In this incisive study one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by the concept of belief. Is scientific knowledge properly conceived as being embodied at its best, in a passive feeling of belief or in an active policy of acceptance? Should a jury's verdict declare what its meembers involuntarily accept? And should statements and assertions be presumed to express what their authors believe or what they accept? Does such a distinction between belief and acceptance help to resolve the paradoxes of self-deception and akrasia? Must people be taken to believe everything entailed by what they believe, or merely to accept everything entailed by what they accept? Through a systematic examination of these problems, the author sheds new light on issues of crucial importance in comtemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This book is intended for scholars and students in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science; also artificial intelligence. Suitable for students at se

Reason and Ethics defends the theoretical claim that all values are subjective and the practical claim that human affairs can be conducted fruitfully in full awareness of this. Joel Marks goes beyond his previous work defending moral skepticism to question the existence of all objective values. This leads him to suggest a novel answer to the Companions in Guilt argument that the denial of morality would mean relinquishing rationality as well. Marks disarms the argument by conceding the irreality of both morality and logic, but is still able to rescue rationality while dispensing with morality on pragmatic grounds. He then offers a positive account of how life may be lived productively without recourse to attributions and assertions of right and wrong, good and bad, and even truth and falsity. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Reason and Ethics will be of interest to scholars and students working in metaethics as well as to the generally intellectually curious.

Herbert Simon's renowned theory of bounded rationality is principally interested in cognitive constraints and environmental factors and influences which prevent people from thinking or behaving according to formal rationality. Simon's theory has been expanded in numerous directions and taken up by various disciplines with an interest in how humans think and behave. This includes philosophy, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, economics, political science, sociology, management, and organization studies. The Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality draws together an international team of leading experts to survey the recent literature and the latest developments in these related fields. The chapters feature entries on key behavioural phenomena, including reasoning, judgement, decision making, uncertainty, risk, heuristics and biases, and fast and frugal heuristics. The text also examines current ideas such as fast and slow thinking, nudge, ecological rationality, evolutionary psychology, embodied cognition, and neurophilosophy. Overall, the volume serves to provide the most complete state-of-the-art collection on bounded rationality available. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of economics, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, political sciences, and philosophy.

In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (2019), Jeffrey Friedman presented a sweeping reinterpretation of modern politics and government as technocratic, even in many of its democratic dimensions. Building on a new definition of technocracy as governance aimed at solving social and economic problems, Friedman showed that the epistemic demands that such governance places on political elites and ordinary people alike may be overwhelming if technocrats fail to attend to the ideational heterogeneity of the human beings whose control is the object of technocratic power. Yet a recognition of ideational heterogeneity considerably complicates the task of predicting behavior, which is essential to technocratic control-as Friedman demonstrated with pathbreaking critiques of the homogenizing strategies of neoclassical economics, positivist social science, behavioral economics, and populist democratic politics. In Technocracy and the Epistemology of Human Behavior, thirteen political theorists, including Friedman himself, debate the implications of Power Without Knowledge for social science, modern governance, the politics of expertise, post-structuralism, anarchism, and democratic theory; and Friedman responds to his critics with an expansive defense of his vision of contemporary politics and his political epistemology of ideationally diverse human beings. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Review.

This book asks whether there any limits to the sorts of religious considerations that can be raised in public debates, and if there are, by whom they are to be identified. Its starting point is the work of Richard Rorty, whose pragmatic pluralism leads him to argue for a politically motivated anticlericalism rather than an epistemologically driven atheism. Rather than defend Rorty's position directly, Gascoigne argues for an epistemological stance he calls 'Pragmatist Fideism'. The starting point for this exercise in what Rorty calls 'Cultural Politics' is an acknowledgement that one must appeal to both secularists and those with religious commitments. In recent years 'reformed' epistemologists have aimed to establish a parity of epistemic esteem between religious and perceptual beliefs by exploiting an analogy in respect of their mutual vulnerability to sceptical challenges. Through an examination of this analogy, and in light of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, this book argues that understood correctly the 'parity' argument in fact lends epistemological support to the argument that religious considerations should not be raised in public debate. The political price paid-paying the price of politics-is worth it: the religious thinker is provided with a good reason for maintaining that their practices and beliefs are not undermined by other forms of religious life.

