<p> In this dissertation I examine whether and how knowledge or cognitive achievements like it have final value. I first give an account of epistemic value according to which it is not a unique kind of value, but rather value simpliciter which attaches to epistemic objects. I then critically evaluate recent prominent accounts of the value of knowledge and find them lacking. I argue that both virtue- and curiosity-based accounts of the value of knowledge fail to ground universal final value for it. I conclude that knowledge does not in fact have universal final value, and propose my own view that not it, but understanding has what I call universal preconditional value: it is a precondition for the formation of values at all.</p>

Every time we act in an effort to attain our epistemic goals, we express our epistemic agency. The present study argues that a proper understanding of the actions and goals relevant to expressions of such agency can be used to make ameliorative recommendations about how the ways in which we actually express our agency can be brought in line with how we should express our agency. More specifically, it is argued that the actions relevant to such expressions should be identified with the variety of actions characteristic of inquiry; that contrary to what has been maintained by recent pluralists about epistemic value, the only goal relevant to inquiry is that of forming true belief; and that our dual tendency for bias and overconfidence gives us reason to implement epistemically paternalistic practices that constrain our freedom to exercise agency in substantial ways. For example, we are often better off by gathering only a very limited amount of information, having our selection of methods be greatly restricted, and spending our time less on reflecting than on simply reading off the output of a simple algorithm. In other words, when it comes to our freedom to express epistemic agency, more is not always better. In fact, less is often so much more.

<p> The dissertation is about the significance for, and impact upon public administration of the correspondence theory of truth or veridicality, and its underlying epistemological assumptions. The underlying thesis is that, unduly influenced by the success of the natural sciences, and na&iuml;ve in accepting their claims to objectivity, many disciplines have sought to emulate them. There are two principle objections. Firstly, all other considerations aside, the supposedly objectivistic methodologies apparently applied to the explanation and prediction of the behavior of interactions of physical objects, may simply be inappropriate to certain other areas of inquiry; and more specifically objectivist methodologies are indeed inappropriate to understanding of human subjects, and their behavior, relations and interactions, and thus to public administration. The second objection is that it is of course logically impossible for any supposedly empirical discipline, as the natural sciences claim to be, to justify the belief in a supposedly objective realm of things-in-themselves existing outside, beyond, or independently of the changing, interrupted and different &lsquo;appearances&rsquo; or experiences, to which an empirical science is qua empirical, necessarily restricted. Correspondence of any empirical observations or appearances (and the consequent or presupposed theoretical explanations) to an objective realm, upon which the claim to objectivity is based, is unverifiable. </p><p> In light of the above it becomes evident that far from being objective, the natural sciences themselves, and the empirical observations upon which they are supposedly grounded, are subject to conceptual mediation and subjective interpretation; subjective and inter-subjective coherence replacing objective correspondence as the criterion of veridicality. Consequently it becomes clear that the presuppositions and prejudices of the observers enter, in the forms of concepts and preconceptions, into the very observations, and even more so into the theoretical constructions, or theories, of the natural, and indeed human and social sciences, and their claims to be authoritative and true. Subsequent discussion is then focused on both the coherence of individuals&rsquo; experiences and understanding, and their inter-subjective coherence &ndash; which both rises from and constitutes, a &ldquo;community&rdquo;. The role of language facilitates such coherence.</p>

<p> My dissertation lies at the philosophical intersection of the American pragmatist tradition and contemporary epistemology. By treating truth, justification, and belief as matters of degree, I develop a measure of knowledge that captures all of our fundamental intuitions while providing answers to the problems of epistemic luck, skepticism, and scientific pessimism. </p><p> Traditionally, knowledge is understood as justified true belief that is not due to luck. My project follows this general outline. First, I describe the pragmatist understanding of truth first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in the late nineteenth century. My first chapter offers Peirce's understanding of truth as the best explanation of our intuitive understanding of what it is for a proposition to be the case and shows how we can understand Peirce's theory as compatible with contemporary theories of truth. </p><p> In my second chapter, I develop a theory of belief such that an agent believes a proposition when she acts as if that proposition were a rule governing her behavior. On this view, beliefs are theoretical entities posited to make sense of other agents' actions. Following this account of belief, I describe what it is for a belief to be true and argue that sense of truth in which beliefs are true is best understood as an approximation of the full descriptive truth. </p><p> My third, fourth, and fifth chapters are an account of justification. Chapter 3 is a descriptive account of synchronic justification: we all reject or accept propositions in accordance with maximizing the coherence of our belief-networks. Chapters 4 and 5 articulate and then defend a new measure of diachronic justification, which is a measure of the degree to which a belief is appropriately revisable and therefore embeddable in an ongoing process of fallibilist inquiry. I develop a novel formal quantification of methodological justification and show that it gives plausible results when applied to popular cases. </p><p> My final chapter brings justification, truth, and belief together into a scalar knowledge measure. I locate my theory in ongoing epistemic inquiry, describing its conceptual advantages over rival theories as well as its ability to replicate their successes.</p>

