Knowledge, Truth, and Duty

Abstract

Abstract Gathers 11 new and 3 previously published essays, all of which bear on questions having to do with epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue. In the Introduction, Steup provides a summary of each of the essays as well as a brief account of his defense of doxastic involuntarism. In the first part of the volume – Epistemic Duty and the Normativity of Justification – Susan Haack discusses the ethics of belief, Bruce Russell explores the distinction between subjective and objective justification and its relevance to the analysis of knowledge, and Richard Fumerton questions the normativity of justification. In the second part – Epistemic Deontology and Doxastic Voluntarism – Robert Audi, Richard Feldman, and Carl Ginet discuss whether belief is, as is commonly supposed, involuntary, and whether its involuntariness is an obstacle to conceiving of epistemic justification in terms of duty fulfillment. In the third part – Epistemic Deontology and the Internality of Justification – Alvin Goldman subjects internalism, the view that justifiers must be internal to the mind, to a penetrating critique, and Matthias Steup defends internalism against Goldman's criticism. The papers in part four – Justification and Truth – address the question of how justification is related to truth as the epistemic goal. Marian David examines various strategies of linking epistemic justification to the truth goal and highlights the way in which they fail, and Michael DePaul argues that since we value knowledge more than mere true belief, truth cannot be our sole epistemic goal. The papers in the fifth section – Epistemic Virtue and Criteria of Justified Belief – explore the question of whether we can derive criteria of knowledge and justified belief without falling into circularity or succumbing to skepticism. Ernest Sosa proposes virtue perspectivism as a response to skepticism, and Noah Lemos defends the commonsense approach of G. E. Moore. The concluding papers in part six – Beyond Deontology – make a case for orienting epistemological inquiry in a new direction. Vrinda Dalmiya argues that focus on the knowing self motivates a care‐based version of virtue epistemology, and Linda Zagzebski proposes that virtue epistemology is particularly well suited for analyzing the neglected concept of understanding.