Knowledge and Justification

This issue of Discipline filosofiche brings together a number of articles on knowledge and epistemic justification. The first two articles tackle the problem of disagreement. Klemens Kap­pel focuses on deep disagreement, that is, difference of opinion about the re­liability of epistemic principles, and discusses the sort of practical problem it raises. On the other hand, Michele Palmira focuses on peer disagreement, that is, difference of opinion among epistemic peers, and criticizes some recent attempts to understand this phenomenon in contextualist terms. A second group of papers takes up different aspects of the sceptical challenge to our knowledge claims. Tim Kraft argues that “Cartesian” sceptical arguments need not be premised on controversial infallibilist assumptions and reformulates them in a way that avoids two familiar pitfalls. Raban Reich­mann develops a version of the sceptical challenge that does not exploit the familiar scenarios usually found in the epistemological literature, but invokes the possibility that we are mistaken in our beliefs for a reason that we cannot even understand. Maria Cristina Amoretti and Nicla Vassal­lo provide a detailed argument to the effect that the three conditions that have been traditionally regarded as necessary for knowledge – truth, belief and justi­fication – may be satisfied even in a global sceptical scenario. The other articles address three further issues connected with the subject of knowledge. René van Woudenberg focuses on the relationship between will and belief, arguing that the evidence provided by various thought experi­ments as well as by empirical psychology unequivocally supports doxastic in­voluntarism. Arturs Logins discusses and neutralizes a number of purported counterexamples to the Reason-Knowledge principle – a principle relating knowledge to rational action that was first proposed by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley. Dan O’Brien draws on the insights of virtue epistemol­ogy to present a fresh view of Hume’s account of intellectual virtues, cast­ing doubts on the adequacy of the usual reductionist portrayal of the Scot­tish philoso­pher’s epistemology of testimony.