The second edition of Jack Crumley's An Introduction to Epistemology strikes a balance between the many issues that engage contemporary epistemologists and the contributions of the major historical figures. He shows not only how philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant foreground the contemporary debates, but also why they deserve consideration on their own terms. This is an extensively revised and updated edition of An Introduction to Epistemology. More concise and user-friendly, the book provides an introduction to the central topics in epistemology. While it presents comprehensive accounts of contemporary issues, it also gives serious attention to historical views, such as in the chapters on perception and a priori knowledge. New to this edition is a chapter on feminist epistemology and the inclusion of evidentialism and contextualism. The book is appropriate for undergraduate students taking their first course in epistemology, as well as graduate students, and interested persons. Included are chapters on skepticism, the analysis of knowledge, reliabilism, foundationalism, coherentism, externalism and internalism, naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, a priori knowledge, and perception. Each chapter includes an accessible description of the motivation for various views and explanations of the important arguments and counter-arguments. Students are this led from simpler, more accessible introductions to the more detailed and complex. Covered in some detail are Alvin Goldman's version of reliabilism, Robert Audi on modest foundationalism, Keith Lehrer on coherentism, William Alston's view of justification, Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology, W.V.O. Quine's naturalized epistemology, and Berkeley and Locke on perception, and Leibniz, Kant, and A. J. Ayer on a priori knowledge. The chapter on feminist epistemology looks at several views, including Helen Longino, Sandra Harding, Genevieve Lloyd, Louise Antony, Vrinda Dalmiya, and Linda Alcoff. New work is included on cutting edge topics in epistemology, such as contextualism and perceptual realism. This is the only epistemology text of this sort that contains an entire chapter devoted to feminist epistemology. – Contents : Preface to the First Edition; Preface to the Second Edition; Introduction; The Aims of Epistemology; Some Important Concepts; Tradition and Revision; Key Concepts. – Chapter 1. Skepticism; – 2. An Introduction to the Analysis of Knowledge; – 3. Reliabilism; – 4. Structure and Sources of Justification: Foundationalism; – 5. Structure and Sources of Justification: Coherence Theory; – 6. Externalism and Internalism; – 7. Naturalized Epistemology; – 8. Feminist Epistemology; – 9. A Priori Knowledge; – 10. Perception. – At the end of each chapter: Key Concepts; Review Questions; For Further Study. M.-M. V.

Externalism about knowledge commits one to a modest form of contextualism: whether one knows depends (or may depend) on circumstances (context) of which one has no knowledge. Such modest contextualism requires the rejection of the KK Principle (If S knows that P, then S knows that S knows that P) - something most people would want to reject anyway - but it does not require (though it is compatible with) a rejection of closure. Radical contextualism, on the other hand, goes a step farther and relativizes knowledge not just to the circumstances of the knower, but to the circumstances of the person attributing knowledge. I reject this more radical form of contextualism and suggest that it confuses (or that it can, at least, be avoided by carefully distinguishing) the relativity in what S is said to know from the relativity in whether S knows what S is said to know.

According to Fred Dretske’s externalist theory of knowledge a subject knows that p if and only if she believes that p and this belief is caused or causally sustained by the information that p. Another famous feature of Dretske’s epistemology is his denial that knowledge is closed under known logical entailment. The author argues that, given Dretske’s construal of information, he is in fact committed to the view that both information and knowledge are closed under known entailment. This has far-reaching consequences. For if it is true that, as Dretske also believes, accepting closure leads to skepticism, he must either embrace skepticism or abandon his information theory of knowledge. The latter alternative would seem to be preferable. But taking this route would deprive one of the most powerfully developed externalist epistemologies of its foundation.

