Expanding the scope of reflective knowledge: From MINE to OURS

Abstract

Ernest Sosa has suggested that we distinguish between animal knowledge, on the one hand, and reflective knowledge, on the other. Animal knowledge is direct, immediate, and foundationally structured, while reflective knowledge involves a knower's higher-order awareness of her own mental states, and is structured by relations of coherence.Although Sosa's distinction is extremely appealing, it also faces serious problems. In particular, the sorts of processes that would be required for reflective knowledge, as Sosa understands it, are not processes that are instantiated in human cognition. Philosophical Issues. 2019;29:241-253.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/phis

Challenging the ability intuition: From personal to extended to distributed belief‐forming processes

“…The Reflective requirement fails not only because there seem to be many cases of knowledge through epistemic reliance for which the Reflective requirement clearly doesn't apply, but also because, even in cases in which we imagine ourselves to have reflective access to the reliability of the processes on which our beliefs rely, that supposed reflective access is in fact merely illusory-a rationalization rather than a genuine reason (cf. Shieber, 2019a). Furthermore, the Weak Consistency requirement fails because it isn't robust enough to guarantee that someone who satisfies the Weak Consistency requirement will thereby be appropriately sensitive to the truth-reliability of the source of her information: as the hotel alarm clock case shows, very easily could it be the case that the alarm clock is unreliable without that having any effect on your belief, despite your satisfying the Weak Consistency requirement.…”