Epistemic Closure Principle

It has been argued that an advantage of the safety account over the sensitivity account is that the safety account preserves epistemic closure; while the sensitivity account implies epistemic closure failure. However, the argument fails to take the method-relativity of the modal conditions on knowledge, viz, sensitivity and safety, into account. In this paper, I argue that the sensitivity account and the safety account are on a par with respect to epistemic closure once the method-relativity of the modal conditions is taken into account. Therefore, epistemic closure is no longer an arbiter in the debate.

There are always two sides to a door. It has two faces without being two-faced. It is derived by merging two Old English forms: the singular "dor" and the plural “duru."

To be a door is to embrace multiplicities.

To be a door is to make choices all your life. More accurately to be a door is to perpetually unmake the choice that you last made; to choose between being opened, or being closed.

To be a door is to choose without taking sides.

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"Paprika! is a window into emerging discourse from Yale School of Architecture and Yale School of Art." For the full edition edited by Jane van Velden, Paul DeFazio & Jerry Chow, visit  https://yalepaprika.com/folds/reading-the-room

Cross Reference. See also other elements of architecture in the Articles section:

Door Window Tap Switch
Windows
Balcony

This paper contains an exposition of the significance of Descartes’ Dream Argument in skepticism. I have tried to show how Descartes’ search for certainty leads him to put forth the Dream Argument as an argument for skepticism of senses. In the way of countering some of the traditional objections against the Dream Argument’s crucial premise that the state of waking cannot be distinguished from sleep, I have tried to highlight on the point that any criterion of distinction between the two states fails to do its job insofar as the criterion ultimately falls back upon some sense perceptions. Towards the conclusion of this paper, I have tried to show how the Dream Argument presupposes the principle of Knowledge Closure and, then, employing Dretske’s Zebra Example, suggested that a refutation of the validity of the Knowledge Closure can refute the Dream Argument as an argument for skepticism of senses.

Descartes’s Evil Demon Argument has been the subject of many reconstructions in recent analytic debates. Some have proposed a reconstruction with a principle of Infallibility, others with a principle of Closure of Knowledge, others with more original principles. In this paper, I propose a new reconstruction, which relies on the combination of two principles, namely the Meta-Coherence principle (defended by Huemer) and the principle of Closure of Justification (best defended by Hawthorne). I argue that the argument construed in this way is the best
interpretation of what is really at play in the Evil Demon intuition, and also that this argument is dialectically much stronger than previous reconstructions. If this is right, then the “Closure plus Meta-Coherence” argument is what anti-sceptics should really be attacking.

On:e of the many challenges W.E.B. Du Bois faced in the study of African Americans was the pervasive racism that affected
how social scientists acquired data on people of African descent.
Moreover, the historical reality in which such data were gathered
was one in which there were indications of genocidal aims on the part
of the dominant population. Du Bois needed to show that African
Americans should receive rigorous study and that rigorous study was
a part of the struggle for African American upliftment. In his effort to
address both challenges, Du Bois, in effect, developed several bases
for rigorous human study that included the importance of recognizing
the humanity of the subjects under study. He touched upon several
central concerns in the philosophy of the human sciences including
the viability of studying metastable subjects; the relationship
between epistemological and ontological categories in the cultural
sphere  and the lived reality of action in the face of behavioral imposition.

Here, I shall be examining the viability of a Moorean response to the Argument from Ignorance; i.e., one that tries to rebut the argument by denying its first premise that we cannot have knowledge that we are not BIVs. After first explicating the Argument from Ignorance in detail, I then go on to try and motivate this approach by critically examining two alternative approaches to dealing with radical scepticism: closure-denial, and attributer contextualism. Finding them wanting, I then turn to a Moorean 'argument from knowledge', and diagnose why as it stands such an approach is ineffective, before going on to explore whether one can wed such an argument to an externalist framework in order to provide a more satisfying answer to the question of how one can know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, one that does not simply beg the question against the sceptic. Finding such a neo-Moorean approach to be initially promising, I then conclude by arguing that ultimately it winds up saving knowledge simpliciter only at the cost of losing rationally-grounded knowledge to the sceptic's grasp, and such a result is highly unpalatable.

