This thesis offers a fresh interpretation and defense of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge. I adopt a multilevel approach according to which perceptual knowledge on one level can enjoy factive rational support provided by perceptual knowledge of the same proposition on a different level. Here I invoke a distinction Ernest Sosa draws between 'judgmental' and 'merely functional' belief to articulate what I call the bifurcated conception of perceptual knowledge. The view that results is a form of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge specifically at the higher judgmental level, layered over a straightforward externalism about perceptual knowledge at the lower merely functional level. The first chapter orients the reader to epistemological disjunctivism- with particular emphasis on the 'reflective epistemological disjunctivism' defended by Duncan Pritchard with inspiration from John McDowell. Here I review the arguments for thinking such a proposal true, as well as highlight some problems and three emerging challenges for the view: what I call the internalist challenge, the new access challenge(s), and the 'new evil genius' challenge. These challenges largely inspire the chapters to follow. In the second chapter I present the positive proposal: a fresh interpretation of epistemological disjunctivism in terms of perceptual knowledge at the specifically judgmental level. I argue that this is a modification that epistemological disjunctivists should adopt since it inoculates their view against the internalist challenge: the challenge of explaining why perception should provide one with knowledge by providing one with motivating reasons for belief. In the third chapter I motivate the view further in connection with the more familiar 'basis problem' for epistemological disjunctivism. I argue that this approach supports a unique strategy for solving that problem: one that is consistent both with what is known as 'the entailment' thesis and the thought that we can reduce perceptual knowledge to a kind of rationally supported belief. In the fourth chapter I move to playing defense. I defend the proposal against the so-called 'new evil genius' challenge. This is the challenge to explain why subjects in pairs of 'good' and 'bad' cases can seem equally justified for sustaining their perceptual beliefs. I argue that what we are being sensitive to here, rather, is the fact that both subjects can be equally epistemically responsible and/or reasonable for believing what they do. Before concluding this chapter I also offer an error theory. In the fifth chapter I defend the proposal against the new access challenges raised in chapter one. These alleged challenges for epistemological disjunctivism arise specifically for versions of reflective epistemological disjunctivism that hold that one's rational support for perceptual beliefs is not only factive but reflectively accessible as well. Rather than address the challenges head on, I try to dislodge the thought they depend upon-viz., that one's factive rational support for perceptual beliefs is reflectively accessible to the subject. Here I argue that the reflective accessibility of one's factive rational support is actually a wheel turning idly in the debate with the underdetermination-based radical sceptic-so that we can simply drop it without consequence. The result is an epistemological disjunctivism that is immune to access problems. I then offer a final summary and conclude. At the end of this thesis I have attached an appendix, which is an excursion into religious epistemology and an exploration of a form of religious epistemological disjunctivism. Here I apply the epistemological disjunctivist insight to the case of religious perception in order to defend the idea that one can offer independent rational support for theistic belief by appealing to religious beliefs that are justified on the basis of religious experiences. This appendix chapter is in keeping with the general spirit of the thesis insofar as it seeks to developed epistemological disjunctivism in new and fruitful directions.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

