In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...) participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. (shrink)

Gettier cases describe situations where an agent possesses a justified true belief that _p_, without, at least according to mainstream analytic epistemology, knowing that _p_, while the “Gettier intuition” is the judgment that a protagonist in a Gettier case does not know the relevant proposition. Our goal in this chapter is to show that we can make the Gettier intuition compelling or underwhelming by presenting it in different contexts. We report a surprising order effect whereby people find the Gettier intuition (...) less compelling when a case describing a justified but false belief is presented before a Gettier case. We also report a surprising framing effect: two Gettier cases that differ only in their philosophically irrelevant narrative details elicit substantially different judgments. Finally, we discuss the metaphilosophical implications of these effects. (shrink)

A longstanding philosophical concern has been to question whether a piece of information can be treated as knowledge. This concern generated the traditional epistemological reflections on: ‘what is knowledge’ or ‘what can be qualified as knowledge’? Knowledge is often considered as a corpus of ‘beliefs’ that an individual has about the world. The concern for mainstream epistemology was the problem of identifying the criterion for justified belief and dealing with the sceptical challenge of the possibility of knowledge. The epistemic engagement, (...) and negotiation with the world, involving other epistemic agents as well, constitute various episodic slices present within the larger enterprise of relating the world and the mind (the subject). We pursue acquiring and sharing information about the world. Thus, our interaction with the world provides a continuous flow of information between ourselves and the world (which includes other epistemic agents as well). Such information, with proper evidential support and justification, often becomes knowledge, which then gradually forms our corpus of beliefs. This article explores the role of evidentiality in testimonies, and as ‘markers of evidence’ that may be expressed in a statement by the speaker may often suggest conditions of acceptance by the hearer. I also address the issue of epistemic decision-making in social contexts in the form of two questions: (i) how do epistemic agents form beliefs about something (in the world) given evidential inputs from other people; and (ii) how do epistemic agents respond and alter their doxastic attitude in light of testimony (evidence from others)? (shrink)

It is platitudinous to say that whenever we try to read some ancient text or interpret some theory distant in space and/or time, we employ contemporary tools of analysis, contemporary techniques of modeling. Even while building theories, theoreticians (philosophers and scientists alike) are found to take help from the technology of the time. Aristotle, for example, had a wax-tablet view of memory. Leibniz used the model of a clock to explain the harmonious universe. Freud used a hydraulic model of the (...) flow of libido, and the telephone switchboard model guided psychologists while they were theorizing on intelligence. Nearer to our time, we have seen physicists explaining the structure of an atom by the model of the.. (shrink)