Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 3, HT23)

epistemology reading group

Recent years have seen the revival of a traditional presentational account of knowledge (Ayers and Antognazza (2019), Antognazza (2020), Sylvan (ms)), according to which occurrent knowledge is, at least in paradigm cases, a presentational mental state.  The most ambitious version of the presentational account predicts that occurrent inferential knowledge is a kind of epistemic seeing, not different in kind from most perceptual knowledge.  This prediction raises more acute versions of puzzles about the relationship between inferential knowledge, perceptual knowledge and judgment that were raised earlier in the literature on E=K.  To resolve these puzzles, I suggest that we need a distinction in kind between two forms of epistemic priority.  I suggest that we cannot, however, maintain this distinction without either (1) taking a stand on questions about cognitive architecture and cognitive development that seem to remain open, or (2) reframing the presentational view as thesis in transcendental psychology.  Either way, the presentational view becomes hard to distinguish from standard externalist and Kantian approaches.


Metaphysics and Epistemology Group Convenors: Nick Hughes, Nick Jones and Alex Kaiserman