ABSTRACT This article argues that there are two fundamentally different types of alethic and epistemic progress in philosophy. It is widely assumed that such progress is to be assessed by reference to the quantity or quality of philosophy's product (i.e., a type of output or outcome, such as true answers, coherent views, knowledge, or understanding), rather than to the manner in which philosophy is done—its performance . That assumption is mistaken. Performance progress is not reducible to product progress. This carries implications for debates about peer disagreement, epistemic consequentialism, philosophical methods, and the idea of philosophy as a “spiritual exercise.”

ABSTRACT This essay asks a new question: When someone with a firm understanding of basic operations nevertheless remains ignorant of a complex logical or mathematical truth, precisely what kind of information are they missing? I introduce “catenary truths,” a significant component of this non‐omniscient shortfall. Traditional epistemologies of the a priori don't extend to catenary knowledge, so I offer a novel proposal for how we acquire catenary information. The proposal answers Benacerraf‐inspired worries about access to abstracta by showing how processes of reasoning instantiate catenary truths. The proposal also sheds new light on whether logic is ampliative, how a calculation is like an experiment, higher‐order doubts about deductive reasoning, the inconceivability of logically impossible worlds, and commonalities between mathematical and moral intuition.

ABSTRACT When does an agent possess a proposition P as evidence? According to Timothy Williamson, the answer is when, and only when, they know that P . Call this view E = K. In this article, I point out an unwanted consequence of E = K, which is that people who suffer from anxiety have impoverished empirical evidence due to their anxiety. Although anxiety can manifest in a variety of ways and to different degrees, I take it that in some cases a person's anxiety functions in a way that prevents a person from believing in accordance with their empirical evidence. However, E = K has trouble explaining the descriptive and normative dimensions of a case like this, because the view implies that whenever an agent's anxiety prevents them from outright believing a proposition this ipso facto deprives them of empirical evidence.

ABSTRACT This is a reply to Duncan Pritchard's response to my critique of his normative account of ignorance. Pritchard suggests that I take a Normative Condition on board in my own account of ignorance. Pritchard's suggestion has drastic revisionary and deflationary implications for how we use words like “ignorance” and “ignorant”. I explain why I believe this is unnecessary: one can perfectly well be ignorant without displaying any kind of intellectual fault. Pritchard does convincingly show, though, that the Signifcance Condition of my account of ignorance needs revision. I explain that we can revise it by allowing for both subjective and objective significance.

ABSTRACT This article develops and defends the idea that some of our biases have an externalist character, with particular attention to cases in which the phenomenon arises in political contexts. A person who consistently defers to biased sources can count as biased even while responding impeccably to their total evidence. On the basis of such cases, I argue for three connected theses: Externalism about Bias (a person's biases do not supervene on their internal states and the causal relations among those states); Rationality is Compatible with Bias ; and Rationality Requires Bias (in certain environments, full rationality can require being biased, in a pejorative sense of “biased”). These theses are supported by compelling judgments about cases, independently of commitment to any specific theory of bias. They are also naturally accommodated by the norm‐theoretic account of bias, on which biases involve systematic departures from genuine norms. I argue that many central attributions of bias to human believers are grounded in departures from the externalist norm of truth. Finally, I draw a further consequence: Because many biases are environmentally constituted, the empirically documented unreliability of introspection as a method for detecting bias is not a contingent fact but holds of necessity.

ABSTRACT Having evidence does not in itself make a doxastic attitude justified even if the evidence supports the attitude in question. Plausibly, one must also appreciate the support one's evidence provides for the doxastic attitude. Although such appreciation seems central to the picture of justification offered by Evidentialism, its nature has been largely unexplored by Evidentialists. This article seeks to rectify this situation by explaining how Evidentialists should understand appreciation and its role in justification. Additionally, the account of appreciation defended here is put to work in explicating the justification had during the process of deliberation and in clarifying what we should think about cases of epistemic akrasia.

ABSTRACT Public evidence plays a central role in the justification of scientific theories—but does its importance extend beyond science, for instance, to political or religious belief? To address this question, we first need a clear account of public evidence. This article develops such an account, characterizing public evidence as non‐experiential evidence that meets the non‐factive epistemic conditions for common knowledge. I argue that public evidence not only underwrites the justification of scientific theories but also constrains how experience can justify belief more generally. The result is a novel account of public evidence with broad applicability across domains of inquiry.

ABSTRACT When what justifies you in believing a proposition is some evidence you have, you are doxastically justified only if you believe that proposition on the basis of that evidence. According to causal theories of basing, this basing relation must be a causal relation. In this article, we discuss the role that defeaters play in an account of this kind. We first argue that doxastic justification for believing a certain proposition requires, not just basing the belief on evidence that one has and that is sufficient to propositionally justify the belief, but also being sensitive to the absence of sufficiently weighty defeaters. We then argue that causal theories of basing have the right kinds of resources to incorporate this role played by defeaters (and the relevant role played by disqualifiers) in the concept of doxastic justification. Our argument borrows from action theory in that it is inspired by similar arguments on behalf of causalist accounts of action and freedom. We end with a discussion of the bearing of our view on Pryor's dogmatism.

ABSTRACT Some concepts generate paradoxes by licensing inconsistent beliefs. We can try to revise some of those beliefs by doing some “conceptual engineering,” but this leads to a puzzle. However exactly the details of conceptual engineering get filled in, it seems that what happens is we revise our beliefs without gaining any evidence against our old views or in support of our new views. But epistemically rational belief change always requires new evidence—or so it seems. I respond to the puzzle by proposing a view of epistemic rationality on which we are required to hold a belief only if two conditions hold: Our evidence supports the belief, and our attention is directed at the evidence and the supported belief's content. Thus, we can rationally withdraw a belief by withdrawing our attention to its content, even without having any new evidence. Its ability to solve this puzzle for conceptual engineering, in addition to some other important puzzles that I briefly show it also solves, gives us a strong case for this proposed connection between rationality and attention.

ABSTRACT It has recently been argued that purported evidential and zetetic norms issue contradictory verdicts and that such contradictions best be resolved in favor of zetetic norms. The paper argues that this line of argument proves unsuccessful. First, natural formulations of what one ought to do if inquiring into a given matter resemble anankastic conditionals that don't allow for detachment of normatively significant verdicts. Second, even if suitably reformulated, zetetic norms issue, at best, verdicts with a distinctly practical flavor that contrasts with the epistemic flavor characteristic of evidential norms. While there are conflicts between normative verdicts of different flavors, the phenomenon is familiar and, in the cases in question, doesn't force a zetetic turn , that is, a reorientation of epistemology that gives zetetic norms precedence over evidential norms.