Articles
Patrick BONDY, How to Understand and Solve the Lottery Paradox
William A. BRANT, Levelling the Analysis of Knowledge via Methodological Scepticism
Caroline Alexandra MATHIEU, The Confrontation Between Qualitative and Quantitative Researchers: A Different Article, a Daring Publication
Peter MURPHY, Another Blow to Knowledge from Knowledge
Anguel S. STEFANOV, Zeno’s Paradoxes Revisited

Debate
Jimmy Alfonso LICON, Dissecting the Suicide Machine Argument: Insights from the Hales – Licon Debate
Clayton LITTLEJOHN, Are Epistemic Reasons Ever Reasons to Promote?
Nicolás LO GUERCIO, Reply to Palmira

This study provides a critical appraisal of Duncan Pritchard’s (2012) argument to the effect that ability to preserve certain eminently plausible transmission and/or closure principles for knowledge serves as a powerful adequacy test on alternative accounts of so-called Wittgensteinian certainties or hinge commitments. I argue that Pritchard fails to establish this claim and that the transmission test does not favor his favorite conception over alternative conceptions premised on the idea that hinge commitments are not supportable via evidential-cognitive routes.

Generally, an epistemic fallibilist considers it reasonable to claim, “I know that P, but I may be wrong.” An epistemic infallibilist, on the other hand, would consider this claim absurd. I argue initially that infallibilism presents more advantages in its assertion of the claim’s absurdity than fallibilism does in making the claim. One, infallibilism is not faulted with the propensity for violations of epistemic closure that beleaguers some fallibilist accounts, due in part to the latter’s problematic shunting of fallible epistemic standards across inferential chains. Two, infallibilism is more easily modelled doxastically than fallibilism, as the former’s understanding of certainty is more tractable than the latter’s idea of what counts as a viable standard of fallibility. A rectification of these fallibilist issues may then be called upon to motivate gradualist variants of fallibilism. For epistemic gradualism, the problematic modellability and shunting of standards is curtailed via an awareness that the standard for knowledge is just one out of many along a gradient that includes, at one extreme, the infallibilist standard of certainty. Specifically, first, gradualism, along with infallibilism, can be modelled doxastically through elucidating upon an obtaining relation between doubt and knowledge; next, the problem with violating closure, although not generally applicable to infallibilism, can be answered by gradualism with a reasonable denial of closure altogether that makes precise which epistemic standard is relevant for which part of an inferential chain; lastly, these modelling resources can be appropriated, by both gradualism and infallibilism, to successfully address a doxastically pertinent form of closure violation called rational self-doubt.

Epistemologists have proposed various norms of assertion to explain when a speaker is in an epistemic position to assert a proposition.  In this paper I propose a distinct necessary condition on assertibility: that a speaker should assert only what she sensitively believes, where a subject's belief is sensitive just in case the subject would not hold it if it were false.  I argue that the Sensitivity Rule underwrites simple explanations for three key features of assertibility that pose explanatory challenges to other prominent proposals: the fact that assertibility is open under known entailment, the general impropriety of assertions that a lottery ticket has lost made purely on the basis of the speaker's knowledge of the odds, and the fact that assertibility varies widely with features of the conversational context.  I close by considering three distinct roles the Sensitivity Rule might play in the overall theory of assertibility.

Duncan Pritchard recently proposed a Wittgensteinian solution to closure-based skepticism. According to Wittgenstein, all epistemic systems assume certain truths.The notions that we are not disembodied brains, that the Earth has existed for a long time and that one's name is such-and-such all function as "hinge commitments." Pritchard views a hinge commitment as a positive propositional attitude that is not a belief. Because closure principles concern only knowledge-apt beliefs, they do not apply to hinge commitments. Thus, from the fact that a subject knows that he is sitting
in a room, and the fact that the subject's sitting in a room entails his bodily existence, it does not follow that the subject also knows that he is not an envatted brain. This paper rejects Pritchard's non-belief reading of hinge commitments. I start by showing that the non-belief reading fails to solve the skeptical paradox because the reasons that Pritchard uses to support the non-belief reading do not exempt hinge propositions from closure principles. I then proceed to argue that the non-belief reading is false as it
claims that hinge commitments, unlike ordinary beliefs, are rationally unresponsive—with the help of a scenario in which a subject's experience is internally chaotic, we can safely conclude that the hinge commitment that one is not systematically mistaken about the world is equally responsive to one's evidential situations.

