Epistemic Justification

If you want to understand Tyler Burge's distinction between entitlement and justification, this paper is for you.  Burge first introduced his distinction between epistemic entitlement and epistemic justification in 'Content Preservation' in 1993. He has since deployed the distinction in over twenty papers, changing his formulation around 2009. His distinction and its basis, however, is not well understood in the literature. This chapter distinguishes two uses of 'entitlement' in Burge, and then focuses on his distinction between justification and entitlement, two forms of warrant, where warrants consists in the exercise of a reliable belief-forming competence. Since he draws the distinction in terms of reasons, this chapter brings his account of reasons altogether in one place. The chapter introduces a decision-procedure for classifying warrants as justifications or entitlements. The distinction between justification and entitlement is not the same as the inferential vs. non-inferential distinction. The chapter distinguishes inference from processing, thinking, reasoning, and critically reasoning. Burge's new formulation of the distinction was driven by the recognition of non-accessible modular reasons. Three kinds of access are distinguished.

According to ambitious responsibilism (AR), the virtues that are constitutive of epistemic responsibility should play a central and fundamental role in traditional projects like the analysis of justification and knowledge. While AR enjoyed a shining moment in the mid-1990s, it has fallen on hard times. Part of the reason is that many epistemologists—including fellow responsibilists—think it paints an unreasonably demanding picture of knowledge and justification. I agree that such worries undermine AR's existing versions. But I think the curtains have been prematurely drawn on the view. My goal is to show that the objections only threaten the periphery of certain versions of AR, and to develop a version that blocks them. With this goal in mind, here is the plan. I will begin in §2 by clarifying the core commitments of AR and explain how influential responsibilists have added to these commitments in optional ways. In §3, I will rehearse the standard objections to AR, explaining why they only impugn the add-ons. I'll then turn in §4 to develop a version I call Kantian Responsibilism (KR). KR is a two-level view consisting of (i) a high-level analysis of epistemic normativity in responsibilist terms, and (ii) a first-order account of the conditions under which these terms apply. According to KR's first tier, epistemically virtuous thought is thought that manifests respect for truth; because I hold that manifesting certain reasons-sensitive dispositions is necessary and sufficient for respecting truth, KR's second tier takes epistemic virtues to coincide substantively with reasons-sensitive dispositions. After unpacking KR in §4, I show in §5 how it answers the objections to AR. I close in §6 by making some broader points about KR's virtues, especially when compared with reliabilist views.

This review synthesizes and critically examines 19 empirical studies that have addressed the domain-specificity/domain-generality issue in personal epistemology. We present an overview of traditional and more contemporary epistemological stances from philosophical perspectives to offer another basis from which to examine this issue. Explicit examples of academic domains are described and epistemological comparisons are made based on our synthesized definition. Given the epistemological similarities and differences across domains that we identified from empirical and philosophical considerations, we propose that beliefs are both domain general and domain specific. Accordingly, we present a theoretical framework of personal epistemology that incorporates both positions and hypothesize how the belief systems might interact in terms of the development of personal epistemology and relations to various facets of cognition, motivation, and achievement. The article ends with a discussion of educational implications.

It is often assumed that there is a close connection between Quine’s criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction, in ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ and onwards, and his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, in Word and Object and onwards. Often, the claim that the distinction is unsound (in some way or other) is taken to follow from the indeterminacy thesis, and sometimes the indeterminacy thesis is supported by such a claim. However, a careful scrutiny of the indeterminacy thesis as stated by Quine, and the varieties of the analytic/synthetic distinction, reveals that the two claims are mutually independent. Neither does the claim that the distinction is unsound follow from the indeterminacy thesis, nor that thesis from unsoundness claim, under any of the common interpretations of the analytic/synthetic distinction.

An extended effort to discuss the nature, scope, and rationality conditions on Kant's account of "Belief" or "faith" (Glaube).  It is familiar that Kant thinks various claims that cannot be objects of knowledge may be the proper object of Belief for moral reasons.  One surprising contention of this paper is that Kant thinks such Belief can also be motivated by theoretical considerations in certain contexts.

Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is first and foremost a science of the structures of consciousness. Since it is intended to yield eidetic, i. e., a priori insights, it is often assumed that transcendental phenomenology and the natural sciences are totally detached from each other such that phenomenological investigations cannot possibly benefit from empirical evidence. The aim of this paper is to show that a beneficial relationship is possible. To be more precise, I will show how Husserl's a priori investigations on consciousness can be supplemented by research in experimental psychology in order to tackle fundamental questions in epistemology. Our result will be a phenomenological conception of experiential justification that is in accordance with and supported by empirical phenomena such as perceptual learning and the phenomenon of blindsight. Finally, I shall shed light on the systematic limits of empirical research.

To discuss reflexive practice in relation to epistemic cognition, we posit informed reflexivity as an epistemic virtue that is informed by its particular context and purposes of knowing and action and promotes use of reliable processes to achieve epistemic aims. It involves reasoning about social relationships in which a person is embedded when acting in a specific kind of context—whether academic or real-world—that requires construction, evaluation, and application of knowledge. Informed reflexivity is the learned disposition to reason about one's knowledge-related actions, entailing context-specific epistemic characteristics. It involves an intentional stance about the need to reason about oneself and the context. Discussions of two disciplinary competencies (science and history) and two cross-disciplinary competencies (critical thinking and writing) illustrate how epistemically competent practices instantiate informed reflexivity. Promoting informed reflexivity as an epistemic virtue might dispose students toward reliable processes of knowing and making epistemically informed resolved action appropriate to the context.

According to a view I'll call Epistemic Normativism (EN), knowledge is normative in the same sense in which paradigmatically normative properties like justification are normative.  This paper argues against EN in two stages and defends a positive non-normativist alternative.  After clarifying the target in §1, I consider in §2 some arguments for EN from the premise that knowledge entails justification (the “Entailment Thesis”).  I first raise some worries about inferring constitution from entailment.  I then rehearse the reasons why some epistemologists reject the Entailment Thesis and argue that a non-normativist picture provides the best explanation of all the intuitions surrounding this thesis, favorable and unfavorable.  On this picture, human knowledge is a structured non-normative complex that has as one of its parts a justification-making property, analogous in role to good-making properties like pleasurableness.  After giving three arguments against EN in §3 and answering an objection in §4, I turn in §5 to further develop the positive view sketched in §2. In §6, I take stock and conclude.

The internalism/externalism debate is of interest in epistemology since it addresses one of the most fundamental questions in the discipline: what is the basic nature of knowledge and epistemic justification? It is generally held that if a positive epistemic status obtains, this is not a brute fact. Rather if a belief is, for example, justified, it is justified in virtue of some further condition(s) obtaining. What has been called epistemic internalism holds, as the label suggests, is that all the relevant factors that determine justification must be “internal” (in a sense that needs to be specified). Epistemic externalism is the denial of internalism. Epistemic internalism about justification is the subject of this article.

After introducing the central intuitive considerations that have tended to motivate internalism, this paper will explore different ways of construing the internalist position (or family of positions). In addition to classical formulations, more recent formulations will be discussed, concluding with a discussion of an emerging position known as “Epistemological Disjunctivism”, which its advocates claim preserves the most important features of more traditional forms of internalism, while avoiding their difficulties. Epistemological Disjunctivism is particularly worthy of attention since if true, it promises to bridge internalist and externalist epistemologies, bringing a rapprochement to two sides of what may otherwise appear a deep and intractable debate about the fundamental nature of epistemology.

Across multiple societies, we see a shift from regimes of truth (ROT) to “regimes of
posttruth” (ROPT) characterized by proliferating “truth markets.” ROT corresponded
to disciplinary society, tighter functioning between media/political/education apparatuses, scientific discourses, and dominant truth-arbiters. ROPT corresponds to societies of control, where power exploits new “freedoms” to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diffuse/evaluate). These developments further correspond to postpolitics/ postdemocracy, where issues, discourses, and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite the enabling of a new range of cultural and pseudopolitical participation around, among other things, truth. ROPT emerge out of postpolitical/postdemocratic strategies common to control societies where especially resource rich political actors attempt to use data-analytic knowledge to manage the field of appearance and participation, via attention and affect.

Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge.  This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth.  §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attractive about epistemic consequentialism while yielding predictions that are harder for the latter to secure in a principled way.  §2 presents Epistemic Kantianism. §3 argues that it is uniquely poised to satisfy the desiderata set out in §1 on an ideal theory of epistemic justification.  §4 gives three further arguments, suggesting that it (i) best explains the normative significance of the subject's perspective in epistemology, (ii) follows from the kind of axiology needed to solve the swamping problem together with modest assumptions about the relation between the evaluative and the deontic, and (iii) illuminates certain asymmetries in epistemic value and obligation.  §5 takes stock and reassesses the score in the  debate.

Epistemic diversity is the ability or possibility of producing diverse and rich epis-temic apparati to make sense of the world around us. In this paper we discuss whether, and to what extent, different conceptions of knowledge-notably as 'justified true belief' and as 'distributed and embodied cognition'-hinder or foster epistemic diversity. We then link this discussion to the widespread move in science and philosophy towards monolingual disciplinary environments. We argue that English, despite all appearance, is no Lingua Franca, and we give reasons why epistemic diversity is also deeply hindered is monolingual contexts. Finally, we sketch a proposal for multilingual academia where epistemic diversity is thereby fostered. A core philosophical question concerns understanding what knowledge is. is has occupied large part of the philosophical enterprise since the ancient times and is still a vibrant area of research within different philosophical traditions. Related to the question of what knowledge is, there is also the question of how to build knowledge, which can be thought of being at the core of scientiic method on the one hand, and of philosophical argumentation on the other hand. ese two questions-what knowledge is and how to build it-must be somehow connected. It is in fact dubious to have a theory of knowledge in which the what and how questions are unrelated. Yet, how exactly they are connected is contentious and one might wonder whether the second should be derived from the rest, or vice versa. In the rest part of the paper we explore whether and to what extent different conceptions of knowledge lead to different ways of building it. Specifically, we take issue * is paper is the result of numerous discussions between the two of us on these (and many other) topics. Material related to multilingualism in science has been presented to 3 rd-year BA students at the UvA, as part of a guest lecture by Federico during the course 'Philosophical Approaches to the Sciences' convened by Federica in the past few years. Material related to epistemic diversity has been presented by Federica at the conference 'Worlds of Entanglements', held at the VUB in September 2017. We are grateful to the guest editors for encouraging us to submit our manuscript to this special issue. We are also most grateful to Moti Mizrahi, Eric Schliesser, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful and stimulating comments. Any errors or inaccuracies remain of course ours.

This paper argues that reliabilism can be plausibly divorced from epistemic con-sequentialism, either by being subsumed under a non-consequentialist norma-tive framework or by taking the form of a non-normative account of knowledge on a par with certain accounts of the metaphysics of perception and action. It argues moreover that reliabilism should not be defended as a consequentialist theory. Its most plausible versions are not aptly dubbed 'consequentialist' in any sense that genuinely parallels the dominant sense in ethics. Indeed, there is no strong reason to believe reliabilism was ever seriously intended as a form of epistemic consequentialism. At the heart of its original motivation was a concern about the necessity of non-accidentality for knowledge, a concern perfectly at home in a non-consequentialist or non-normative setting. Reliabilism's connection to epistemic consequentialism was an accretion of the 1980s, and a feature of only one of its formulations in that decade.

Formal epistemologists often claim that our credences should be representable by a probability function. Complete probabilistic coherence, however, is only possible for ideal agents, raising the question of how this requirement relates to our everyday judgments concerning rationality. One possible answer is that being rational is a contextual matter, that the standards for rationality change along with the situation. Just like who counts as tall changes depending on whether we are considering toddlers or basketball players, perhaps what counts as rational shifts according to whether we are considering ideal agents or creatures more like ourselves. Even though a number of formal epistemologists have endorsed this type of solution, I will argue that there is no way to spell out this contextual account that can make sense of our everyday judgments about rationality. Those who defend probabilistic coherence requirements will need an alternative account of the relationship between real and ideal rationality.