In Centering Epistemic Injustice: Epistemic Labor, Willful Ignorance, and Knowing Across Hermeneutical Divides, Kamili Posey asks what it means for accounts of epistemic injustice to take seriously the lives and perspectives of socially marginalized knowers. The first part of this book takes up the predominant account of testimonial injustice offered by Miranda Fricker, arguing that testimonial injustice is not merely about the epistemic harms perpetrated by dominant knowers against marginalized knowers, but also about the strategies that marginalized knowers use to circumvent those harms. Such strategies expand current conceptions of epistemic injustice by centering how marginalized knowers engage and resist in hostile epistemic environments. The second part of the book examines Fricker's concept of hermeneutical injustice, rooted in hermeneutical marginalization. Thinking alongside critics of hermeneutical injustice, this book explores the relationship between dominant knowing and marginalized knowing and asks if social power-including the power to shape collective resources and ways of meaning-making-makes it impossible for dominant knowers to know and "hear well" across hermeneutical divides. Finally, the book asks whether hermeneutical divides are real divides in understanding and how dominant knowers might come to be better knowers in the pursuit of a more thoroughgoing epistemic justice.

Most contemporary philosophers (71.1%, according to a recent survey) believe that a priori knowledge is really possible. Indeed, since the late 1980s there has been a renewed and steadily growing interest in rationalism and the a priori; and gradually what George Bealer has dubbed a "rationalist renaissance" has emerged onto the contemporary philosophical scene. At the same time, however, even despite this renaissance, the core notion of "rational intuition" has not been either adequately defended or fully developed, especially as regards solving its two core problems:
(1) "how rational intuitions can sufficiently justify beliefs," and
(2) "how to explain the real possibility of rational intuitions."
Given that unstable dialectical situation, this book is an attempt to respond critically, directly, and decisively to the most important contemporary skeptical anti-rationalist attacks on intuitions and a priori knowledge in philosophy, and to defend "neo-rationalism" from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, with a special focus on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving its two core problems.

The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism offers 44 cutting-edge chapters-written specifically for this volume by an international team of distinguished researchers-that assess the past, present, and future of pragmatism. Going beyond the exposition of canonical texts and figures, the collection presents pragmatism as a living philosophical idiom that continues to devise promising theses in contemporary debates. The chapters are organized into four major parts: Pragmatism's history and figures Pragmatism and plural traditions Pragmatism's reach Pragmatism's relevance Each chapter provides up-to-date research tools for philosophers, students, and others who wish to locate pragmatist options in their contemporary research fields. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that the vitality of pragmatism lies in its ability to build upon, and transcend, the ideas and arguments of its founders. When seen in its full diversity, pragmatism emerges as one of the most successful and influential philosophical movements in Western philosophy.

This root-and-branch re-evaluation of Darwin's concept of sexual selection tackles the subject from historical, epistemological and theoretical perspectives. Contributions from a wealth of disciplines have been marshaled for this volume, with key figures in behavioural ecology, philosophy, and the history of science adding to its wide-ranging relevance. Updating the reader on the debate currently live in behavioural ecology itself on the centrality of sexual selection, and with coverage of developments in the field of animal aesthetics, the book details the current state of play, while other chapters trace the history of sexual selection from Darwin to today and inquire into the neurobiological bases for partner choices and the comparisons between the hedonic brain in human and non-human animals. Welcome space is given to the social aspects of sexual selection, particularly where Darwin drew distinctions between eager males and coy females and rationalized this as evolutionary strategy. Also explored are the current definition of sexual selection (as opposed to natural selection) and its importance in today's biological research, and the impending critique of the theory from the nascent field of animal aesthetics. As a comprehensive assessment of the current health, or otherwise, of Darwin's theory, 140 years after the publication of his Descent of Man, the book offers a uniquely rounded view that asks whether 'sexual selection' is in itself a progressive or reactionary notion, even as it explores its theoretical relevance in the technical biological study of the twenty-first century.