Knowledge is closed under (known) implication, according to standard theories. Orthodoxy can allow, though, that *apparent* counterexamples to closure exist, much as Kripkeans recognize the existence of illusions of possibility (IPOs)which they seek to explain away. Should not everyone, orthodox or not, want tomake sense of ‘‘intimations of openness’’ (IONs)? This paper compares two stylesof explanation: (1) evidence that boosts P ’s probability need not boost that of its consequence Q; (2) evidence bearing on P’s subject matter may not bear on the subject matter of Q.

One of the many challenges W.E.B. Du Bois faced in the study of African Americans was the pervasive racism that affected how social scientists acquired data on people of African descent. Moreover, the historical reality in which such data were gathered was one in which there were indications of genocidal aims on the part of the dominant population. Du Bois

This article discusses the various dimensions of East Central Europe's closure with the communist past, and then assesses the impact of transitional justice measures in the closure with communism. Special attention is paid to the so called 'lustration', which in the view of the author performs important functions in transitions to democratic regimes, related to the reconstruction of a moral and rational community, and to the closure with the communist past. The article shows that the failures and controversies surrounding 'lustration' were due to its radical potential of reconstruction of a moral–rational democratic community, and also to specific socio–political factors of the post–communist ECE. What specific features of ECE post–communist transitions and of lustration conducted to the recurrence of debates related to the communist past is a question that has not been addressed heretofore, despite a fairly well–developed literature on post–communist administrative justice.

In this paper, I consider the so-called Access Problem for Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism (2012). After reconstructing Pritchard’s own response to the Access Problem, I argue that in order to assess whether Pritchard’s response is a satisfying one, we first need an account of the notion of ‘Reflective Access’ that underpins Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism. I provide three interpretations of the notion of Reflective Access: a metaphysical interpretation, a folk interpretation, and an epistemic interpretation. I argue that none of these three interpretations comes without problems. I conclude that, until we have a clear and unproblematic account of Reflective Access, the Access Problem remains a challenge for Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism.

Despite their substantial appeal, closure principles have fallen on hard times. Both anti-luck conditions on knowledge and the defeasibility of knowledge look to be in tension with natural ways of articulating single-premise closure principles (Lasonen-Aarnio, 2008, Schechter, 2013). The project of this paper is to show that plausible theses in the epistemology of testimony ('transmission theses') face problems structurally identical to those faced by closure principles. First I show how Lasonen-Aarnio's claim that there is a tension between single premise closure and anti-luck constraints on knowledge can be extended to make trouble for transmission theses. Second, I show how Schechter's claim that there is a tension between single premise closure and the thought that knowledge is defeasible can be extended to make trouble for transmission theses. I end the paper by sketching the consequences of this trouble for the dialectic in the epistemology of testimony.

The brain-in-a-vat skeptic assumes that something we apparently do not know – that we are not systematically deceived – follows from something we thought it obvious that we knew, that we have hands, say. My thesis is that this implication claim cannot be made out without destroying the skeptical threat of the overall argument. This reply to the skeptic does not require an assumption or denial of closure of knowledge under known implication, or Moorean-style dogmatism, but only the fact that strong conclusions do not follow deductively from weak premises. Thus, the brain-in-a-vat skeptic leaves our knowledge just as it was found.

This is a critical commentary on Pritchard's book Epistemic Angst. In Section 2, I present the closure-based radical skeptical paradox. Then in Section 3, I sketch Pritchard’s undercutting response to this paradox. Finally, in Section 4, I put forward two concerns about Pritchard’s response and I also propose a reading of hinge commitments, the ability reading, that might put some pressure on Pritchard’s own reading of these commitments.