This thesis is broadly about the structure of propositional knowledge and the ways in which an individual knower can have such knowledge. More specifically, it is about the epistemology of factive psychological attitudes and the view that knowing is a purely mental state. I take such a view as being not so much a theory of knowledge, but rather an accounting of how we know, or the ways in which we know. In arguing for this view I offer a different interpretation of certain epistemic conditions, like seeing and remembering and try to show how understanding the metaphysics of mental states and events clarifies the relation between such conditions and the factive psychological attitudes implicit in them. Part one of the thesis is occupied with a discussion about a form of externalism popular in contemporary philosophy of mind, content externalism and a form of externalism popularized by Timothy Williamson which I refer to in the thesis as attitude externalism. I argue that content externalism in the style of Tyler Burge, arguably one of its most prominent advocates, faces a rather serious dilemma when it comes to the role that mental states and specific mental events are meant to play in psychological explanation. The view endorsed by Timothy Williamson, which says that some psychological attitudes, factive attitudes like ‘seeing that’, can be thought of as broad prime conditions is offered as a way in which the content externalist can avoid this dilemma and retain a causal-psychological explanatory thesis about mental states and events. The second part of the thesis is concerned with the epistemology of factive psychological attitudes and I focus carefully on two paradigmatic cases – seeing and remembering. I dedicate a chapter to each and offer a series of arguments to the effect that seeing and remembering though they may be thought of as ways of having propositional knowledge, it is not necessary that they entail knowing nor that they be stative to do so. In this sense, there is a strong and important divergence in the dialectic of the thesis from the view offered by Timothy Williamson, on which many points in this thesis there is agreement. I conclude the thesis with a discussion on what I take to be a fundamental epistemological principle, which I call the multiformity principle. The argument there is that when a subject knows that p, there is always a specific way in which that subject knows. I further take this principle to reveal the fact that propositional knowledge is an intrinsically disjunctive phenomenon.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

O presente trabalho visa motivar e defender o disjuntivismo epistemológico, a tese de que a percepção é estado factivo e racionalmente fundado. Essa variação de disjuntivismo é apresentada como uma dissolução do paradoxo cético da subdeterminação. Diante do problema cético do sonho, o disjuntivismo epistemológico é tomado conjuntamente com uma concepção enactivista da percepção, cuja tese central é que estados perceptuais são constituídos pelas ações do agente no ambiente. A conjunção dessas duas teses promove uma concepção corporificada da racionalidade, segundo a qual estados percpetuais racionalmente fundados são obtidos pelo exercício de habilidades do indivíduo no ambiente. Essa tese é ameaçada pela intuição supostamente plausível de que indivíduos em cenários céticos poderiam ser racionais, ainda que não possuíssem meios corpóreos para interação com seu em torno. Argumenta-se contra essa intuição pela crítica à maneira como cenários céticos são concebidos. Por fim, aplica-se o enactivismo radical ao autoconhecimento, promovendo um meio termo entre um modelo perceptual de autoconhecimento e um modelo racionalista. / This work is intended to motivate and defend epistemological disjunctivism, the view that perception is a factive and rationally grounded state. This version of disjunctivism is presented as a dissolution of the underdetermination skeptical paradox. Facing the dream skeptical problem, epistemological disjunctivism is taken in conjunction with an enactive conception of perception, whose core thesis is that perceptual states are constituted by one’s actions in the environment. The conjunction of these two theses promotes an embodied notion of rationality, according to which rationally grounded perceptual states are achieved by the exercise of one’s abilities in the environment. That view is threatened by the apparently plausible intuition that individuals in skeptical scenarios could be rational even if they lacked the bodily means to interact with their surroundings. This intuition is defeated by a critique to the way skeptical scenarios are conceived. Lastly, radical enactivism is applied to self-knowledge, attaining a middle ground between the perceptual and the rationalist models of self-knowledge.