Cet article se donne deux objectifs : le premier est de comprendre la place de l’immunologie dans le débat internalisme-externalisme et de définir l’internalisme immunologique; le second est de montrer que les données de l’immunologie très contemporaine sont incompatibles avec la vision internaliste, si bien que non seulement l’immunologie ne peut plus être le socle de l’internalisme, mais qu’elle peut servir de fondement à une thèse différente (thèse intermédiaire qui tend vers l’externalisme), à savoir l’interactionnisme biologique, qui définit une influence réciproque dans laquelle l’organisme produit son environnement en même temps que l’environnement produit l’organisme.

Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own states (or processes) in an indexical mode of presentation. The philosophical debate is concentrating on mental states (or processes). If we characterize self-knowledge by natural language sentences, the most adequate utterance has a structure like “I know that I am in mental state M”. This common sense characterization has to be developed into an adequate description. In this investigation we will tackle two questions: (i) What precisely is the phenomenon referred to by “self-knowledge” and how can we adequately describe a form of self-knowledge which we might realistically enjoy? (ii) Can we have self-knowledge given the fact that the meaning of some words which we utter depends on the environment or the speech community? The theory we defend argues that we have to distinguish the public meaning of utterances, on the one hand, and the mental representations which are constituting a mental state of an individual, on the other. Self-knowledge should be characterized on the level of mental representations while the semantics of utterances self-attributing mental states should be treated separately. Externalism is only true for the public meaning of utterances but not for beliefs and other mental states including self-knowledge.

In this paper I outline and defend an introspectionist account of authoritative self-knowledge for a certain class of cases, ones in which a subject is both thinking and thinking about a current, conscious thought. My account is distinctive in a number of ways, one of which is that it is compatible with the truth of externalism—the view that the contents of subjects’ intentional states are individuation-dependent on factors external to their minds. It is thus decidedly anti-Cartesian, despite being introspectionist. My argument proceeds in three stages. A virtue of the position I develop is that the epistemic features on which it is based also apply to sensations and to non-episodic intentional states, to the extent that one has authoritative knowledge of them. However, despite the appeal to analogies with observable properties of objects of perception, the account is not a ‘perceptual’ model of such knowledge in the sense that those such as Shoemaker, Burge and others have in mind. Because the features on which the analogy is based are abstract and general, they are not tied to cases of observation alone. Those who appeal to such phenomena as ‘intellectual experience’ (Burge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96, 91–116, 1996) or ‘intellectual intuition’ (Bealer, Philosophical perspectives, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 29–55, 1999) in their accounts of authoritative self-knowledge may well appeal to such features. This, amongst other factors, distinguishes the position from other introspectionist ones in a way that makes it immune to standard objections to perceptual models of self-knowledge.

Dans cet article, l’auteur nomme «externalisme» la thèse de la pénétration du contenu des états mentaux par l’environnement physique, et «anti-individualisme» la thèse de la pénétration du contenu des états mentaux d’un individu par la communauté à laquelle il appartient. Il fait valoir que la version du physicalisme des particuliers défendue par Davidson est compatible avec l’externalisme mais qu’elle est incompatible avec l’anti-individualisme préconisé par Burge.

This paper provides a rationale for advocating pancritical rationalism. First, it argues that the advocate of critical rationalism may accept (but not be internally justified in accepting) that there is ‘justification’ in an externalist sense, specifically that certain procedures can track truth, and suggest that this recognition should inform practice; that one should try to determine which sources and methods are appropriate for various aspects of inquiry, and to what extent they are. Second, it argues that if there is external justification, then a critical rationalist is better off than a dogmatist from an evolutionary perspective.

This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of the idea in the work of Dewey and Spencer is considered, as is the impact of recent evolutionary theory on our understanding of the place of mind in nature. – Contents : – Part I. Foundations: 1. Naturalism and teleology; 2. Externalism and internalism; 3. Spencer’s Version; 4. Dewey’s version; 5. On construction; 6. The question of correspondence; – Part II. Models: 7. Adaptive plasticity; 8. The signal detection model; 9. Complex individuals, complex populations. – Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-308) and index.