A skeptical hypothesis argument introduces a scenario – a skeptical hypothesis – where our beliefs about some subject matter are systematically false, but our experiences do not discriminate between the case where our beliefs are true and the skeptical scenario where they are not. Because we are unable to rule out this scenario, we do not know that any of our beliefs about the subject matter are true. As one famous skeptical hypothesis argument goes: I cannot rule out the hypothesis that I am being deceived by a demon. Therefore, I cannot know anything about the external world. By similar token, a moral skeptical hypothesis argument is an argument that moral knowledge is impossible for
agents like us in situations like ours, because we are unable to rule out some skeptical hypothesis.

In this paper, I defend a moral skeptical hypothesis argument – the Moral Closure Argument – against a number of objections. This argument is not novel, but it has rarely been taken seriously because it is widely held that the argument has serious flaws. My task in this paper is to argue that these supposed flaws are merely apparent; the Moral Closure Argument is much more potent than it might seem.

According to the epistemic closure principle, if someone knows some proposition P and also knows that P entails Q, she knows Q as well. This principle is often defended by appealing to its intuitiveness. But only recently was epistemic closure put to the empirical test: Turri ran experiments in which closure is (allegedly) violated in folk knowledge ascriptions surprisingly often. We disagree with this diagnosis. It is by no means obvious which experimentally testable hypothesis proponents of epistemic closure should accept. In this paper we formulate and test a hypothesis different from Turri's. We argue that our hypothesis is more apt for empirically testing epistemic closure. In a series of experiments we manipulated the strength of entailment between two propositions and found that the stronger the entailment was, the lower was the proportion of participants who violated closure, indicating that folk knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to entailment. We conclude that closure is a principle of folk epistemology after all.

It is tempting to think that multi premise closure creates a special class of paradoxes having to do with the accumulation of risks, and that these paradoxes could be escaped by rejecting the principle, while still retaining single premise closure. I argue that single premise deduction is also susceptible to risks. I show that what I take to be the strongest argument for rejecting multi premise closure is also an argument for rejecting single premise closure. Because of the symmetry between the principles, they come as a package: either both will have to be rejected or both will have to be revised.

This article is a response to an important objection that Sherrilyn Roush has made to the standard closure-based argument for skepticism, an argument that has been studied over the past couple of decades. If Roush's objection is on the mark, then this would be a quite significant finding. We argue that her objection fails.

It is widely thought that if knowledge requires sensitivity, knowledge is not closed because sensitivity is not closed. This paper argues that there is no valid argument from sensitivity failure to non-closure of knowledge. Sensitivity does not imply non-closure of knowledge. Closure considerations cannot be used to adjudicate between safety and sensitivity accounts of knowledge.

How can we move on as a nation if we have yet to settle the score of our bloody past?
How could we as a country reach or attain closure, if we have yet to exorcise and be at peace with all the ghost of our deadly and gloomy yesterday?
What is the significance of the said apology?
The purpose of the said apology is to admit one’s crimes against the people and the nation as a whole, in a sense to the rest of the world too. Said apology is utterly necessary to admit unhesitatingly and to bear responsibility to the said wrong act, to atone for the sins and transgressions of our predecessors, to remember the countless dead, the innumerable disappeared victims, all those who were abused, violated and raped by our local military industrial brainless toy soldiers and fanatical bastard perverts, to honor the memory and legacy of all those who stood, resisted, struggled and died fighting heroically the evil empire of Martial Rule, to vow that this gruesome and gory event will never ever recur and consequently perhaps to forge a sense of closure, both personal and historical; both to the perpetrators and also to all the victims, so as their family.
It is only this way that ultimately, it is hoped that the healing of the nation and the reconciliation of all the sectors of our society will begin to ensue.

