Thomistic Faith Naturalized? The Epistemic Significance of Aquinas’s Appeal to Doxastic Instinct

Intellectual norms are norms which can guide the exercise of indirect doxastic control and govern doxastic responsibility assessments. With the help of intellectual norms we can evaluate whether an agent is blameworthy, praiseworthy or neutrally evaluable for holding a certain doxastic attitude. In the following chapter, I will explain what an intellectual norm is. I am roughly following Peels’ general idea that intellectual obligations regulate belief-influencing actions (2017, p. 100). Moreover, I will investigate the conditions under which an intellectual norm has epistemic significance. I will assume that if a norm has epistemic significance, then an evaluation which is governed by this norm is epistemically significant as well. Moreover, I will introduce an epistemic consequentialist approach to doxastic responsibility assessment and I will argue that the norms which govern these responsibility assessments can be characterized as epistemic norms. This will provide us with reasons to assume that the doxastic responsibility assessment which is modelled in an epistemic consequentialist framework is indeed an epistemically significant evaluation.

This chapter argues that acquaintance has further epistemic significance beyond what the author attributed to it in previous chapters. The author argues that acquaintance not only has epistemic significance in itself, simply in virtue of being knowledge, but also in virtue of justifying beliefs—both immediately and inferentially. He then uses these results to defend various forms of epistemic foundationalism. Ultimately, the author argues that acquaintance is the foundation for all empirical knowledge. That is, he argues that all knowledge that depends for its justification on perceptual or introspective experience depends on acquaintance for its justification. He considers whether some of these results can be gotten without acquaintance—that is, by appealing to experience in more neutral terms, without positing an acquaintance relation. He argues that they cannot—that acquaintance plays a central, ineliminable role in the epistemology of experience.

Conciliatory views about disagreement with one’s epistemic peers lead to a somewhat troubling skeptical conclusion: that often, when we know others disagree, we ought to be (perhaps much) less sure of our beliefs than we typically are. One might attempt to extend this skeptical conclusion by arguing that disagreement with merely possible epistemic agents should be epistemically significant to the same degree as disagreement with actual agents, and that, since for any belief we have, it is possible that someone should disagree in the appropriate way, we ought to be much less sure of all of our beliefs than we typically are. In this paper, I identify what I take to be the main motivation for thinking that actual disagreement is epistemically significant and argue that it does not also motivate the epistemic significance of merely possible disagreement.

Chapter 5 asks what the epistemic significance is of the fact that we have this distinctive capacity for self-knowledge, as understood under the moderate deflationist view of Chapter 4. It argues for four claims in response. (1) Articulatory self-knowledge is a process of both discovery and creation. (2) We can use this process as a way of gaining psychological self-knowledge, but also—in the very best cases—worldly understanding or insight. (3) The distinctive process involved in cases articulatory self-knowledge makes it best suited for what Quassim Cassam calls substantive self-knowledge. And (4), put together, these findings make it the case that articulatory self-knowledge is likely to be a crucial element in much creative intellectual work like maths, science, and philosophy.

This article begins with a review of the various roles which computers have played in supporting collaborative learning and argues that, whatever role it plays, technology is not neutral with respect to interactions with and between users. Interfaces to learning environments embody particular representational schemes which have the potential either for competing with representations of the learning domain or for giving access to it. In this respect, the learner-machine interface has ‘Epistemic significance’ and its design is as important as the design of the materials and activities to which it interfaces.

Conciliationism faces a challenge that has not been satisfactorily addressed. There are clear cases of epistemically significant merely possible disagreement, but there are also clear cases where merely possible disagreement is epistemically irrelevant. Conciliationists have not yet accounted for this asymmetry. In this paper, we propose that the asymmetry can be explained by positing a selection constraint on all cases of peer disagreement—whether actual or merely possible. If a peer’s opinion was not selected in accordance with the proposed constraint, then it lacks epistemic significance. This allows us to distinguish the epistemically significant cases of merely possible disagreement from the insignificant ones.

The traditional picture of logic takes it for granted that “valid arguments have a fundamental epistemic significance”, but neither model theory nor traditional proof theory dealing with formal system has been able to give an account of this significance. Since valid arguments as usually understood do not in general have any epistemic significance, the problem is to explain how and why we can nevertheless use them sometimes to acquire knowledge. It is suggested that we should distinguish between arguments and acts of inferences and that we have to reconsider the latter notion to arrive at the desired explanation. More precisely, the notions should be developed so that the following relationship holds: one gets in possession of a ground for a conclusion by inferring it from premisses for which one already has grounds, provided that the inference in question is valid. The paper proposes explications of the concepts of ground and deductively valid inference so that this relationship holds as a conceptual truth. Logical validity of inference is seen as a special case of deductive validity, but does not add anything as far as epistemic significance is concerned—it resides already in the deductively valid inferences.

Recent debates about disagreement’s significance have largely focused on its epistemic significance. However, given how much attention has already been paid to its epistemic significance, we might well wonder: what significance might disagreement have when we consider other related normative domains? And, in particular, what significance might it have when we consider the broader domain of inquiry, or what some thinkers have called either the “zetetic” or “erotetic” domain? In response, this paper suggest three things. Firstly, it suggests how we might clarify the relations among the epistemic, erotetic, and zetetic domains of normativity, given their potential differences and incompatibilities. Then, it suggests that disagreement’s significance within inquiry can either be tied to erotetic norms or to either of two sorts of zetetic norms: vindication-directed or possession-directed norms. And finally, it suggests preferred answers to the question of what disagreement’s distinctly zetetic significance might be, given the participating inquirers’ ordinarily-conceived zetetic standings and how their sets of dialectically accessible evidence might compare.

