Abstract
The notion of cognitive act is of importance for an epistemology that is apt for constructive type theory, and for epistemology in general. Instead of taking knowledge attributions as the primary use of the verb ‘to know’ that needs to be given an account of, and understanding a first-person knowledge claim as a special case of knowledge attribution, the account of knowledge that is given here understands first-person knowledge claims as the primary use of the verb ‘to know’. This means that a cognitive act is an act that counts as cognitive from a first-person point of view. The method of linguistic phenomenology is used to explain or elucidate our epistemic notions. One of the advantages of the theory is that an answer can be given to some of the problems in modern epistemology, such as the Gettier problem.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Per Martin-Löf and Göran Sundholm for extensive comments on a former version of this paper. I thank Mark van Atten for the stimulating discussions on intuitionism and phenomenology during my sabbatical leave in Paris (IHPST, fall 2005), and my colleague Eric Schliesser for his comments on a former version of this paper. Parts of this paper were presented at Groningen, Paris (IHPST), Leuven and Aberdeen; I thank the organizers and participants.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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van der Schaar, M. The cognitive act and the first-person perspective: an epistemology for constructive type theory. Synthese 180, 391–417 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9708-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9708-4