Skeptical puzzles and arguments often employ knowledge-closure principles (e.g. If S knows that P, and knows that P entails Q, then S knows that Q). Epistemologists widely believe that an adequate reply to the skeptic should explain why her reasoning is appealing albeit misleading; but it's unclear what would explain the appeal of the skeptic's closure principle, if not for its truth. In this paper, I aim to challenge the widespread commitment to knowledge-closure. But I proceed by first examining a new puzzle about failing to know--what I call the New Ignorance Puzzle (sections I-III). This puzzle resembles to the Old Ignorance Puzzle (i.e. the closure-based skeptical puzzle), although it does not involve a closure principle. It instead centers on the standard view of ignorance, a highly intuitive principle stating that ignorance is merely a failure to know. In sections II and III, I argue that the best way to solve the New Ignorance Puzzle is to reject the standard view of ignorance and to explain away its appeal via conversational implicature. I then use this solution to the New Ignorance Puzzle as a way of explaining why knowledge-closure principles would seem true, and why abominable conjunctions would seem abominable, even if such principles were false (section IV). The upshot is a new way of explaining why the skeptic's reasoning is appealing albeit misleading.

In this paper I get confused about closure and factivity. More specifically. . .

The paper is comprised of two sections: In section I, I argue that the problem of scepticism can arise independently form the closure of knowledge under known entailment. The section begins with a non-standard approach to deriving a sceptical paradox, via the factivity of knowledge, and builds a case for the problem of scepticism arising from closure before arguing against the general permissibility of this reasoning. In short, I propose the factual claim that I am not a brain-in-a-vat is as problematic as the epistemic claim that I know I am not a brain-in-a-vat. This paper does not give a response to sceptical challenges. Indeed, I feel the intuitive pull against both the factual and epistemic claims, though it is not clear that everyone does, and attempt to bolster these intuitions with additional argumentation. However, I assume that one does, at least, feel the pull of the latter intuition. My goal is to highlight the assumptions about knowledge that the sceptic can draw upon to raise sceptical doubts, and observe certain consequences of these assumptions. I conclude this section by showing scepticism in the context of factivity is stronger than scepticism in the context of closure, in the sense that the latter follows from the former, and explore the relationship between factivity and closure. In section II, I argue that the observations developed in section I lead to issues with relevant alternative analyses of knowledge. I begin by developing these in the context of Schaffer contrastive analysis of knowledge, before extending the line of argument to relative alternative analyses in general. I conclude this section and the paper by showing how Wright analysis of warrant transmission may be used to identify the issues in sceptical paradoxes as arising from the factivity of knowledge, thereby giving a framework to analyse the issues raised in section I. This paper, therefore, does not seek to give a response to issues raised by scepticism. Our goal, rather, is to show that these issues can be raised independently from the closure of knowledge under known entailment, and further, from what is typically taken to be a fundamental conceptual truth about knowledge—i.e. that it is a factive mental state—an explore certain consequences of this observation.

Philosophers have long had a soft spot for like-from-like reasoning. Whatever produces a good person must be good. Whenever something is heated it is heated by something hot. The degree of perfection contained in the effect cannot exceed the degree contained in the cause. And so on. We know that there is an intuition that underlies transmission theories of causation, but we also know that the intuition is unreliable. Gin is colourless but it makes you see rainbows. Populations can become increasingly fit over time. And so on. If we were surprised to discover that knowledge can come from mistaken belief, maybe we shouldn't have been. Without some specific reason for thinking that only knowledge can beget knowledge, we should have been open to the possibility of knowledge from falsehood (KFF). In KFF cases, a subject acquires knowledge by reasoning through a falsehood. Most of the literature on knowledge from falsehood is concerned with the possibility of KFF cases. Some of it focuses on the significance of such cases. This is a paper about the significance of the possibility. For various reasons , people think that KFF cases cause trouble for the knowledge-first approach to evidence, justification, and the norm of belief. These arguments all assume that certain like-from-like reasoning fails for knowledge but holds for justification. I think this is a mistake. If it's unreliable for knowledge, it's unreliable for justification.