<p> My dissertation aims to provide a virtue reliabilist account of the epistemic effects of social location. I use a reliabilist theory of virtue epistemology as a framework for understanding the epistemic effects of social marginalization and privilege. </p><p> To do so, I describe how marginalization and privilege affect social cognition. I argue that social cognition is underwritten by various social cognitive capacities, some of which can and do qualify as intellectual virtues. Understanding these capacities as virtues elucidates how epistemic benefits and harms accrue to agents as a result of identity and associated social status. </p><p> Additionally, I argue that drawing on an information economy framework illuminates the epistemic effects of social location on groups. Specifically, I use John Greco&rsquo;s distinction between transmission and generation, two functions of knowledge with distinct epistemic norms, to explain how structural marginalization and privilege work to influence the movement of knowledge into, within, and among marginalized and privileged epistemic communities. </p><p> Finally, I describe the relationship of the virtues to knowledge justification. In simplified terms, I argue that knowledge demands both reliability and responsibility. Responsibility involves those dispositions an agent manifests when sensitive to the reliability of the evidence for her beliefs. Such sensitivity takes environment into account, and for humans, that environment is generally social. So, I argue that responsibility involves sensitivity to the social nature of human knowledge. I explain what the relationship between types of virtues means for the epistemic effects of social location, and how that relationship suggests potential correctives to some epistemic harms.</p><p>

Bayesian Epistemology is a general framework for thinking about agents who have beliefs that come in degrees. Theories in this framework give accounts of rational belief and rational belief change, which share two key features: (i) rational belief states are represented with probability functions, and (ii) rational belief change results from the acquisition of evidence. This dissertation focuses specifically on the second feature. I pose the Evidence Question: What is it to have evidence? Before addressing this question we must have an understanding of Bayesian Epistemology. The first chapter argues that we should understand Bayesian Epistemology as giving us theories that are evaluative and not action-guiding. I reach this verdict after considering the popular ‘ought’-implies-‘can’ objection to Bayesian Epistemology. The second chapter argues that it is important for theories in Bayesian Epistemology to answer the Evidence Question, and distinguishes between internalist and externalist answers. The third and fourth chapters present and defend a specific answer to the Evidence Question. The account is inspired by reliabilist accounts of justification, and attempts to understand what it is to have evidence by appealing solely to considerations of reliability. Chapter 3 explains how to understand reliability, and how the account fits with Bayesian Epistemology, in particular, the requirement that an agent’s evidence receive probability 1. Chapter 4 responds to objections, which maintain that the account gives the wrong verdict in a variety of situations including skeptical scenarios, lottery cases, scientific cases, and cases involving inference. After slight modifications, I argue that my account has the resources to answer the objections. The fifth chapter considers the possibility of losing evidence. I show how my account can model these cases. To do so, however, we require a modification to Conditionalization, the orthodox principle governing belief change. I present such a modification. The sixth and seventh chapters propose a new understanding of Dutch Book Arguments, historically important arguments for Bayesian principles. The proposal shows that the Dutch Book Arguments for implausible principles are defective, while the ones for plausible principles are not. The final chapter is a conclusion.

In this dissertation, I reconcile our knowledge of our own minds with philosophical naturalism. Philosophers traditionally hold that our knowledge of our own minds is especially direct and authoritative in comparison with other domains of knowledge. I introduce the subject in the first chapter. In the second and third chapters, I address the idea that we know our own minds directly. If self-knowledge is direct, it must not be grounded on anything more epistemically basic. This creates a puzzle for all epistemologists. For the naturalist, the puzzle is especially tricky. To say that self-knowledge has no epistemic ground threatens the naturalist’s ability to understand it as psychologically real. I argue that the idea that self-knowledge is direct is not well motivated and that models of direct self-knowledge have fundamental problems. In the fourth and fifth chapters, I examine first-person authority. I distinguish between epistemic authority, or being in a better position than others to know, and nonepistemic authority, or being immune to challenge according to some conventional norm. I argue that we have only limited epistemic authority over our own minds. I then consider whether there may be an interesting non-epistemic authority attached to the first-person perspective. This would locate first-person authority in connection with our responsibility for our own minds. I argue that this sort of authority may exist, but is unlikely to threaten naturalism without further anti-naturalist commitments in the philosophy of mind. In the final two chapters, I explore the possibility that the underlying disagreements between naturalists and anti-naturalists are about the nature of belief. I consider what failures of self-knowledge might demonstrate about the nature of belief. I show how, with the proper understanding of belief, a theory of self-knowledge can assuage some of these worries. Having adopted a conception of belief that makes sense for philosophy and empirical psychology, I outline a positive theory of self-knowledge and suggest directions for future research.