Our understanding of the cross-cultural aspects of personal epistemology is limited. In particular, cross-cultural comparisons of elementary school teachers’ and students’ personal epistemology have received very little theoretical or empirical attention. The current chapter aims to examine German and U.S. elementary schools in terms of their philosophical and practical similarities and differences in personal epistemology. Both theoretical and empirical work will be reviewed to support a more holistic model of personal epistemology, the Educational Model of Personal Epistemology. In light of this model, we discuss our expectations for differences and similarities in the epistemic climate of elementary classrooms in the U.S. and Germany. Drawing from this discussion, we suggest that researchers should approach cross-cultural research in personal epistemology from a more holistic standpoint, employ a diversity of methods, and obtain a solid understanding of the educational context under study. Regarding educational implications, we propose a possible fusion of the educational philosophies held in the U.S. and Germany concerning the implementation of teacher training and classroom education. Finally, we recommend that fostering evaluativistic thinking (i.e., a way of knowing that focuses on the evaluation and decision-making among differing viewpoints) should be a main goal for education starting at the elementary level to ensure students’ future roles as productive citizens in Western societies and stress the role of the teacher in this endeavor.

Permissivism is the view that there are evidential situations that rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. In this paper, I argue for Intrapersonal Belief Permissivism (IaBP): that there are evidential situations in which a single agent can rationally adopt more than one belief-attitude toward a proposition. I give two positive arguments for IaBP; the first involves epistemic supererogation and the second involves doubt. Then, I show how these arguments give intrapersonal permissivists a distinct response to the toggling objection. I conclude that IaBP is a view that philosophers should take seriously.

Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully general account of the view. I conclude by looking at the two major difficulties for fallibilism: the Gettier problem and the lottery paradox.

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I argue on behalf of an account of knowledge that is invariantist—i.e., the semantic value of knowledge attributions does not vary from context to context—and stable, in that it does not take knowledge to be affected by practical considerations.  I show how a view of this sort, using nothing but the basic resources of fallibilism, can provide both a resolution to the lottery paradox and a satisfying explanation for the appeal of skepticism.

Perception grounds demonstrative reference, yields singular thoughts, and fixes the reference of singular terms. Moreover, perception provides us with knowledge of particulars in our environment and justifies singular thoughts about particulars. How does perception play these cognitive and epistemic roles in our lives? I address this question by exploring the fundamental nature of perceptual experience. I argue that perceptual states are individuated by particulars and explore epistemic, ontological, psychologistic, and semantic approaches to account for perceptual particularity.

This paper is an opinionated guide to the literature on normative (=good) epistemic reasons. After making some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of normative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states, and concluding that they are not mental states. In §3, I examine the distinction between normative epistemic reasons there are and normative epistemic reasons we possess. I offer a novel account of this distinction and argue that we in fact ought to acknowledge a threefold distinction between objective, possessed, and apparent normative epistemic reasons. In §4, I discuss the question of which normative reasons for doxastic attitudes are the epistemic ones, evaluating reasons against a simple evidentialist answer. Finally, in §5, I look at the role of reasons in epistemology, considering challenges to viewing them as the building blocks of epistemic normativity and maintaining that the challenges recommend a novel bi-level epistemology rather than the marginalization of reasons in epistemology.

Externalists about epistemic justification have long emphasized the connection between truth and justification, with this coupling finding explicit expression in process reliabilism.  Process reliabilism, however, faces a number of severe difficulties, leading disenchanted process reliabilists to find a new theoretical home.  The conceptual flag under which such epistemologists have preferred to gather is that of dispositions.  Just as reliabilism is determined by the frequency of a particular outcome, making it possible to characterize justification in terms of a particular relationship to truth, dispositions are accompanied by concrete, worldly manifestations.  By taking true beliefs as the result, not of certain processes but of particular dispositions, these epistemologists have attempted to respond to the numerous obstacles to reliablism.  Yet all this work has proceeded without regard to the wealth of contemporary work on the metaphysics of dispositions, making the new hope premature at best, ill-founded at worst.  Combining contemporary dispositional accounts of justification with extant analyses of dispositions reveals that the latter is the case.  The structural differences between epistemic justification and dispositions make it clear that not only should process reliabilism be abandoned, but the subsequent appeal to dispositions along with it.

