10h15 Coffee

10h30 Anne Meylan (Geneva). The Ability and the Anti-Luck Condition: How They Collaborate.
ABSTRACT. Pritchard's recent account of knowledge combines two conditions: an anti-luck and an ability condition. The objective of this presentation is to consider whether Pritchard is right to opt for such an account.
Pritchard's twofold account of knowledge results from a previous conclusion according to which, in certain circumstances, both of these conditions fail to fit intuitions governing the attribution or the non-attribution of knowledge.
In the first part of this presentation, I would like to explain why I think Pritchard's move — from the conclusion that both the first and the second condition occasionally fail to fit our intuitive ascription of knowledge, to the twofold account of knowledge— is incorrect. Even if the ability condition does not tell us the whole story about knowledge, it does not seem clear to me that the anti-luck condition finds itself in an equivalently uncomfortable position.  It is not obvious that there are cases of true beliefs which satisfy the anti-luck condition but which do not constitute pieces of knowledge.
The goal of the second part of this presentation is to provide some further support for the conclusion that the ability condition is not even partially necessary for knowledge. First I will try to determinate accurately the implications of the ability condition regarding the nature of the metaphysical entity which is supposed to be additionally valuable in virtue of satisfying the ability condition. This will allow me to conclude that the metaphysical entity in question cannot be identified with knowledge, since the former does not share some of the essential features of the latter. To say it differently, the satisfaction of the ability condition is supposed to provide additional value to the state of affairs which satisfies it, but the state of affairs which satisfies it cannot be identified with knowledge. This provides us with a second reason to think that the ability condition has nothing to do with an account of knowledge.

11h45 Rene van Woudenberg (Amsterdam VU). The Nature and Conditions of Belief.
ABSTRACT. The first aim of this paper is to clarify the metaphysical nature of belief. It is argued that belief is not an action: many things that are true of actions are not true of beliefs. I consider, and criticize, Sosa's claim that belief is a performance with a goal. It is next argued that belief is not a mental event. It is finally argued that belief is a state (and a stance).
The second aim of the paper is to specify the conditions that have to be satisfied in order for a someone to have a belief. Here I argue in favor of a non-dispositionalist account.
 
13h00 Lunch and coffee (Salle Paul Lapie)
 
Afternoon: Salle des Resistants, 45 rue d'Ulm
 
14h00 Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh). Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology.
ABSTRACT. It is argued that there are two ‘master’ intuitions about knowledge--an anti-luck intuition and an ability intuition--and that these impose distinct epistemic demands. It is claimed that recognising this fact leads one towards a new proposal in the theory of knowledge--anti-luck virtue epistemology--which can avoid the problems that afflict other theories of knowledge. This proposal is motivated in contrast to two other ways of thinking about knowledge which are shown to be ultimately unsuccessful: anti-luck epistemology and virtue epistemology. Finally, a diagnosis is offered of why our concept of knowledge should have the kind of structure dictated by anti-luck virtue epistemology.

15h15 Chris Kelp (Leuven). What's the Point of "Knowledge" Anyway?
ABSTRACT. In 'Knowledge and the State of Nature' Edward Craig defends the thesis that the job of the concept of knowledge is to flag good informants. In recent years, Craig’s “good informant thesis” (GIT) has enjoyed an increasing degree of popularity among a number of epistemologists—notably John Greco, Duncan Pritchard, Miranda Fricker and Martin Kusch—who have appealed to it in order to support or motivate a variety of further epistemological claims. Surprisingly, sympathisers of GIT rarely pause to provide independent support for it and tend to refer to Craig’s pioneering work instead. Given that this is so, of course, whether or not their wider epistemological goals are achieved will depend heavily on whether or not Craig's case for GIT is itself convincing.
In this paper I aim to show, first, that Craig’s argument for GIT does not stand up to closer scrutiny and, second, that there is an alternative thesis that retains the virtues of GIT whilst being able to avoid its vices.

16h30 Coffee

16h45 Nikolaj Pedersen (Copenhagen). Entitlement and Meta-Epistemology.
ABSTRACT. This paper provides a survey of recent work on epistemic entitlement. It does so by presenting and comparing three notions of entitlement, introduced and developed by respectively Tyler Burge, Crispin Wright, and Hartry Field. Burge, Wright, and Field-style entitlement are similar in that they are all default types of warrant. A meta-epistemological comparison between the three kinds of entitlement will be offered through a discussion of what I will label the ‘Source Question’. The Source Question raises the following issue: supposing that a subject S is entitled in believing that P, what is the source of S’s entitlement? Our discussion will show that, despite being similar in the sense of being default types of warrant, Burge, Wright, and Field-style entitlement are also different in crucial respects. 