It is widely accepted, amongst epistemologists, that evidence plays an important role in our epistemic life. Crucially, there is no agreement on what evidence is. Following Silins, we can cash out the disagreement around the notion of evidence in terms of the opposition between Evidential Internalism and Evidential Externalism (Silins, 2005). Evidential internalists claim that evidence supervenes on one's non-factive mental states, such as, beliefs, impressions (BonJour, 1999, Audi, 2001). Evidential Externalists deny that. In this Thesis, first, I contrastively assess the plausibility of two prominent contemporary externalist theories: Duncan Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism, the thesis on which one's evidence in perceptual cases is truth-entailing and reflectively accessible (Pritchard, 2012), and Timothy Williamson's E=K, the thesis on which one's evidence is all and only the propositions one knows (Williamson, 2000). Second, I develop a novel externalist account of evidence that I call Ecumenical Evidentialism. I show how Ecumenical Evidentialism is able to bring together some of the benefits of both Pritchard's Disjunctivism and Williamson's E=K. This Thesis is structured into three sections, each of which addresses the following three questions respectively: Does the Access Problem represent a real threat to Evidential Externalism? Is Evidential Externalism committed to a sceptical variety of Infallibilism? How does Evidential Externalism understand the relation between evidence and epistemic justification? I argue that neither Epistemological Disjunctivism nor E=K are fully satisfying Externalist accounts of evidence. On one hand, I argue that Disjunctivism captures the orthodox intuition on which justification is a matter of being evidence-responsive, but it does so on pain of facing the so-called Access Problem. On the other hand, by rejecting any strong accessibility thesis, Williamson's E=K is better positioned to resist both the Access Problem as well as the Infallibility Problem, but it does not vindicate the orthodox intuition on which justification is a matter of being evidence-responsive. Finally, I show that, while retaining the main commitments of Williamson's theory of evidence, such as, E=K, my Ecumenical Evidentialism is able to capture the orthodox responsiveness intuition about epistemic justification.

This dissertation constructively explores the implications for natural theology of (especially) John McDowell’s anti-Cartesian philosophy of mind and perception. Traditionally, an important element within natural theology is the idea that nature testifies to its creator, thereby making knowledge of a creator available to humans. In traditional accounts, the relevant knowledge is usually conceived as inferential. From observations of “the things that have been made” (Rom 1: 20), we may reason our way to the existence of a creator. The dissertation presents an alternative construal of creation’s testimony. It argues that biological nature may have expressive properties of a similar kind as human behaviour and art seem to have. We may be able to perceive nature as creation, i.e., as expressive of the mind of a creator. The knowledge of a creator acquired from nature is, according to this construal, perceptual rather than inferential. The viability of the dissertation’s suggestion depends, however, on the rejection of certain common and fundamental assumptions about the nature of mind and perception – assumptions that may rightly be called “Cartesian.” In chapters 1-3, a radically anti-Cartesian outlook on mind and perception, drawn mainly from McDowell’s work, is presented. The outlook (labelled “open-mindedness”) conceives the mind as a system of essentially world-involving capacities. One such capacity is perception, which is portrayed as (when all goes well) a direct, cognitive openness to the world. Chapter 4 argues that open-mindedness makes an attractive construal of our knowledge of “other minds” available. Human behaviour may, as McDowell suggests, be construed as having expressive properties, i.e., perceivable properties the instantiation of which logically entails the instantiation of certain mental properties. The main problem confronting this idea is the so-called “argument from pretence” – a version of the more general “argument from illusion.” The fact that behaviour that is the result of pretence can be indistinguishable, for an observer, from behaviour that is genuinely expressive of the mental property pain, can seem to entail that it is impossible to perceive that somebody else is in pain. It is argued that accepting the outlook of open-mindedness and the view of perception it includes dissolves this problem and makes it possible to construe (some of) our knowledge of the mental states of other people as perceptual rather than inferential knowledge. Chapter 5 argues that the same philosophical moves that dissolve the “problem of other minds” also can be used to overcome the problems confronting the (from a Christian perspective) attractive idea that nature may be perceptibly expressive of the mind of a creator. It is argued that the idea that other phenomena than human behaviour can be genuinely expressive of mind is not at all counter-intuitive. Artworks have, for instance, (according to a common view) expressive properties that make something of the mental life of the artist available to others. Furthermore, many people seem to have experiences in which natural structures appear to them as intentionally created. Even atheists report that biological organisms strike them as “designed.” Experiences in which natural phenomena appear to the subject as intentionally created or “designed” are candidates for being veridical perceptions of expressive properties in nature. It is argued that the suggested construal of biological nature as expressive of the mind of a creator is completely compatible with the fact that biological species have evolved by natural selection. Chapter 6 briefly reflects on the consequences of the dissertation’s argument for Christian theology.