In The art of dialectic between dialogue and rhetoric, Spranzi (2011) explores the relation between the art of dialectic and the philosophical search for principles of methods of inquiry. By providing a reconstruction of the tradition of Aristotelian dialectic, she aims at elucidating the ‘‘epistemic significance’’ (p. 1) of dialectic. The reconstruction addresses a limited number of authors, all of which are chosen for their relevance in answering the question as to how the dialectical method may be instrumental in acquiring knowledge. In the first two chapters of the book Spranzi discusses the seminal passages in Aristotle’s Topica, Sophistici elenchi and Rhetorica, as well as the contributions of Cicero, Boethius and several medieval authors. She then discusses the developments in the tradition of dialectic that took place in the Renaissance, devoting three separate chapters to the contributions of Agricola, Nifo, and Sigonio respectively. In the final chapter, she describes the relationship between modern argumentation theory and the Aristotelian tradition of dialectic. Among the authors discussed are Toulmin, Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca, Van Eemeren and Grootendorst, Walton, and Freeman. As to the methodology of her reconstruction of the tradition of dialectic, Spranzi indicates that she focuses on ‘‘dialectica docens’’ rather than ‘‘dialectica utens’’ (p. 3). This means that she reconstructs only those passages in which the authors explicitly reflect on the relationship between dialectic and the advancement of knowledge and stays away from passages in which the authors explain the technicalities of the dialectical discussion procedure. The actual reconstruction of the tradition of dialectic starts in chapter 1, Aristotle and the art of dialectic. In line with the central aim of her research, Spranzi highlights those passages in the works of Aristotle in which he explicitly reflects on the connection between the art of debate and the pursuance of knowledge. Having explained the central concepts of Aristotle’s Topica, she distinguishes between

This article explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience: its affective character. This includes the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe and the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, disclosing objective axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. To this end I analyze two representationalist approaches to valenced perception—evaluativism and attitudinalism—which serve as exemplars of, respectively, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Cognitivists claim that valence supervenes on the empirically significant element of a perception—its content—while non-cognitivists suggest that it supervenes on elements that are not truth-apt and therefore not a direct source of the perception’s empirical significance. Considering principled objections that they each face, I propose a non-representationalist alternative—one that aims to explain not only why perceptual pleasure and pain are epistemically significant, but why they are themselves (non-instrumentally and pro tanto) good and bad for subjects.

Assessment of those with whom one finds oneself in dispute is indispensable in the epistemology of disagreement. The assessment of one’s opponents is necessary in order to determine whether a particular disagreement constitutes evidence of a likely error in one’s own understanding. However, assessment of an opponent’s capacity to know the matter in dispute is only possible when the conditions for knowledge are not themselves open to debate. Consequently, epistemic significance can only be recognised in disagreements among those who are in tacit or explicit agreement about what constitutes justification in a given case. The result is that the epistemic significance that disagreement possesses is always strictly conditional upon prior assumptions. The difference between a peer disagreement and a non-peer disagreement cannot indicate whether one is or is not more likely to be right than one’s opponent in an absolute sense, only whether one is or is not more likely to be right given the presupposed conditions.

Breaking the ties: epistemic significance, bacilli, and underdetermination

Pieranna Garavaso and Nicla Vassallo investigate Gottlob Frege's notion of thinking (das Denken) to provide a new analysis of a largely unexplored area of the philosopher's work. Confronting Frege's deeply seated and widely emphasized anti-psychologism, Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance claims that the objective human science that Frege proposed can only be possible through a nuanced notion of thinking as neither merely psychological nor merely logical. Focusing on what Frege says about thinking in many passages from his works, Garavaso and Vassallo argue that Frege was engaged with issues that are still alive in contemporary debates, such as the definition of knowledge and the necessary role of language in conceptual thinking and in the expression of thoughts. Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance is essential not only for those interested in a new and original reading of Frege’s philosophy, but also for anyone engaged in epistemology, logic, psychology, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Starting with some illustrative examples, I develop a systematic account of a specific type of experimentation—an experimentation which is not, as in the “standard view”, driven by specific theories. It is typically practiced in periods in which no theory or—even more fundamentally—no conceptual framework is readily available. I call it exploratory experimentation and I explicate its systematic guidelines. From the historical examples I argue furthermore that exploratory experimentation may have an immense, but hitherto widely neglected, epistemic significance.

The major ethical theories—welfarist consequentialism, Kantianism, contractualism, common sense morality, and virtue ethics—appear to converge on the same practical advice in many situations. Such convergence seems epistemically significant. A natural thought would be that the convergence should assure us about the advice. However, what would be the rationale behind this—why should the convergence increase our assurance? That’s the main question we pursue in this paper. As the question is only sparsely addressed in the existing literature, we begin by detailing various kinds and structures of convergence. In relation, we propose a specific way to think about the epistemic significance of convergence. The remainder of the paper is primarily negative. We argue that even granting non-skeptical assumptions that are common in moral epistemology, the epistemic significance of convergence is harder to account for than most would probably think.