The scandal to philosophy and human reason, wrote Kant, is that we must take the existence of material objects on mere faith. In contrast, the skeptical paradox that has scandalized recent philosophy is formulated in terms of justification, warrant, and entitlement, rather than faith. I argue that most contemporary approaches to the paradox (both dogmatist/liberal and default/conservative) do not address the traditional problem that scandalized Kant, and that the status of having a warrant (or justification) that is derived from entitlement is irrelevant to whether we take our beliefs on mere faith. For, one can have the sort of warrant that most contemporary anti-skeptics posit while still taking one’s belief on mere faith. An alternative approach to the traditional problem is proposed, one that still makes use of contemporary insights about “entitlement.”

TO READ THE WHOLE BOOK -- PLEASE GO TO THE "CHAPTER" SECTION FOR POETICS WHERE EACH CHAPTER HAS ITS OWN PDF. It has been published in 1990 and is also available for free download from the University of California Press.

The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin land has been a political football, tossed back and forth between Israel and Egypt at least five times.

<p>According to epistemic closure, if someone knows some proposition <italic>P</italic> and also knows that <italic>P</italic> entails <italic>Q</italic>, she knows <italic>Q</italic> as well. This is often defended by appealing to its intuitiveness. Only recently, however, was epistemic closure put to the empirical test: Turri ran experiments in which closure is violated in folk knowledge ascriptions surprisingly often. The chapter authors disagree with this diagnosis. It is by no means obvious which experimentally testable hypothesis proponents of epistemic closure should accept. The chapter formulates a different hypothesis and argues that it is more apt for empirically testing epistemic closure. In a series of experiments the chapter authors manipulated the strength of entailment between two propositions and found that the stronger the entailment, the lower the proportion of participants who violated closure, indicating folk knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to entailment. The chapter concludes that closure is a principle of folk epistemology after all.</p>

I am concerned with epistemic closure—the phenomenon in which some knowledge requires other knowledge. In particular, I defend a version of the closure principle in terms of analyticity; if an agent S knows that p is true, then S knows that all analytic parts of p are true as well. After targeting the relevant notion of analyticity, I argue that this principle accommodates intuitive cases and possesses the theoretical resources to avoid the preface paradox. I close by arguing that contextualists who maintain that knowledge attributions are closed within—but not between—linguistic contexts are tacitly committed to this principle’s truth

This paper argues that propositional modal logics based on Kripke-structures cannot be accepted by epistemologists as a minimal framework to describe propositional knowledge. In fact, many authors have raised doubts over the validity of the so-called principle of epistemic closure, which is always valid in normal modal logics. This paper examines how this principle might be criticized and discusses one possible way to obtain a modal logic where it does not hold, namely through the introduction of impossible worlds.

What is the relationship between degrees of belief and binary beliefs? Can the latter be expressed as a function of the former -- a so-called "belief-binarization rule" -- without running into difficulties such as the lottery paradox? We show that this problem can be usefully analysed from the perspective of judgment-aggregation theory. Although some formal similarities between belief binarization and judgment aggregation have been noted before, the connection between the two problems has not yet been studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to fill this gap. The paper is organized around a baseline impossibility theorem, which we use to map out the space of possible solutions to the belief-binarization problem. Our theorem shows that, except in limiting cases, there exists no belief-binarization rule satisfying four initially plausible desiderata. Surprisingly, this result is a direct corollary of the judgment-aggregation variant of Arrow's classic impossibility theorem in social choice theory.

According to the safety account of knowledge, one knows that p only if one's belief could not easily have been false. An important issue for the account is whether we should only examine the belief in the target proposition when evaluating whether a belief is safe or not. In this paper, it is argued that if we only examine the belief in the target proposition, then the account fails to account for why beliefs in necessary truths could fall short of knowledge. But, if we also examine beliefs in other relevant propositions, then the account fails to preserve epistemic closure. Therefore, the safety account cannot find a safe path between epistemic closure and necessary truths.

Despite its intrinsic plausibility, the sensitivity principle has remained deeply unpopular on the grounds that it violates an even more plausible closure principle. Here we show that sensitivity does not, in general, violate closure. Sensitivity only violates closure when combined with further auxiliary premises-regarding which of an agent's commitments constitute that agent's beliefs-which are optional for the sensitivity theorist.