To what extent is neoliberalism undermining democracy and distorting the values of science? Can and should science be treated as an exemplar for a more dialogic democracy? Are universities and public intellectuals able to develop a more dialogically engaged public? What role should there be for 'experts' in a more dialogic democracy? Does information and communications technology present a potential to enhance democracy or increase the control and manipulation of knowledge and the public by corporations? This timely volume explores these pressing questions, in a dialogue based on developing and applying the recovery of the 'critical Popper', which highlights his contemporary relevance to the critique of neoliberal political economy in the age of technocapitalism. This book will be discussed in an online roundtable on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Information about the SERRC can be found here: https://social-epistemology.com/

Based on extensive research, this book is a fundamental critique of psychiatry that examines the foundations of psychiatry, refutes its basic tenets, and traces the workings of the industry through medical research and in-depth interviews.

This book engages with a range of questions about the nature of faith. The authors defend a distinctive conception of faith involving resistance to psychological, practical and epistemic challenges, from which a novel account of the psychology and epistemology of faith is developed.

The main work of Immanuel Kant in which he argues that the mind forms its own experiences. These experiences are thus only as perceiving the phenomenal world and not experiencing the world around us as it truly is. He tries to combat the critique that such a view holds and to put the use of reason to justify our experiences by showing that we never truly experience what we perceive.

Rationality: Contexts and Constraints is an interdisciplinary reappraisal of the nature of rationality. In method, it is pluralistic, drawing upon the analytic approaches of philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and more. These methods guide exploration of the intersection between traditional scholarship and cutting-edge philosophical or scientific research. In this way, the book contributes to development of a suitably revised, comprehensive understanding of rationality, one that befits the 21st century, one that is adequately informed by recent investigations of science, pathology, non-human thought, emotion, and even enigmatic Chinese texts that might previously have seemed to be expressions of irrationalism.

This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce's own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking.

Williamson explains, defends, and applies Kant's theory of emotion. Looking primarily to the Anthropology and the Metaphysics of Morals, she situates Kant's theory of affect within his theory of feeling and focuses on the importance of moral feelings and the moral evaluation of our emotions.

Human beings have always been specialists, but over the past two centuries division of labor has become deeper, ubiquitous, and much more fluid. The form it now takes brings in its wake a series of problems that are simultaneously philosophical and practical, having to do with coordinating the activities of experts in different disciplines who do not understand one another. Because these problems are unrecognized, and because we do not have solutions for them, we are on the verge of an age in which decisions that depend on understanding more than one discipline at a time will be made badly. Since so many decisions do require multidisciplinary knowledge, these philosophical problems are urgent. Some of the puzzles that have traditionally been on philosophers' agendas have to do with intellectual devices developed to handle less extreme forms of specialization. Two of these, necessity and the practical `ought', are given extended treatment in Elijah Millgram's The Great Endarkenment. In this collection of essays, both peviously published and new, Millgram pays special attention to ways a focus on cognitive function reframes familiar debates in metaethics and metaphysics. Consequences of hyperspecialization for the theory of practical rationality, for our conception of agency, and for ethics are laid out and discussed. An Afterword considers whether and how philosophers can contribute to solving the very pressing problems created by contemporary division of labor. "These always interesting, often brilliant, and contentious essays focus on the question of how we need to reason practically, if we are to flourish, given Millgram's account of our human nature and of the environments that we inhabit. The originality of his thought is matched by his clarity and his wit."-Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame

This collection of 19 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time and written by an international team of established and emerging scholars, explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Relevant virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual courage, diligence in inquiry, and the like. Relevant vices include dogmatism, need for immediate certainty, and gullibility and the like. The chapters are divided into four key sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements. And the chapters explore the most salient questions in this areas of research, including: How are individual intellectual virtues and vices affected by their social contexts? Does being in touch with other open-minded people make us more open-minded? Conversely, does connection to other dogmatic people make us more dogmatic? Can groups possess virtues and vices distinct from those of their members? For instance, could a group of dogmatic individuals operate in an open-minded way despite the vices of its members? Each chapter receives commentary from two other authors in the volume, and each original author then replies to these commentaries. Together, the authors form part of a collective conversation about how we can know about what we know. In so doing, they not only theorize but enact social virtue epistemology.

