Jennifer Nagel

Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes

Why do our intuitive knowledge ascriptions shift when a subjects practical interests are mentioned? Many efforts to answer this question have focused on empirical linguistic evidence for context sensitivity in knowledge claims, but the empirical psychology of belief formation and attribution also merits attention. The present paper examines a major psychological factor (called ‘need-for-closure’) relevant to ascriptions involving practical interests. Need-for-closure plays an important role in determining whether one has a settled belief; it also influences the accuracy of ones cognition. Given these effects, it is a mistake to assume that high- and low-stakes subjects provided with the same initial evidence are perceived to enjoy belief formation that is the same as far as truth-conducive factors are concerned. This mistaken assumption has underpinned contextualist and interest-relative invariantist treatments of cases in which contrasting knowledge ascriptions are elicited by descriptions of subjects with the same initial information and different stakes. The paper argues that intellectualist invariantism can easily accommodate such cases.

The empiricist conception of experience

Does a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience require us to give up any claim to non-trivial a priori knowledge? One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge — if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as a memory or daydream. What is surprising is that we can find elements of this essentially Kantian line about experience even in the work of empiricists such as Locke and Bas van Fraassen.

Motivating Williamson's Model Gettier Cases

Abstract Williamson has a strikingly economical way of showing how justified true belief can fail to constitute knowledge: he models a class of Gettier cases by means of two simple constraints. His constraints can be shown to rely on some unstated assumptions about the relationship between reality and appearance. These assumptions are epistemologically non-trivial but can be defended as plausible idealizations of our actual predicament, in part because they align well with empirical work on the metacognitive dimension of experience.