Abstracts

Explicating ‘Paradox’

Sofia Bokros (Uppsala University)

Meaning-inconsistency approaches to paradox attempt to explain why specific paradoxes arise by appealing to inconsistent meanings or concepts. Whether such approaches to paradox are successful or not is still a topic of controversy. In this talk I will examine the epistemic features of the situation that a paradox puts us in, as well as the epistemic demands that this places on any proposed solution to the paradox. An upshot of this examination is that the epistemic and pragmatic motivations for finding solutions to paradoxes are often conflated. I argue that once the epistemic and pragmatic motivations are separated out, we can see that a particular virtue of the meaning-inconsistency approach is that it adequately responds to the epistemic demands of paradox.

Explicating the Concept of Epistemic Rationality

Anna-Maria A. Eder (University of Cologne)

A characterization of epistemic rationality, or epistemic justification, is typically taken to require a process of conceptual clarification, and is seen as comprising the core of a theory of (epistemic) rationality. I propose to explicate the concept of rationality. It is essential, I argue, that the normativity of rationality, and the purpose, or goal, for which the particular theory of rationality is being proposed, is taken into account when explicating the concept of rationality. My position thus amounts to an instrumentalist position about theories of epistemic rationality. Since there are different purposes, or goals, for which theories of rationality are proposed, the method of explication leaves room for different characterizations of rationality. I focus on two such (kinds of) purposes: first, the purpose of guiding the formation (or maintenance) of doxastic states and, second, the purpose of assessing (the formation or maintenance of) doxastic states. I conclude by outlining a pluralistic picture concerning rationality.

Exploring the Epistemic

Eve Kitsik (University of Cologne)

One reason for epistemologists to engineer, and not just describe, concepts is that the relevant ordinary concepts might be defective: for example, perhaps the ordinary concept of knowledge compels us to accept inconsistent principles and should therefore be replaced for philosophical purposes. I focus on another reason to engineer: the concepts that epistemologists currently work on, and work with, might not stand for, or exhaust, the most interesting and important phenomena in the vicinity. So, there is motivation to further explore the conceptual space. A promising route is exploring the epistemic goods pursued and gained by engineering concepts. I discuss three such goods: (1) joint-carvingness, (2) non-mirroring understanding gained from orderly concepts, and (3) attending to the intrinsically attention-worthy. These might not be fundamental epistemic goods, but exploring them nevertheless enriches our understanding of epistemic value. One might wonder: how do we know that our exploration has not left the “epistemic” territory—that the goods we found are indeed epistemic? I argue that this question should be addressed by thinking about why we need to mark that territory and set epistemic value apart from other, competing kinds of value.

Epistemic Trouble for Conceptual Engineering

Robin McKenna (University of Liverpool)

In her “Epistemic Trouble for Engineering ‘Woman’” Mona Simion raises an objection to Sally Haslanger's “ameliorative analysis” of gender concepts like ‘woman’. Her objection is that the primary function of all concepts—gender concepts included—is to represent the world. In the first part of this talk I argue that Simion’s objection fails if—as Haslanger argues—gender concepts are social kind concepts, a primary function of which is to shape the world rather than (just) describe it. Still, even if Simion’s objection to Haslanger fails, it can be repurposed as an objection to any conceptual engineering project that focuses on concepts the primary function of which is to represent the world. This (arguably) includes all and any epistemic concepts that might be of interest to conceptual engineers. In the second part of this talk I explore some strategies for defusing the repurposed version of Simion’s objection to conceptual engineering in epistemology.

A Conceptual Engineering Approach to Understanding

Jennifer Nado (University of Hong Kong)

Recently, the field of epistemology has witnessed a revival of interest in the epistemic state of understanding. While 20th century epistemology was largely focused on the analysis of knowledge and its constituents, recent authors such as Linda Zagzebski (2001), Jonathan Kvanvig (2003), Catherine Elgin (2006) and others have suggested that epistemology ought to refocus its efforts, to one degree or another, towards the study of understanding. Understanding, these authors claim, provides a unique and arguably superior form of epistemic value – one which our knowledge-focused philosophical investigations have neglected. Revisionary as these suggestions might be on one level, however, much of the recent understanding literature tends to employ the methods of standard, good(?) old-fashioned conceptual analysis. In this talk, I’ll suggest that we instead employ the recently popularized methodology of conceptual engineering to evaluate the respective merits of our concepts of knowledge and of understanding. Specifically, I’ll argue that while the value of understanding may well exceed that of knowing, the concept of knowledge better fits many of the purposes for which epistemic concepts are employed – purposes such as flagging appropriate sources of testimony, or regulating permissible assertion and action. Nonetheless, a substantive minority of purposes may be better served by the concept of understanding; in particular, I’ll suggest that attributing understanding is a useful means of identifying persons who may be able to resolve novel problems. As such, understanding possesses genuine theoretical interest – though it’s unlikely to dethrone knowledge as the primary locus of epistemic study.

Explicationist Epistemology and the Explanatory Role of Knowledge

Erik J. Olsson (Lund University)

It has been argued that much of contemporary epistemology can be unified under Carnap’s methodology of explication, which originated in the neighboring field of philosophy of science. However, it is unclear to what extent epistemological theories that emphasize the explanatory role of knowledge fit into this picture, Kornblith’s natural kind epistemology and Williamson’s knowledge first approach being cases in point. In this connection, I raise three questions. Can we harvest the insights of these approaches without loss in the more standard and less idiosyncratic explicationist framework? Can we do so without falling prey to prominent criticism raised against those approaches? Finally, do the approaches come out as coherent under an explicationist rendering? I argue that in Kornblith’s case the answer to all three questions is essentially in the affirmative. Much of the knowledge first approach is also translatable into explicationism. However, from that perspective, Williamson’s central argument for treating knowledge as undefinable, referring to persistent yet unsuccessful attempts to solve the Gettier problem, amounts to an overreaction to that problem. Leaving explicationism aside, I ask, in the penultimate section, what Williamson’s own philosophical method really amounts to.

Engineering Voting

Mona Simion (University of Glasgow)

I argue that our current conception of the nature of voting is incompatible with its constitutive role in democratic exercise and propose to think of voting as an informative speech act with normative content. When we vote for George, what we do is we perform an informative constative with the content 'George should be elected', where the should at stake is hypothetical towards personal goals of choice. In turn, this speech act informs collective democratic decision making. As such, I argue, democratic voting is constitutively governed by a knowledge norm: an exercise with too widely spread and too systematic breach of the knowledge norm is not an exercise in democratic voting.