Précis on Knowing and Checking: an Epistemological Investigation

Acta Analytica, 2023

This paper replies to the comments made in Acta Analytica by Peter Baumann, Kelly Becker, Marian David, Nenad Miščević, Wes Siscoe, and Danilo Šuster on my Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation (Routledge 2019), hereinafter abbreviated as KC. These papers resulted from a workshop organized by the department of philosophy of the University of Maribor. I am very thankful to the organizers of the workshop and to the authors for their comments.

Acta Analytica, 2023

In his recent book, Knowing and Checking, Guido Melchior argues that, when we attempt to check whether p, we tend to think that we do not know p. Melchior then uses this assumption to explain a number of puzzles about knowledge. One outstanding question for Melchior's account, however, is why this tendency exists. After all, Melchior himself argues that checking is not necessary for knowing, so why would we think that we fail to know that p when we are in the midst of checking that p? I will explore one such suggestion for why this occurs, arguing that the connection between checking and inquiry can shed light on the impact that checking has on knowing.

Croatian Journal of Philosophy

The traditional tripartite and tetrapartite analyses describe the conceptual components of propositional knowledge from a universal epistemic point of view. According to the classical analysis, since truth is a necessary condition of knowledge, it does not make sense to talk about "false knowledge" or "knowing wrongly." There are nonetheless some natural languages in which speakers ordinarily make statements about a person's knowing a given subject matter wrongly. In this paper, we first provide a brief analysis of "knowing wrongly" in Turkish. Then, taking Allan Hazlett's recent account of the gap between traditional analyses of knowledge and actual epistemic practices of real cognitive agents as a point of departure, we spell out a non-universalist and nonextensionalist perspective on the value of "knowing wrongly."

Journal of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, 2016

Contemporary philosophy in the west has begun with emphasizing "subjectivism" and the theory of "knowledge". Discussing the nature of knowledge leads inevitably to investigating the nature of "belief". However, it is important to note that knowledge is always something more than mere belief. To demarcate between truthful and untruthful belief we must have certain criteria. In this essay, an analytical approach has been adopted to first present a historical review of the meanings of "knowledge" and then to discuss the three parameters of knowledge (belief, truth, justification) in contemporary epistemology. The main ideas with regard to truthful belief and epistemological justification are investigated within the framework of two approaches: foundationalism and coherentism.

Theoria Revista De Teoria Historia Y Fundamentos De La Ciencia, 2014

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism

Sextus Empiricus’ definition of skepticism as a search for truth still poses great problems for research today. Perhaps the most urgent of these is: How can we reasonably assert the possibility of knowledge and at the same time deny its reality? The paper tries to solve this question by drawing attention to a hitherto neglected variant of skepticism: the so-called critical skepticism. In confrontation with Hume and Kant, Salomon Maimon develops a skeptical position which, with the help of transcendental argumentation, produces a knowing of not-knowing. Maimon defends with Kant (and against Hume) transcendental knowledge which at the same time offers a reason to reject with Hume and against Kant empirical knowledge. By doing so, he distinguishes a knowledge of possibility from a (non-)knowledge of reality, whereby the search for truth—expressed in the assumption that knowledge is possible—is and remains the only truth.

Philosophical Quarterly, 2004

A Priori Justification. By Albert Casullo.Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs Externalism, Foundations vs Virtues. By Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa.New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge. Edited by Susana Nuccetelli.Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public. By Alvin I. Goldman.The Sceptics: Contemporary Essays. Edited by Steven Luper.Thinking about Knowing. By Jay F. Rosenberg.

In this paper, we will present, on the one hand, those formulations that have motivated research on epistemic value, and the other, discuss the fact that the recent discussions about the value of knowledge has begun to explore the pos- sibility that there is not knowledge that has a special epistemic value, but another epistemic state, namely the understanding.

Synthese, 2017

On his 60th birthday Pascal Engel was presented with a collection of more than fifty 1 1 papers authored by prestigious philosophers that reflected his long career of promotion 2 and development of analytic philosophy in and out of Europe. 1 This special issue brings 3 together a selection of those papers centred on the topics of truth and epistemic norms.

Human Knowing: Our Hopes and Our Limits ©Harold I. Brown I have invoked, although not copied, Russell's (1948) title because I aim to pursue a traditional part of epistemology that has fallen into neglect in recent decades, but do so in a contemporary context. This is the project that Hume described, with his usual eloquence, in the Introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another.