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In the literature on doxastic evidence, the phenomenon is regarded as either internal (Plantinga 1993, Feldman and Conee 2001, Turri 2009) or external (Armstrong 1973, Collins 1997, BonJour 2008). Though the specifics of these views tend to vary, the two main categories are prominent. However, these views face various criticisms. Internalists claim that external evidence ignores relevant mental processes. Externalists claim that internal evidence is weak given its subjective nature. I will propose a remedy for both of these criticisms. I will argue that evidence is internal, external, and social. That is to say, that there are three types of evidence: mental states, states of affairs, and that which has been produced by a rigorous social process. I will extract Helen Longino’s method for establishing social knowledge (2002) and apply it to evidence; I will argue that her method produces social evidence as well. The social component of evidence is aimed towards strengthening internal and external theories of evidence by responding to the worries raised by the internalists and externalists. First, I will argue that a theory that accommodates both internal and external evidence can absolves the worries raised to either theory alone. Moreover, a theory that can accommodate social evidence will be stronger insofar as a rigorous social process will add a further qualification which can only strengthen our evidence. Second, I will argue that social evidence is not reducible to either external or internal evidence. The external view cannot account for the mental processes that are evidently a part of the justification process and is therefore weak. Finally, though the internal view is compelling, it does not account for evidence which supports our usage of automatic, non-conscious mental processes (Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Aarts and Dijksterhuis 2000).

Imagine that you’ve just spent the last several months reading Don Quixote—and that you’re all but fifty pages away from finishing. Unfortunately for you, the book was due back before you could finish, and so begrudgingly, you turn it back in, having not known what happens in the end. Riddled with curiosity, you make your best guess about Quixote’s eventual fate and suppose it is the most likely scenario. Entirely unbeknownst to you, it turns out that you were right; Quixote’s ultimate destiny was just what you had supposed it would be! What luck! Quite naturally, we would say that (despite how impressed we are that you rightly anticipated Cervantes), when all is said and done, knowing what happens to Don Quixote in the end is surely better than merely believing truly what happens in the end—the predicament you find yourself in having not actually finished the book. After all, it was just by dumb luck that you guessed the ending right—a point you could deny only on the pain of some embarrassing claim of clairvoyance. We might put the idea more generally by saying that from a purely cognitive standpoint, it is better to know the truth than to stumble upon it by luck. This general idea betrays two distinct insights about knowledge. The first is the insight that while true belief is valuable, knowledge is distinctively so—knowing the truth is valuable in a way that merely having a true (but not-known) belief is not. The second insight here is that you lack knowledge if it’s just by dumb luck that the belief you have is true. Call these the value insight and the anti-luck insight: Value insight: Knowledge is distinctively valuable. Luck insight: Knowledge excludes luck. In contemporary epistemology, and especially over the past five years, separate projects have arisen in correspondence with these distinct intuitions: value-driven epistemology is concerned with issues surrounding the first insight, and projects under the description of anti-luck epistemology have arisen out of the second. Now we might reasonably suppose that whatever it is that makes knowledge relevantly un-lucky would be something we could cite in accounting for what makes knowledge distinctively valuable. This natural idea reflects the thought that the insights about value and luck should not be entirely disconnected. There is a problematic tension though between this reasonable expectation and the resources epistemologists have provided for us to accommodate it. What explains the tension is the fact that value-driven and anti-luck projects in epistemology have by and large been developed apart from each other, each focused on one of our two guiding insights at the expense of the other. Consequently, value-driven epistemology’s focus on the normative but not modal properties of knowledge leaves these two aspects of knowledge disconnected much in the way that anti-luck epistemology’s focus on the modal but not the normative properties of knowledge leaves these same aspects disconnected. The lacuna here between what value driven epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge valuable and what the anti-luck epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge exclude luck is troubling. We may resist that there should be such a disconnect if we avoid the common flaw shared by each of these projects pursued in isolation from the other. The flaw here is essentially one of naivety: that of supposing that we can give an account of knowledge exclusively in terms of conditions that would accommodate one of the two insights, while still managing to account for the other insight—which itself we did not appeal to directly in our theory of what knowledge is—e.g. in the analysis provided of it. This is the flaw behind the value-driven approaches that think about knowledge in terms of valuable properties they can’t explain to ensure modal robustness and the anti-luck projects that think of knowledge in terms of modal properties into which we can’t well smuggle the normativity needed to explain its value. To avoid this flaw, then, we should let both of these insights dictate the conditions our analysis offers as essential to knowing. The project with which I’ll be engaging here develops substantially on this widely overlooked and promising idea.

In the main, scholars have assumed that Karl Barth exhibited little theological interest in human knowing as a distinct topic in the Church Dogmatics, and that his pronouncements on it are mere footnotes in his exposition of the doctrine of revelation. However, my thesis is that in that work Barth crafts a vibrant and highly nuanced theological account of cognition as part of his actualistic conception of the human creature and its telos as God’s covenant partner. This study describes the contours of Barth’s account of the creature as an epistemic agent. I discuss how the basic shape of knowing in Barth’s theology is conditioned by the function it is ordained to serve as the creaturely presupposition of the knowledge and service of God. Evidence also suggests that Barth endorses the broad outlines of Kant’s understanding of the architecture of cognition on theological grounds, and so affirms it to be a “spontaneous” act – thus situating the creature as an epistemic agent. However, so construed, human knowing integrates well with Barth’s wider conception of human subjectivity and freedom insofar as ‘epistemic spontaneity’ – the idea that the creature actively determines the object of cognition – is a modulation of the type of freedom the creature is created for. Nevertheless, the question arises as to whether Barth carries his theological commitment to the creature as a spontaneous knower into the environments in which the act of cognition is said to be operational, namely, in the event of the knowledge of God and the knowing of everyday objects. The significance of this thesis to Barth studies is that it establishes how, far from being a peripheral issue, cognition functions as a distinctive and highly significant element of Barth’s conception of human creaturehood. It therefore contributes to efforts made to rescue that conception from the mistaken view that Barth allows divine sovereignty to suppress creaturely reality. Moreover, this thesis makes additional contributions to discussions about the creaturely ground of moral agency, Barth’s relationship to Kant, and the role human cognition receives in the event of the knowledge of God.

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