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Risk sensitive animal knowledge

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Notes

  1. In keeping with Henderson and Horgan (2011), we would insist that the relevant forms of reliability include what we there call “transglobal reliability under suitable modulational control,” and that this makes for processes that are globally (and commonly locally) reliable in epistemically hospitable global (and local) environments. We omit the details here.

  2. Perhaps this is a class of competences—such as the perceptual competence for generating true beliefs regarding North American wild flowers, the capacity for generating true beliefs about instanced computer malfunctions, and so on).

  3. The kind of reliability that we ourselves claim is constitutively required for epistemic justification, and hence also for knowledge—viz., what we call “transglobal reliability under suitable modulational control” (cf. note 2), is a form of reliability that is inherently risk-sensitive. Indeed, the apparent need to accommodate risk sensitivity within an adequate account of epistemic justification—and hence within an adequate account of knowledge too—was a principal motivating rationale for the form of reliabilism we advocate in Henderson and Horgan (2011). We call it transglobal reliabilism. Central here are processes of modulational control—such processes are responsive to information bearing on risks. In training up a normal human (or normal dog, monkey, or similar animal) as a perceiver of some class of phenomena, the human (or animal) subject’s perceptual competence itself gets shaped so as to become automatically sensitive to a range of information associated with encountered risks. This kind of sensitivity via modulational control significantly enhances the reliability of the subject’s perceptual processes and thus contributes to the subject’s perceptual competence itself.

  4. Or we have been suggesting this much. The real argument that there can be this kind of sensitivity in the processes of first-order belief generation is to be found in Henderson and Horgan (2000, 2011, Chaps. 7–8).

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588, USA

    David Henderson

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA

    Terry Horgan

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  1. David Henderson
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  2. Terry Horgan
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Correspondence to Terry Horgan.

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Henderson, D., Horgan, T. Risk sensitive animal knowledge. Philos Stud 166, 599–608 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0201-z

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