Many people have recently argued that we need to distinguish between experiences and seemings and that this has consequences for views about how perception provides evidence (Brogaard 2013, 2014, Lyons 2005, 2009, Reiland 2014, Tucker 2010). In this paper I spell out my take on these issues by doing three things.
First, I distinguish between mere sensations like seeing pitch black all around you and perceptual experiences like seeing a red apple. Both have sensory phenomenology in presenting us with sensory qualities like colors, being analog in Dretske’s sense, and being fine-grained. However, only the latter have furthermore a perceptual phenomenology characterized by objectification and related dualities of perspectivality/completion and variation/constancy.
Second, I elaborate on the reasons for thinking that both mere sensations and perceptual experiences (= experiences) need to be distinguished from accompanying seemings that passively assign things into conceptual categories and thereby tell you something about them. For example, when you look at a red apple and have the relevant recognitional abilities it will also normally seem to you that this is an apple.
Finally, I argue that the best version of the popular dogmatist view about evidence is one which claims that it’s neither experiences nor seemings by themselves, but rather the right sorts of composites of experiences and seemings that provide evidence.

The recent debate on cognitive phenomenology has largely focused on phenomenal aspects connected to the content of thoughts. By contrasts, aspects pertaining to their attitude have often been neglected, despite the fact that they are distinctive of the mental kind of thought concerned and, moreover, also present in experiences and thus less contentious than purely cognitive aspects. My main goal is to identify two central and closely related aspects of attitude that are phenomenologically salient and shared by thoughts with experiences, namely the rational role that they play in our mental lives and their determination by factors external to them, such as external objects or reasons. In particular, I aim to defend Phenomenal Rationalism about judgemental thoughts and perceptual experiences: the view that their phenomenal character reflects their rational role, that is, their capacity to provide and/or respond to reasons. I conclude with some remarks about how this view may be extended to other kinds of thought and experience; and about how the phenomenological salience of the specific rational role of individual judgemental thoughts may in fact be used to formulate also an argument for the phenomenological salience of their particular propositional contents.

I examine three attitudes: belief, faith, and hope. I argue that all three attitudes play the same role in rationalizing action. First, I explain two models of rational action-the decision-theory model and the belief-desire model. Both models entail there are two components of rational action: an epistemic component and a conative component. Then, using this framework, I show how belief, faith, and hope that p can all make it rational to accept, or act as if, p. I conclude by showing how my picture can explain how action-oriented commitments can be rational over time, both in the face of counterevidence and in the face of waning affections.

According to deontological approaches to justification, we can analyze justification in deontic terms. In this paper, I try to advance the discussion of deontological approaches by applying recent insights in the semantics of deontic modals. Specifically, I use the distinction between weak necessity modals (should, ought to) and strong necessity modals (must, have to) to make progress on a question that has received surprisingly little discussion in the literature, namely: 'What's the best version of a deontological approach?' The two most obvious hypotheses are the Permissive View, according to which 'justified' expresses permission, and the Obligatory View, according to which 'justified' expresses some species of obligation. I raise difficulties for both of these hypotheses. In light of these difficulties, I propose a new position, according to which justified expresses a property I call faultlessness, defined as the dual of weak necessity modals. According to this view, an agent is justified in φ-ing iff it's not the case that she should [/ought] not φ. I argue that this 'Faultlessness View' gives us precisely what's needed to avoid the problems facing the Permissive and Obligatory Views.

Robert Brandom holds that what we mean is best understood in terms of what inferences we are prepared to defend, and that such a defence is best understood in terms of rule-governed social interactions. This manages to explain quite a lot. However, for those who think that there is more to making correct/incorrect inferences than obeying/breaking accepted rules, Brandom’s account fails to adequately capture what it means to reason properly. Thus, in an effort to sketch an alternative that does not rely primarily on peer pressure, I draw on the work of C. S. Peirce. Peirce argued that, when we reason, we manipulate abstract diagrams in order to observe what results. Since some manipulations are barred by the self-same nature of the diagrams, I try to show that this qualitative incompatibility, which I dub “contrapiction,” is a good (non-social) reason to regard some reasoning as bad.

It is clear that beliefs can be assessed both as to their justification and their rationality. What is not as clear, however, is how the rationality and justification of belief relate to one another. Stewart Cohen has stumped for the popular proposal that rationality and justification come to the same thing, that rational beliefs just are justified beliefs, supporting his view by arguing that 'justified belief' and 'rational belief' are synonymous. In this paper, I will give reason to think that Cohen's argument is spurious. I will show that 'rational' and 'justified' occupy two distinct semantic categories - 'rational' is an absolute gradable adjective and 'justified' is a relative gradable adjective - telling against the thought that 'rational belief' and 'justified belief' are synonymous. I will then argue that the burden of proof is on those who would equate rationality and justification, making the case that those who hold this prominent position face the difficulty of explaining how rationality and justification come to the same thing even though 'rational' and 'justified' are not synonymous.

We present a complete, decidable logic for reasoning about a notion of completely trustworthy (" conclusive ") evidence and its relations to justifiable (implicit) belief and knowledge, as well as to their explicit justifications. This logic makes use of a number of evidence-related notions such as availability, admissibility, and " goodness " of a piece of evidence, and is based on an innovative modification of the Fitting semantics for Artemov's Justification Logic designed to preempt Gettier-type counterexamples. We combine this with ideas from belief revision and awareness logics to provide an account for explicitly justified (defeasible) knowledge based on conclusive evidence that addresses the problem of (logical) omniscience.

Almost every contemporary theory of knowledge is a version of fallibilism, yet an adequate statement of fallibilism has not yet been provided. Standard definitions cannot account for fallibilistic knowledge of necessary truths. I consider and reject several attempts to resolve this difficulty before arguing that a belief is an instance of fallibilistic knowledge when it could have failed to be knowledge. This is a fully general account of fallibilism that applies to knowledge of necessary truths. Moreover, it reveals, not only the connection between fallibility and error, but the connection between fallibility and accidental truth as well.

In this article, I argue that the television show Justified represents a
critique of the Myth of the South. I argue that Justified critiques the
representation of the U.S. South and it does so by invoking the
Myth of the West, which affords viewers the opportunity to identify
with something they know and in so doing makes the critique of
the Myth of the South more palatable. I further argue that critiquing
regional identities is necessary because these identities continue to
structure much of the way we think about people and places in the
United States. Through a rhetorical investigation of the Myth of the
South and a critical reading of Justified, I demonstrate the ways in
which the Myth of the West can help do important work to critique
another popular cultural myth and that Justified is an important text
to investigate because of its viewership (vis-
a-vis identification and
escapism), relationship to popular genres, and use of one myth to
critique another.

I consider the ‘inferentialist’ thesis that whenever a mental state rationally justifies a belief it is in virtue of inferential relations holding between the contents of the two states. I suggest that no good argument has yet been given for the thesis. I focus in particular on Williamson (2000) and Ginsborg (2011) and show that neither provides us with a reason to deny the plausible idea that experience can provide non-inferential justification for belief. I finish by pointing out some theoretical costs and tensions associated with endorsing inferentialism. [Forthcoming in Synthese . . . ]

The paper analyses possible reasons for the gap between teachers’ actions and intentions, reported by research on practices with the use of ICT. The theoretical approach is informed by teachers’ beliefs, which are discriminated in two categories: pedagogical and epistemic. A qualitative fieldwork research undertaken in eight public primary schools in Rio de Janeiro between 2014 and 2019 presents empirical evidence of the relationship between ICT use in the classroom and teachers’ beliefs. Data collection took place in two phases, and the data set consists of: (1) sixty four semi-structured interviews with teachers of the eight schools; (2) two focus groups with teachers in two schools, selected among the eight initial schools. Main findings show the importance of ICT self-efficacy at the core of teacher’s pedagogical beliefs, as skills and knowledge are built upon direct experience and observation of others. Furthermore, epistemic beliefs are strongly related to pedagogical beliefs and teachers’ attitudes. Findings show that the most innovative teachers are those who conceive ICT as a cultural artefact, have an ecological view of the classroom, and translate their intentions into actions, facing uncertainty and possible failure.

A história da historiografia produzida no Brasil vive sob o signo de um paradoxo: a maioria dos estudos produzidos tem como fonte e/ou objeto problemas, autores e/ou obras abordadas de uma perspectiva nacional/local; mas, ao mesmo tempo, essas fontes/objetos estão, do ponto de vista de sua historicidade, inseridas em “redes” transnacionais e/ou globais. Tendo em vista esse paradoxo, o presente artigo procura propor e apresentar reflexões teóricas sobre a possibilidade de pensar e produzir a história da historiografia em perspectiva transnacional, considerando em particular a história da historiografia latino-americana nessa perspectiva. Ao mesmo tempo, a fim de refletir sobre o referido paradoxo, fazemos considerações sobre algumas aporias que se colocam frente ao problema da inserção de distintas formas de representação do passado nessa história. Procuramos sintetizar algumas perspectivas a fim de problematizar, por um lado, uma história da historiografia fechada dentro das lógicas da nação e, por outro, uma “história intelectual global” pouco cuidadosa no que se refere às condições assimetrias de diversos tipos e eventualmente pouco atenta as ambiguidades encerradas no próprio conceito de modernidade e seus correlatos.

In this book, I develop a theory of responsible belief. First, I tighten our grip on the core notions of ‘responsibility’ and ‘belief’ by giving an analysis of these two concepts that will play a crucial role in any account of responsible belief. Second, I present the problem of doxastic involuntarism: it seems that we cannot choose our beliefs, not even in an indirect way, and, therefore, we do not have obligations to hold or not to hold specific beliefs. I also defend the view that the main accounts that aim to meet this problem by arguing that we do have some kind of (compatibilist) control, fail. Third, I provide a solution to the problem by arguing that we do have control over all sorts of factors that make a difference to what we believe and argue that we, therefore, have certain intellectual obligations. Fourth, I defend the thesis that, sometimes, we can still believe responsibly, even though we have violated our intellectual obligations in coming to hold a belief, namely because we are excused for doing so. I argue that there are three types of excuses and discuss them and their implications in detail: force, ignorance, and luck. In an Appendix, I argue that any attempt to identify responsible belief with epistemically justified belief is doomed to fail. The book will appear early 2016 with Oxford University Press.

Modal Security is an increasingly discussed proposed necessary condition on undermining defeat. It says, roughly, that if evidence undermines (rather than rebuts) one’s belief, then one gets reason to doubt the belief's safety or sensitivity. The primary interest of the principle is that it seems to entail that influential epistemological arguments, including Evolutionary Debunking Arguments against moral realism and the Benacerraf-Field Challenge for mathematical realism, are unsound. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine Modal Security in detail. We develop and discuss what we take to be the strongest objections to the principle. One of the aims of the paper is to expose the weakness of these objections. Another is to reveal how the debate over Modal Security interacts with core problems in epistemology — including the generality problem, and the distinction between direct and indirect evidence.

The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call “operative epistemic reasons”. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to be both propositions and truth-making facts. In §3, I turn to consider what it takes for a consideration to be an operative epistemic reason, examining three conditions—the representational, treating, and explanatory conditions—that have been proposed. I offer a novel view about the explanatory condition. In §4, I discuss the special case of inferential operative reasons and examine attempts to understand them in terms of rule-following, sketching a competence-based spinoff of dispositionalism. Finally, in §5, I consider whether there are non-inferential operative reasons, observing that one needn’t countenance them to be a foundationalist but then developing a view about what they are and how they do and don't differ from inferential reasons.