I develop and argue for a version of epistemic contextualism - the view that the truth-values of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions depend upon and vary with the context in which they are uttered - that emphasises the roles played by both the practical interests of those in the context and the epistemic practices of the community of which they are part in determining the truth-values of their ‘knowledge’ ascriptions (the ‘basic contextualist thesis’). My favoured way of putting it is that the truth of a ‘knowledge’ ascription of the form ‘S knows that p’ requires that the subject of the ascription can rule out the relevant alternatives in which not-p, where the relevant alternatives are the ones that those in the ascriber’s context have a reason to consider. What alternatives those in the context have a reason to consider depends on their practical situation and on what alternatives are generally considered relevant within their community. I call this ‘interests contextualism’. The thesis splits into three parts. First, I deal with what I call ‘linguistic objections’, which purport to show that there’s no linguistic evidence that the expression ‘knows’ is context-sensitive (Hawthorne 2004; Stanley 2005a), and objections concerning the way ‘knows’ behaves in intra- and inter-contextual disagreement reports (Cappelen & Hawthorne 2009; MacFarlane 2005). I argue that there are a number of ways in which contextualists can deal with these objections. Consequently, they provide no reason to reject contextualism. Second, there are a number of ways of going beyond the basic contextualist thesis, and I argue that the best way is along the lines indicated above, viz. interests contextualism. In the process I articulate a number of desiderata for a contextualist account of the features of context that are responsible for contextual variation in the truth-values of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions. I argue that, unlike its main rival - which I call ‘conversational contextualism’ (Blome-Tillmann 2009a; Cohen 1999; DeRose 2009; Lewis 1996) - interests contextualism can satisfy all of the desiderata. Consequently, interests contextualism is preferable to conversational contextualism. Third, I argue that there is good reason to prefer interests contextualism to its noncontextualist rivals, strict invariantism (Brown 2006; Hazlett 2009; Pritchard 2010; Rysiew 2001), sensitive invariantism (Fantl & McGrath 2009; Hawthorne 2004; Stanley 2005a) and relativism (MacFarlane 2005; Richard 2004). The objections dealt with in the first part are meant to provide the main reason to prefer a sort of relativism to interests contextualism. Consequently, the upshot of the first part is that relativism is off the table. The considerations that tell in favour of interests contextualism and against sensitive invariantism are of two types. First, I argue that interests contextualism can deal with a wider range of cases than sensitive invariantism. Second, I argue that the influential account of the function of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions developed in Edward Craig (1990) tells against sensitive invariantism and in favour of interests contextualism. I also argue that the second consideration tells against strict invariantism as much as sensitive invariantism. Consequently, I conclude that interests contextualism is preferable to all of its rivals.

This dissertation is a contribution to two fields of study: applied social epistemology and the philosophy of technology. That is, it is a philosophical study, based on empirical fieldwork research, of social and technical knowledge. Social knowledge here is defined as knowledge acquired through the interactions between epistemic agents and social institutions. Technical knowledge is here defined as knowledge about technical artefacts (including how to design, produce, and operate them). I argue that the two must be considered collectively both in the sense that they are best considered in the light of collectivist approaches to knowledge and in the sense that they must be considered together as part of the same analysis. An analysis solely of the interactions between human epistemic agents operating within social institutions does not give adequate credit to the technological artefacts that help to produce knowledge; an analysis of technical knowledge which does not include an analysis of how that technical knowledge is generated within a rich and complex social network would be similarly incomplete. I argue that it is often inappropriate to separate analyses of technical knowledge from social knowledge and that although not all social knowledge is technical knowledge, all technical knowledge is, by definition, social. Further, the influence of technology on epistemic cultures is so pervasive that it also forms or 'envelops' what we consider to be an epistemic agent.

Introduction: I lay out the broad contours of my thesis: a defence of mathematical nominalism, and nominalism more generally. I discuss the possibility of metaphysics, and the relationship of nominalism to naturalism and pragmatism. Chapter 2: I delineate an account of abstractness. I then provide counter-arguments to claims that mathematical objects make a di erence to the concrete world, and claim that mathematical objects are abstract in the sense delineated. Chapter 3: I argue that the epistemological problem with abstract objects is not best understood as an incompatibility with a causal theory of knowledge, or as an inability to explain the reliability of our mathematical beliefs, but resides in the epistemic luck that would infect any belief about abstract objects. To this end, I develop an account of epistemic luck that can account for cases of belief in necessary truths and apply it to the mathematical case. Chapter 4: I consider objections, based on (meta)metaphysical considerations and linguistic data, to the view that the existential quantifier expresses existence. I argue that these considerations can be accommodated by an existentially committing quantifier when the pragmatics of quantified sentences are properly understood. I develop a semi-formal framework within which we can define a notion of nominalistic adequacy. I show how our notion of nominalistic adequacy can show why it is legitimate for the nominalist to make use of platonistic “assumptions” in inference-making. Chapter 5: I turn to the application of mathematics in science, including explanatory applications, and its relation to a number of indispensability arguments. I consider also issues of realism and anti-realism, and their relation to these arguments. I argue that abstraction away from pragmatic considerations has acted to skew the debate, and has obscured possibilities for a nominalistic understanding of mathematical practices. I end by explaining the notion of a pragmatic meta-vocabulary, and argue that this notion can be used to carve out a new way of locating our ontological commitments. Chapter 6: I show how the apparatus developed in earlier chapters can be utilised to roll out the nominalist project to other domains of discourse. In particular, I consider propositions and types. I claim that a unified account of nominalism across these domains is available. Conclusion: I recapitulate the claims of my thesis. I suggest that the goal of mathematical enquiry is not descriptive knowledge, but understanding.