The first English monograph entirely devoted to a theoretical investigation of Gorgias' epistemological thought

This book is concerned with the conditions under which epistemic reasons provide justification for beliefs. The author draws on metaethical theories of reasons and normativity and then applies his theory to various contemporary debates in epistemology. In the first part of the book, the author outlines what he calls the dispositional architecture of epistemic reasons. The author offers and defends a dispositional account of how propositional and doxastic justification are related to one another. He then argues that the dispositional view has the resources to provide an acceptable account of the notion of the basing relation. In the second part of the book, the author examines how his theory of epistemic reasons bears on the issues involving perceptual reasons. He defends dogmatism about perceptual justification against conservatism and shows how his dispositional framework illuminates certain claims of dogmatism and its adherence to justification internalism. Finally, the author applies his dispositional framework to epistemological topics including the structure of defeat, self-knowledge, reasoning, emotions and motivational internalism. The Dispositional Architecture of Epistemic Reasons demonstrates the value of employing metaethical considerations for the justification of beliefs and propositions. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology and metaethics.

Keith Lehrer is one of the leading proponents of a coherence theory of knowledge that seeks to explain what it means to know in a characteristically human way. Central to his account are the pivotal role played by a principle of self-trust and his insistence that a sound epistemology must ultimately be ecumenical in nature, combining elements of internalism and externalism. The present book is an extensive, self-contained, up-to-date study of Lehrer's epistemological work. Covering all major aspects, it contains original contributions by some of the most distinguished specialists in the field, outgoing from the latest, significantly revised version of Lehrer's theory. All basic ideas are explained in an introductory chapter. Lehrer's extensive replies in a final chapter give unique access to his current epistemological thinking.

The topic of a priori knowledge has been central to analytic philosophy for the past two centuries. It was introduced by Kant in his seminal work Critique of Pure Reason and vigorously dismissed by Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism, resulting in an epistemological controversy that remains deeply divided to this day. Casullo's book, based on previously published and unpublished work, systematically addresses questions that have, since Kant, formed the core of the debate. One of his central claims is that the concept of a priori has not been well understood and that many of the apparent differences that underlie much of the contemporary debate are a result of these misunderstandings. Casullo's reformulation of this traditional debate is both original and persuasive, and should appeal to a wide range of philosophers who share an interest in epistemology.

This volume provides a framework for approaching and understanding mental normativity. It presents cutting-edge research on the ethics of belief as well as innovative research beyond the normativity of belief-and towards an ethics of mind. By moving beyond traditional issues of epistemology the contributors discuss the most current ideas revolving around rationality, responsibility, and normativity. The book's chapters are divided into two main parts. Part I discusses contemporary issues surrounding the normativity of belief. The essays here cover topics such as control over belief and its implication for the ethics of belief, the role of the epistemic community for the possibility of epistemic normativity, responsibility for believing, doxastic partiality in friendship, the structure and content of epistemic norms, and the norms for suspension of judgment. In Part II the focus shifts from the practical dimensions of belief to the normativity and rationality of other mental states-especially blame, passing thoughts, fantasies, decisions, and emotions. These essays illustrate how we might approach an ethics of mind by focusing not only on belief, but also more generally on debates about responsibility and rationality, as well as on normative questions concerning other mental states or attitudes. The Ethics of Belief and Beyond paves the way towards an ethics of mind by building on and contributing to recent philosophical discussions in the ethics of belief and the normativity of other mental phenomena. It will be of interest to upper-level students and researchers working in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology.

This is the first book to explore the connections and interactions between social epistemology and epistemic relativism. The essays in the volume are organized around three distinct philosophical approaches to this topic: 1) foundational questions concerning deep disagreement, the variability of epistemic norms, and the relationship between relativism and reliabilism; 2) the role of relativistic themes in feminist social epistemology; and 3) the relationship between the sociology of knowledge, philosophy of science, and social epistemology. Recent trends in social epistemology seek to rectify earlier work that conceptualized cognitive achievements primarily on the level of isolated individuals. Relativism insists that epistemic judgements or beliefs are justified or unjustified only relative to systems of standards-there is not neutral way of adjudicating between them. By bringing together these two strands of epistemology, this volume offers unique perspectives on a number of central epistemological questions. Social Epistemology and Relativism will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, feminist philosophy, and the sociology of knowledge.