I.25 In Chapter 7, our focus is beliefs formed via the testimony of others. Take as a starting point that we all have relied extensively on testimony for most of our lives, and (relatedly), by relying on testimony, we have acquired an impressive body of knowledge that we surely could not have acquired without relying on testimony. This all seems right. But it also seems right that it is inappropriate to trust others when we do not have independent positive reasons to think that the testimony we rely on is reliable. But – as we explain – when you put all these ideas together, you get a puzzle. It's a puzzle that has perplexed thinkers from Thomas Reid and David Hume to the present day. One thing is for sure: satisfactorily escaping this puzzle requires taking some sort of “stand,” and contemporary social epistemologists often distinguish themselves as reductionists and non‐reductionists in light of which stand they take. The debate between reductionists and non‐reductionists overlaps imperfectly with debates about what are called epistemic transmission principles. Chapter 7 digs in to the details of these debates and concludes with a brief overview of some additional testimony‐related themes in contemporary social epistemology concerning (i) peer disagreement, (ii) epistemic norms governing assertion, and (iii) testimonial injustice.
I.26 In Chapter 8, we return to knowledge, albeit not in a standard way. Up to Chapter 8, when we discuss knowledge, we discuss specifically propositional knowledge. But there are (at least) three very different and interesting ways in which contemporary epistemology has investigated kinds of knowledge beyond standard propositional knowledge. These concern the relationships between (i) knowing how and knowing that, (ii) knowledge and understanding, and (iii) what Ernest Sosa calls animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. The principal aim of this chapter, entitled “Kinds of Knowledge,” is to discuss and critically evaluate some of the motivations for, and criticisms of, each of these distinctions.
I.27 The focus of Chapter 9 is a long‐standing and deeply entrenched debate that concerns, in the main, epistemic justification, but also knowledge by extension (in so far as knowledge requires justification). The key divide Chapter 9 explores is between what are called epistemic internalists and epistemic externalists. To be an internalist about justification is to believe either (i) that a thinker's mental states wholly determine whether what the thinker has justification to believe (mentalism) or (ii) that that which is accessible by reflection to the thinker wholly determines what she has justification to believe (accessibilism). Externalists, by contrast, simply deny internalism under one (or both) of these descriptions. For example, according to one prominent version of epistemic externalism, what determines whether a belief is justified or not is whether the process that produced the belief was a reliable one. As we'll see in this chapter, many of the key themes that divide internalists and externalists about epistemic justification mirror themes that feature analogously in discussions about moral luck and responsibility.
I.28 In Chapter 10, we turn our focus to some puzzles that arise at the intersection of the epistemology and ethics of belief. We take, as a starting point for discussion, W.K. Clifford's famous dictum that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (1877, p. 295). Is what Clifford says true? What kinds of considerations are relevant to determining this? As we'll see, if Clifford's principle is understood as a kind of moral principle, one that tells us that there's always a decisive moral reason to believe only what you have sufficient evidence to believe, it looks like Clifford's principle faces some serious problems. If, however, the evidentialist principle is understood as a kind of purely epistemic principle, one that says that there is something epistemically defective about believing something without sufficient evidence, the principle has more plausibility. This chapter navigates a range of terrain surrounding these issues, and, more generally, delves in questions about how “ought” and “should” apply to beliefs in light of the fact that what we believe is (to some extent) outside of our direct control.
I.29 By this point in the book, the reader should have a pretty good sense of what epistemology is all about. It would be convenient to end here. But doing so would be cheating. Remember the skeptic we described in Section I.1? We simply registered that the skeptic has some pretty powerful arguments, even if the skeptical conclusion these arguments lead to seems disastrous. The time has finally come – we can put it off no longer – to lock eyes with the skeptic and see whether we can make it out with any of our knowledge intact.
I.30 There are various kinds of skeptical arguments. But one strand is the most powerful of them all: radical skeptical arguments. In Chapter 11, we – taking Descartes' engagement with radical skepticism as a starting point – sharpen the challenge and show how this closure principle (which we'll have seen crop up at various places in the book) features in the argument. We then consider three overriding anti‐skeptical strategies: (i) the Moorean strategy, (ii) the anti‐closure (sensitivity) strategy, and (iii) the explanationist strategy. These strategies are “overriding” anti‐skeptical strategies in the sense that they simply take radical skepticism’s argument at face value then attempt to meet it head‐on. Along with these overriding strategies, we also engage with what is probably the most well‐known undercutting anti‐skeptical strategy: attributor contextualism. The contextualist's line against the skeptic is a kind of “undercutting” anti‐skeptical strategy in the sense that it involves (through some creative linguistic moves) maintaining that what looked initially like a kind of paradox is in fact not a paradox at all. We conclude by investigating some less orthodox skeptical strategies: one from Jonathan Schaffer which appeals to what he calls the “debasing demon,” and one which appeals not to hypothetical or far‐off examples but, rather, to the various kinds of cognitive biases that recent empirical psychology tells us are pervasive in our thinking.
I.31 Taken together, the chapters cover a lot of ground. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The “is” in This Is Epistemology should not be read as the “is” of identity (a reading that would mean, rather arrogantly, that epistemology is all and only what we've told you about), but as the “is” of predication (which just means, much more modestly, that all of these things are examples of epistemology). To be sure, there are a lot of topics that count as serious epistemology and which we simply haven't managed to cover here in sufficient detail or at all. Accordingly, we encourage the interested reader to explore both more broadly and more deeply, and we hope that the present text offers a suitable background and guidance for doing so well.
Free Internet Resources
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu.
Notes
1 1 For a comprehensive overview of late‐twentieth‐century literature on the analysis of knowledge, see Borges et al. (2017) and, for more advanced discussion, Shope (1983). See also Dutant (2015) and Ichikawa and Steup (2017) for helpful discussion of the analysis of knowledge as a philosophical project.
2 2 “If and only if” can be abbreviated to “iff.”
3 3