Authorship note: M.A. designed the study, coded data, and wrote the majority of the manuscript. A.E.F. wrote the code to collect data from YouTube and made the figures. J.A.C. coded data and wrote and edited much of the manuscript (especially the discussion). P.C. coded data and provided literature review. C.K. ran the topic models and wrote and edited much of the manuscript. Work partly supported by Australian Research Council grant DP190101507 (to M.A. and C.K.) and Templeton Foundation grant 61387 (to M.A.).
2014) insist, in accordance with a tradition beginning with Aristotle, that the epistemic standing one attains when one understands why something is so is itself just a kind of propositional knowledge-viz., propositional knowledge of causes. A point that has been granted on both sides of these debates is that if these reductive proposals are right, then knowledge-how and understanding-why should be susceptible to the same extent as knowledge-that is to being undermined by epistemic luck. This paper reports experimental results that test these luck-based predictions. Interestingly, these results suggest a striking (albeit, imperfect) positive correlation between self-reported philosophical expertise and attributions of knowledge-how, understanding-why and knowledge-that which run contrary to reductive proposals. We contextualize these results by showing how they align very well with a particular kind of overarching non-reductive proposal, one that two of the authors have defended elsewhere (e.g.,
A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology-one with origins in Plato's Meno-concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere (unknown) true opinion. The recent literature is deeply divided on the matter of how best to address the problem. One point, however, remains unquestioned: that if a solution is to be found, it will be at the personal level, the level at which states of subjects or agents, as such, appear. We take exception to this orthodoxy, or at least to its unquestioned status. We argue that subpersonal states play a significant-arguably, primary-role in much epistemically relevant cognition and thus constitute a domain in which we might reasonably expect to locate the "missing source" of epistemic value, beyond the value attached to mere true belief.
Mainstream epistemology has typically presumed a traditional picture of the metaphysics of mind, whereby cognitive processes (e.g., memory storage and retrieval) play out within the bounds of skull and skin. Contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science decreasingly favors this simple “intracranial” picture. Likewise, proponents of active externalist approaches to the mind—e.g., the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC)—have largely proceeded without asking what epistemological ramifications should arise once cognition is understood as criss-crossing between brain and world. This chapter aims to motivate a puzzle that arises once these thought strands are juxtaposed, and highlights a condition of epistemological adequacy that should be accepted by proponents of extended cognition. Once this condition is motivated, the chapter demonstrates how attempts to satisfy it apparently inevitably devolve into a novel epistemic circularity. Eventually, proponents of extended cognition have a novel epistemological puzzle on their hands.
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