Notes for 2/20/2026

 2/20/2026
[Philosophy Club every Monday, 4-5 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")]
[Bioethics Club: Mondays from 5:30pm-6:30pm in Leigh Hall 408]

If you really know something, do you have to be able to explain HOW you know it?
 Biggest problems for prescriptive rationality:
(1)    Epistemic voluntarism
(2)    Belief (cognitive) perseverance



“Neurons that fire together wire together.”

It is harder to dislodge an existing pattern of thought than it is to create a new one.
(People are naturally disposed not to change our minds.)
(“Epistemic conservatism.”) Problem of the criterion:
“In order to have knowledge, you must know what knowledge is.”
“In order to claim to know something, you must know what ‘know’ means.”


Regress problem:
If you have to know that you know in order to know, then you also have to know that you know that you know….

Same problem for belief:
Suppose you believe something. Do you also have to believe that you believe it in order to believe it?



A resolution lies in distinguishing first-order and higher-order cognitions. You don’t have to have a higher-order cognition in order to have a lower especially first-order) cognition.

You can think x without thinking that you are thinking x. The higher-order cognition is something that may come about through reflection, but the higher-order cognition is not a necessary condition for the lower-order cognition.

One of the most common responses to the problem of the criterion is to adopt Foundationalism.

This is the view that some beliefs are known on the basis of other beliefs, but some beliefs are “basic.”

Some common examples of basic beliefs are:
-    First-person present-tense mental states (e.g., I am hungry, that looks like a tree to me)
-    Self-evident conceptual truths (e.g., circles are round, contradictions are impossible)


One of the best-known foundationalists was Rene Descartes

Descartes was not only a foundationalist, but also an infallibilist

Infallibilism is the view that knowledge requires absolute certainty (you only know something if you couldn’t possibly be wrong about it)

Descartes’ infallibilism was largely motivated by two things:
(1)    The collapse of Aristotelian science
(2)    The development of mathematical physics

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