Connaissance, métacognition et modes de justification

Knowledge, metacognition, and modes of justification

The aim of this project is to unravel the relations between metacognition, viewed as a set of normative dispositions used to evaluate and predict the cognitive adequacy of one’s mental states, and the various prima facie justifications or entitlements we use in fixing our beliefs and conducting our epistemic inquiries. Cognitive psychology is supposed to describe in an objective and complete way the various tools involved in knowledge acquisitions, while epistemology explains and evaluates both the means-to-end ways in which agents rationalize the situations they encounter and the general conditions of possibility of knowledge. Our aim is to reconsider such a view and to show why and how, at both cognitive and epistemological levels, some normativity is in place.

The epistemological part will provide an analysis of epistemic norms taken as constitutive principles and as goals of inquiries. Recent work (such as reliabilism and virtue epistemology) has moved away from the classical evidentialist framework and has paid more attention to the dynamical features of belief revision and to the agent-centered aspects of justification. We will provide an analysis of the various modes of justification and entitlement within an original framework, focusing on inquiry. We shall emphasize the methods of inquiry and belief justification which knowers as agents implement in the course of their epistemic evaluation, while remaining sensitive to some evidentialist requirements. Finally we will wonder whether our normative account of knowledge as such fits in a naturalistic world view and how.

The second part, using the methods of the philosophy of mind, will deal with the study of our metacognitive abilities. These have been shown to be present in non-human primates and in human children, i.e. in organisms with no concepts for mental states. Our project will study metacognition as a model for implicit forms of critical reasoning, on which to test naturalistic hypotheses on normativity. We shall develop an original “dual-theory” account of normativity, associating externalist conditions with internalized or subjective proxies, called epistemic feelings. We will provide a semantic analysis of the metacognitive content of these feelings. We will finally discuss the compatibility of this theory with a naturalistic and an empiricist account of the mind.

Upcoming events:

Workshop:
  • Justification (I). Normality & Normativity. 5-6/04/2012 (workshop page)
  • Justification (II). From Reasons to Reasoning. 03/05/2012 (workshop page)


Past Events:

Conference:
  • L’épistémologie du désaccord (The epistemology of disagreement). 23-24/06/11. (workshop page)
Workshop:
  • Epistemic norms from a naturalistic viewpoint: Interdisciplinary perspectives. 07-08/10/10. (workshop page)
Debate:
  • 14/01/11, 14h30: Pierre Jacob and Joëlle Proust. "Does metacognition necessarily involve mindreading?"

Internal seminars:
  • 03/06/11 (joint session with DividNorm): Romy Sauvayre, "Est-il raisonnable de croire contre l’évidence, en écartant les normes de l’acceptable ?"
  • CANCELLED 27/05/11: Annalisa Coliva, "A plea for moderatism"
  • 13/05/11: Pascal Engel, "Epistemic norms and epistemic values"
  • 01/04/11: Ophelia Deroy, "Knowing how we experience"
  • 11/02/11: Anne Coubray, "Is consensus an epistemic norm for religious beliefs?"
  • 28/01/11: Joe Salerno, "Epistemic modals in action"
  • 03/12/10: CANCELLED
  • 19/11/10: Kirk Michaelian, "The information effect"
  • 12/11/10: Conor McHugh, "The truth norm of belief"
Reading group:
  • 09/06/11, 14h30: Christensen, "Epistemology of disagreement: The good news"
  • 12/05/11, 14h30: Dokic, "Seeds of cognition: Noetic feelings and metacognition"
  • 28/04/11, 14h30: Cummins, Poirier, and Roth, "Epistemological strata and the rules of right reason"
  • 07/04/11, 14h30: Glüer and Wikforss, "Against belief normativity"
  • 31/03/11, 14h30: Shah and Velleman, "Doxastic deliberation"
  • 24/03/11, 14h30: Alston, "The deontological conception of epistemic justification"
  • 17/03/11, 14h30: Szabo, "Believing in things"
  • 10/03/11, 14h30: Kelly, "Epistemic rationality as instrumental rationality"
  • 03/03/11, 14h30: Engel, "Epistemic norms"
  • 10/02/11, 14h30: Gordon chapters
  • 03/02/11, 14h30: Elqayam and Evans, "Subtracting “Ought” From “Is”: Descriptivism Versus Normativism in the Study of the Human Thinking"
  • 20/01/11, 14h30: Schier, "So what if Mary didn't know?"
  • 13/01/11, 14h30: Fricker, "Second-hand knowledge"
  • 06/01/11, 14h30: Kitayama and Park, "Cultural neuroscience of the self: Understanding the social grounding of the brain"
  • 16/12/10, 14h30: Dretske, "Epistemic operators"
  • 09/12/10, 14h30: McFarlane, "Epistemic modalities and relative truth"
  • 02/12/10, 14h30: Tye, "The experience of emotion"
  • 25/11/10, 14h30: Stanley and Williamson, "Knowing how"
  • 18/11/10, 14h30: Frankish, "Partial belief and flat-out belief"
  • 04/11/10, 14h30: Reber and Unkelbach, "The epistemic status of processing fluency as a source for judgments of truth"
  • 21/10/10, 10h00: Sperber et al., "Epistemic vigilance"
  • 14/10/10, 10h00: Nagel, "Epistemic anxiety and adaptive invariantism"
Members:

Leaders:
Other faculty:
Postdoctoral research associates:
Other researchers: