Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198746946 ISBN 13: 9780198746942

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Performance-based epistemology conceives the normativity involved in epistemic evaluation as a special case of a pattern of evaluation that can be applied to any domain where there are agents that carry out performances with an aim. For example, it conceives believing and judging as types of performances with an epistemic aim that are carried out by persons. Evaluating beliefs epistemically becomes then a task with essentially the same structure that evaluating athletic, culinary or any other sort of performance; in all cases the performance in question is evaluated in terms of how it relates to certain relevant competences and abilities of the subject that carries it out. In this way, performance-based epistemology locates epistemic evaluation within a general normative pattern that spreads across many different human activities and disciplines. This volume presents new essays by leading epistemologists who discuss key issues concerning the foundations and applications of this approach to epistemology. The essays in Part I examine some foundational issues in the conceptual framework. They address questions central to the debate, including the compatibility of apt success with some forms of luck; the connection between aptness and a safety condition for knowledge; the fallibility of perceptual recognitional abilities; actual-world reliabilism and reliabilism about epistemic justification; the nature of the agency required to make a cognitive success truly one's own; the basic conceptual framework of performance-based epistemology. Part II explores Sosa's epistemology of a priori intuition; internalist objections to Sosa's views on second-order knowledge; the roles that epistemic agency is meant to play in performance-based epistemology; the value that second-order reflection may have; epistemic incompetence; and the problem of epistemic circularity and criticises Sosa's alternative solution.

About this title

About the Author

Miguel Angel Fernandez Vargas, National Autonomous University of Mexico

Miguel Angel Fernandez Vargas received his PhD in Philosophy from University College London in 2006. He joined the Institute of Philosophical Research of UNAM that same year. He works primarily in epistemology, specially in epistemic normativity, models of epistemic evaluation, and scepticism, though he is also interested in philosophy of mind and the history of analytic philosophy. His publications include 'The Possibility of Epistemic Responsibility' in B. Reed (ed.) Philosophical Issues, Action Theory (2013); 'Aptness and Safety: How are they Related?' in Critica (2010); and 'Wright on the Cognitive Role of Entitlements' in E. Garcia Ramirez (ed.) APA Newsletters (2011).

Review

"The authors are well chosen, since they offer sharply contrasting views on fundamental questions in epistemology. They include such notable figures as Hilary Kornblith, Richard Fumerton, Paul Boghossian and Ram Neta. The topics range from the nature of epistemic virtue and epistemic luck to a priori knowledge and the epistemology of stupidity. The essays are all worth reading." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0198746946
• ISBN 13: 9780198746942
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Fernandez Vargas Miguel Angel