According to the BIV hypothesis, theexperiences you would have as a BIV and the experiences you have as anormal person are perfectly alike, indistinguishable, so to speak,“from the inside”. Thus, although it appears to you as ifyou are a normally embodied human being, everything would appearexactly the same way to a BIV. Thus, the way things appear to youcannot provide you with knowledge that you are not a BIV. But if theway things appear to you cannot provide you with such knowledge, thennothing can give you such knowledge, and so you cannot know thatyou’re not a BIV. Of course, you already know this much: if youare a BIV, then you don’t have any hands. If you don’tknow that you’re not a BIV, then you don’t know thatyou’re not in a situation in which you don’t have anyhands. But if you don’t know that you’re not in asituation in which you don’t have any hands, then youdon’t know that you’re not handless. And to not know thatyou’re not handless is simply to not know that you have hands.We can summarize this skeptical argument as follows:

The BIV-Knowledge Closure Argument (BKCA)

(C1) I don’t know that I’m not aBIV.
(C2) If I don’t know that I’m not a BIV,then I don’t know that I have hands.

Therefore:

(C3) I don’t know that I have hands.

As we have just seen, (C1) and (C2) are very plausible premises. Itwould seem, therefore, that BKCA is sound. If it is, we must concludewe don’t know we have hands. But surely that conclusioncan’t be right: if it turns out that I don’t know that Ihave hands, that must be because of something very peculiar about mycognitive relation to the issue of whether I havehands—not because of the completely anodyneconsiderations mentioned in BKCA. So we are confronted with adifficult challenge: The conclusion of the BKCA seems plainly false,but on what grounds can we reject it?^[61]

Here are some other ways of using the BIV hypothesis to generate askeptical argument.

The BIV-Justification Underdetermination Argument(BJUA)

(U1) The way things appear to me could be equally well explainedby the BIV hypothesis as by my ordinary beliefs that things appear tome the way they do because I perceive mind-independent objects.
(U2) If the way things appear to me could be equally wellexplained by either of two hypotheses, then I am not justified inbelieving one of those hypotheses rather than the other.

Therefore:

(U3) I am not justified in believing that I perceivemind-independent objects.

The BIV-Knowledge Defeasibility Argument (BKDA)

(D1) If I know that I have hands, then I know that any evidenceindicating that I don’t have hands is misleading evidence.
(D2) If I know that some evidence is misleading, then I know thatI should disregard that evidence.

Therefore:

(D3) If I know that I have hands, then I know that I shoulddisregard any evidence to the contrary.
(D4) I do not know that I should disregard any evidence to thecontrary.

Therefore:

(D5) I do not know that I have hands.

The BIV-Epistemic Possibility Argument (BEPA)

(P1) It’s at leastpossible that I’m aBIV.
(P2) If it’s possible that I’m a BIV, then it’spossible that I don’t have hands.
(P3) If it’s possible that I don’t have hands, then Idon’t know that I have hands.

Therefore:

(P4) I don’t know that I have hands.

Obviously, this list of skeptical arguments could be extended byvarying either (a) the skeptical hypothesis employed, or (b) the kindof cognitive success being challenged, or (c) the epistemologicalprinciples that link the hypothesis in (a) and the challenge in (b).Some of the resulting skeptical arguments are more plausible thanothers, and some are historically more prominent than others, butthere isn’t space for a comprehensive survey. Here, we willreview some of the more influential replies to BKCA, BJUA, BKDA, andBEPA.

6.2 Responses to the Closure Argument

Next, we will examine various responses to theBKCA argument. According to the first, we can see that(C2) is false if we distinguish between relevant and irrelevantalternatives. An alternative to a propositionp is anyproposition that is incompatible withp. Your having handsand your being a BIV are alternatives: if the former is true, thelatter is false, andvice versa. According to the thoughtthat motivates the second premise of the BIV argument, you know thatyou have hands only if you can discriminate between your actuallyhaving hands and the alternative of being a (handless) BIV. But, byhypothesis, you can’t discriminate between these. That’swhy you don’t know that you have hands. In response to suchreasoning, a relevant alternatives theorist would say that yourinability to discriminate between these two is not an obstacle to yourknowing that you have hands, and that’s because your being a BIVisnot arelevant alternative to your having hands.What would be a relevant alternative? This, for example: your armsending in stumps rather than hands, or your having hooks instead ofhands, or your having prosthetic hands. But these alternativesdon’t prevent you from knowing that you have hands—notbecause they are irrelevant, but rather because you can discriminatebetween these alternatives and your having hands. The relevantalternative theorist holds, therefore, that you do know that you havehands: you know it because you can discriminate it from relevantalternatives, like your having stumps rather than hands.

