Epistemology, Rationality, and Cognition

1.1 Setting Aside the Gettier Problem Since Gettier, much of epistemology has focused on analyzing “S knows that P”, but that is not my interest. My general interest is in rational cognition — both in what it is to be rational, and in how rational cognition works. The traditional epistemological question, “How do you know?”, can be taken as addressing part of the more general problem of producing a theory of rational cognition. It is about specifically epistemic rationality. I interpret this question literally, as a question about how we should proceed in our epistemic endeavors. Epistemological theories that try to answer this question are theories of procedural epistemology (see my 1998), and when, from this perspective, we assess beliefs in terms of their justifiedness, the concept of justification is one of procedural epistemic justification. Whether this has anything to do with the analysis of knowledge is an open question, and not one that I have much interest in addressing.