18h00 Finish
 
19h30 Conference dinner (Le Bouillon des Colonies)

THURSDAY 15 APRIL

Morning: Salle des Resistants, 45 rue d'Ulm

09h00 Claudine Tiercelin (IJN, Paris). Moral Luck and Epistemic Luck.
ABSTRACT. In 'Moral and epistemic luck' (2006), Pritchard claims  that: 1) it is a certain conception of the sceptical problem and of reflective epistemic luck that is motivating Nagel 's and Williams 's general concerns about moral luck and their wrong identification of this latter problem; 2) this also highlights the sense in which the problem of scepticism is an ethical problem, a view not so familiar to the contemporary mindset; 3) although we might wish a resolution of the skeptical problem all the more now that its ethical ramifications are made clear, we also recognize that a great number of debates have to take place in the absence of a solution to the problem of epistemological skepticism.
After presenting Pritchard's main arguments against Williams and Nagel, I shall argue that the conclusions he draws from them also suffer from some problems we can identify in his own conception of the sceptical problem and of the relationships he draws between moral and epistemic luck. Drawing on some pragmaticist intuitions, I shall offer another approach to the sceptical problem in general and another way to identify the possible links between its moral and epistemological ramifications.

10h15 Coffee

11h45 Julien Dutant (Geneva). Three Constraints for Anti-Luck Accounts: Methods, Infallibility and Atomicity.
ABSTRACT. Pritchard (2010) has argued that knowledge is virtuous and safely true belief. Both his virtue and safety conditions are in broadly modal terms, requiring that some types of error are impossible or could hardly happen. In this talk I argue for three constraints that such modal accounts must meet in order to avoid Gettier cases. (1) They should require methods-safety instead of belief-safety, (2) they should require infallibility and not just reliability, and (3) they should be atomic and not conjunctive. The simplest account that satisfies the three conditions is method infallibilism. Methods infallibilism is close both in spirit and structure to Pritchard's anti-luck virtue account, but it differs from it on each of the three counts. I will stress the differences.

13h00 Lunch and coffee (Le Salon, 45 rue d'Ulm)

Afternoon: Salle des Actes, 45 rue d'Ulm

14h00 Elke Brendel (Bonn). Safe Belief, Reliable Method or Cognitive Achievement? In Search of a Proper Analysis of ‘Knowledge’ in an Anti-Luck Epistemology.
ABSTRACT. Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck safety-based account of knowledge has recently come under attack. Some philosophers, such as Juan Comesaña, Christoph Kelp, Ram Neta and Guy Rohrbaugh have provided cases of “unsafe knowledge” as alleged counter-examples to the necessity of safety for knowledge. Some (for example Kelly Becker, Nenad Miščević, Avram Hiller and Ram Neta) have argued against the sufficiency of safety for knowledge since there seems to be cases in which the truth of a belief p is not properly connected to the subject’s evidential grounds for p, but in which p is nevertheless true in most or all (if p is a necessary truth) nearby possible worlds. In light of these objections to the safety-principle, some epistemologists have embraced virtue-oriented accounts of knowledge. They claim that it is not the nearby possibility of having gone wrong that disqualifies a true belief as knowledge, but rather that a true belief fails to count as an epistemic achievement of the epistemic subject. Even Pritchard most recently altered his safety-based account of knowledge and now endorses an account that he calls “anti-luck virtue epistemology”. In my talk, I will critically examine the central arguments against the necessity and sufficiency of safety for knowledge and try to show that they don’t provide compelling reasons to reject safety-based accounts of knowledge. I will argue that the metaphysical project of analysing the nature of knowledge is best achieved in terms of a certain externalist and reliabilist safety requirement. Considerations concerning epistemic virtues are central to other epistemic projects with regard to knowledge.

15h15 Conor McHugh (IJN, Paris). Exercising Doxastic Freedom.
ABSTRACT. Are our doxastic states free? This question appears to matter for the possibility of epistemic responsibility. But it is not clear what the criteria for doxastic freedom should be. One approach is to try to model doxastic freedom on freedom of action. I argue that the non-voluntary character of our doxastic states is a major stumbling block for such an approach. I develop and defend an alternative approach, modelling doxastic freedom on freedom of intention. This is a form of freedom that, for principled reasons, is exercised other than through voluntary control. I argue that voluntary control of intentions or of doxastic states would actually be undermining of freedom.

16h30 Coffee

16h45 Erik J Olsson (Lund). Pritchard on the Value of Knowledge.
ABSTRACT. Duncan Pritchard has written a lot on the problem of the value of knowledge recently, a problem which, he maintains, is more general than it is commonly believed to be. Most notably, he has defended a view similar to that of Jonathan Kvanvig by arguing that while knowledge does not have a distinctive value, understanding has such a value. In Pritchard’s case, the latter value is explained in terms of understanding being a cognitive achievement. Moreover, he has proposed that what we seek in inquiry is not knowledge but understanding. In this paper, I attempt to give a systematic and critical overview of Pritchard’s view on the various aspects of the value problem. In a second part, I contrast his views on these matters with my own approach as partly developed in collaboration with Alvin I. Goldman.

18h00 Finish

Organiser: Conor McHugh