Thus, according to Relevant Alternatives theorists, you know that youhave hands even though you don’t know that you are not a BIV.There are two chief problems for this approach. The first is thatdenouncing the BIV alternative as irrelevant isad hoc unlessit is supplemented with a principled account of what makes onealternative relevant and another irrelevant. The second is thatpremise 2 is highly plausible. To deny it is to allow that thefollowing conjunction can be true:

Abominable Conjunction
I know that I have hands but I do not know that I am not a (handless)BIV.

Many epistemologists would agree that this conjunction is indeedabominable because it blatantly violates the basic and extremelyplausible intuition that you can’t know you have hands withoutknowing that you are not a BIV.^[62]

Next, let us consider a response to BKCA according to which it’snot the second but the first premise that must be rejected. G. E.Moore has pointed out that an argument succeeds only to the extentthat its premises are more plausible than the conclusion. So if weencounter an argument whose conclusion we find much more implausiblethan the denial of the premises, then we can turn the argument on itshead. According to this approach, we can respond to the BIV argumentas follows:

Counter BIV

(~C3) I know that I have hands.
(C2) If I don’t know that I’m not a BIV, then Idon’t know that I have hands.

Therefore:

(~C1) I know that I am not a BIV.

Unless we are skeptics or opponents of closure, we would have toconcede that this argument is sound. It is valid, and its premises aretrue. Yet few philosophers would agree that Counter BIV amounts to asatisfying response to the BIV argument. It fails to explainhow one can know that one is not a BIV. The observation thatthe premises of the BIV argument are less plausible than the denial ofits conclusion doesn’t help us understand how such knowledge ispossible. That’s why the Moorean response, unsupplemented withan account of how one can know that one is not a BIV, is widelythought to be an unsuccessful rebuttal of BKCA.^[63]

We have looked at two responses to BKCA. The relevant alternativesresponse implausibly denies the second premise. The Moorean responsedenies the first premise without explaining how we could possibly havethe knowledge that the first premise claims we don’t have.Another prominent response, contextualism, avoids both of theseobjections. According to the contextualist, the precise contributionthat the verb “to know” makes to the truth-conditions ofthe sentences in which it occurs varies from one context to another:in contexts in which the BIV hypothesis is under discussion, an agentcounts as “knowing” a fact only if she can satisfy someextremely high (typically unachievable) epistemic feat, and this iswhy (1) is true. But in contexts in which the BIV hypothesis is notunder discussion, an agent can count as “knowing” a facteven if her epistemic position vis-à-vis that fact is much moremodest, and this is why (3), taken in isolation, appears false.

The contextualist literature has grown vastly over the past twodecades: different contextualists have different accounts of howfeatures of context affect the meaning of some occurrence of the verb“to know”, and each proposal has encountered specificchallenges concerning the semantic mechanisms that it posits, and theextent to which it explains the whole range of facts about whichepistemic claims are plausible under which conditions.^[64]

6.3 Responses to the Underdetermination Argument

Both the contextualist and the Moorean responses toBKCA, as discussed in the previous section, leave out one important detail.Both say that one can know that one isn’t a BIV (thoughcontextualists grant this point only for the sense of“know” operational in low-standards contexts), but neitherview explainshow one can know such a thing. If, byhypothesis, a BIV has all the same states of mind that Ihave—including all the same perceptual experiences—thenhow can I be justified in believing that I’m not a BIV? And if Ican’t be justified in believing that I’m not a BIV, thenhow can I know that I’m not?

Of course, the question about how I can be justified in believing thatI’m not a BIV is not especially hard for externalists to answer.From the point of view of an externalist, the fact that you and theBIV have the very same states of mind need not be at all relevant tothe issue of whether you’re justified in believing thatyou’re not a BIV, since such justification isn’t fullydetermined by those mental states anyway.

The philosophers who have had to do considerable work to answer thequestion how I can be justified in believing that I’m not a BIVhave typically done this work not directly in reply to BKCA, butrather in reply to BJUA.

What might justify your belief that you’re not a BIV? Accordingto some philosophers, you are justified in believing that you’renot a BIV because, for instance, you know perfectly well that currenttechnology doesn’t enable anyone to create a BIV. The proponentof the BIV hypothesis might regard this answer as no better than theMoorean response to BKCA: if you are allowed to appeal to (what youregard as your) knowledge of current technology to justify your beliefthat you’re not a BIV, then why can’t the Moorean equallywell rely on his knowledge that he has hands to justify his beliefthat he’s not a BIV? Philosophers who accept this objection, butwho don’t want to ground your justification for believing thatyou’re not a BIV in purely externalistic factors, may insteadclaim that your belief is justified by the fact that your own beliefsabout the external world provide a better explanation of your senseexperiences than does the BIV hypothesis (see Russell 1912 and Vogel1990 for influential defenses of this argument against skepticism, andsee Neta 2004 for a rebuttal).

6.4 Responses to the Defeasibility Argument

The most influential reply toBKDA is to say that, when I acquire evidence that I don’t havehands, such evidence makes me cease to know that I have hands. On thisview, when I acquire such evidence, the argument above is sound. Butprior to my acquiring such evidence, (4) is false, and so the argumentabove is not sound. Thus, the truth of (4), and consequently thesoundness of this argument, depends on whether or not I have evidencethat I don’t have hands. If I do have such evidence, then theargument is sound, but of course it has no general skepticalimplications: all it shows that I can’t know some fact wheneverI have evidence that the fact doesn’t obtain (versions of thisview are defended by Harman 1973 and Ginet 1980).

Plausible as this reply has seemed to most philosophers, it has beeneffectively challenged by Lasonen-Aarnio (2014b). Her argument isthis: presumably, it’s possible to havemore thanenough evidence to know some fact. But if it’s possible tohave more than enough evidence to know some fact, it follows that onemight still know that fact even if one acquires some slight evidenceagainst it. And yet, it would be wrong to leave one’s confidenceentirely unaffected by the slight evidence that one acquires againstthat fact: though the evidence might be too slight to destroyone’s knowledge, it cannot be too slight to diminish one’sconfidence even slightly. So long as one could continue to know a factwhile rationally diminishing one’s confidence in it in responseto new evidence, the most popular reply to the defeasibility argumentfails.

Other replies to the defeasibility argument include the denial ofpremise (2),^[65] the denial of (4) (McDowell 1982, Kern 2006 [2017]), and the claimthat the context-sensitivity of “knows” means that (4) istrue only relative to contexts in which the possibility of futuredefeaters is relevant (see Neta 2002). But neither of these replieshas yet received widespread assent.

6.5 Responses to the Epistemic Possibility Argument

The most common reply toBEPA is either to deny premise (1), or to deny that we are justified inbelieving that premise (1) is true. Most writers would deny premise(1), and would do so on whatever grounds they have for thinking that Ican know that I’m not a BIV: knowing that something is not thecase excludes that thing’s being epistemically possible for you.^[66]

But a couple of influential writers—most notably RogersAlbritton and Thompson Clarke (see Albritton 2011 and Clarke1972)—do not claim that premise (1) is false. Rather, they denythat we are justified in believing that premise (1) is true. Accordingto these writers, what normally justifies us in believing thatsomething or other is epistemically possible is that we can conceiveofdiscovering that it is true. For instance, what justifiesme in believing, say, that it’s possible that Donald Trump hasresigned is thatI can clearly conceive of discovering thatDonald Trump has resigned. But if I attempt to conceive of discoveringthat I’m a BIV, it’s not clear that I can succeed in thisattempt. I may conceive of coming upon some evidence that I’m aBIV—but, insofar as this evidence tells in favor of thehypothesis that I’m a BIV, doesn’t it also undermine itsown credibility? In such a case, is there anything at all that wouldcount as “my evidence”? (see Neta 2019 for anelaboration of this point). Without being able to answer this questionin the affirmative, it’s not clear that I can conceive ofanything that would amount to discovering that I’m a BIV. Ofcourse, from the fact that I cannot conceive of anything that wouldamount to discovering that I’m a BIV, it doesn’t followthat I’m not a BIV—and so it doesn’t even followthat it’s not possible that I’m a BIV. But, whether or notitis possible that I’m a BIV, I can’t bejustified in thinking that it is. And that’s to say that Ican’t be justified in accepting premise (1) of BEPA.

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Epistemology

1. The Varieties of Cognitive Success

1.1 What Kinds of Things Enjoy Cognitive Success?

1.2 Demands and Values

1.3 Substantive and Structural

1.4. What Explains What?

1.5 What Makes It Success?

1.6 Epistemic Harms and Epistemic Wrongs

2. What is Knowledge?

2.1 Knowing Individuals

2.2 Knowing How

2.3 Knowing Facts

3. What is Justification?

3.1 Deontological and Non-Deontological Justification

3.2 What Justifies Belief?

3.3 Internal vs. External

4. The Structure of Knowledge and Justification

4.1 Foundationalism

4.2 Coherentism

4.3 Why Foundationalism?

4.4 Why Coherentism?

5. Sources of Knowledge and Justification

5.1 Perception

5.2 Introspection

5.3 Memory

5.4 Reason

5.5 Testimony

6. The Limits of Cognitive Success

6.1 General Skepticism and Selective Skepticism

6.2 Responses to the Closure Argument

6.3 Responses to the Underdetermination Argument

6.4 Responses to the Defeasibility Argument

6.5 Responses to the Epistemic Possibility Argument

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