It is widely thought that in fallible reasoning potential error necessarily increases with every additional step, whether inferences or premises, in the same way that the probability of a lengthening conjunction shrinks. However, this has the absurd consequence that consulting an expert, proof-checking, filling gaps in proofs, and gathering more evidence for a given conclusion necessarily make ...

0. Platitudinously, cognitive science is the science of cognition. Cognition is usually defined as something like the process of acquiring, retaining and applying knowledge. To a first approximation, therefore, cognitive science is the science of knowing. Knowing is a relation between the knower and the known. Typically, although not always, what is known involves the environment external to th...

Akrasia has been traditionally defined as a failure to do what one has most reasons to do, or what one judges that one ought to do (McIntyre 2006; Wedgwood 2007). Traditional conceptions on akrasia take it as a violation of a commitment of the agent: “[for traditional conceptions] an agent who decisively judges it best to A is thereby rationally committed to A-ing, in the sense that (as long as...

Nearly twenty years ago, I began to write a review of the literature of the history of oceanography and an assessment of its position in the history of science. My starting point was the first International Congress of the History of Oceanography, held in Monaco in 1966 and the presentation there of a bellwether paper by Harold Burstyn titled " The historian of science and oceanography. " Natur...

Introduction In Apes, Language and Human Mind the achievements of Kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee, are used to re-evaluate the language abilities of non-human primates. The book's authors, Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker and Taylor, (S-RST) contend that the language achievements of non-humans are made needlessly difficult to evaluate by the anthropocentrism of traditional views of mind. A major part of S-R...

I provide a construal of the epistemic regress problem and I take issue with the contention that a foundationalist solution is incompatible with an internalist account of warrant. I sketch a foundationalist solution to the regress problem that respects a plausible version of internalism. I end with the suggestion that the strategy that I have presented is not available only to the traditional v...

Can we always tell, just through reflection, what we should believe? That is the question of access, the central disagreement between epistemic internalists and externalists, and the focus of the dissertation. Chapter 1 gives an argument for access, connecting it with the question of whether we can intentionally bias our own investigations to favour desirable hypotheses. I argue that we can't: ...

The New Social Movement Approach and the Resource Mobilization Approach are the dominant approaches in social movement research. They focus either on macro-aspects and externalism or on micro-aspects and internalism. This paper suggests that the notion of self-organization is one way of taking into account both internal and external, structuraland action-based aspects of social movements and th...

Contemporary debates about epistemic luck and its relation to knowledge have traditionally proceeded against a tacit background commitment to cognitive internalism, the thesis that cognitive processes play out inside the head. In particular, safety-based approaches (e.g., Pritchard 2005; 2007; Luper-Foy 1984; Sainsbury 1997; Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000) reveal this commitment by taking for grant...

Scientific claims can be assessed epistemically in either of two ways: according to scientific standards, or by means of philosophical arguments such as the no-miracle argument in favor of scientific realism. This paper investigates the basis of this duality of epistemic assessments. It is claimed that the duality rests on two different notions of epistemic justification that are well-known fro...