Suppose you could change people's way of thinking about the world at its very roots, by changing the very concepts by means of which they think. Suppose, further, that this would make the world a better place; that would be quite something. Knowledge and Conceptual Engineering is a comprehensive and systematic study of the nature and normativity of conceptual engineering. This book comprehensively deals with all the central questions in the field: the very possibility of conceptua...

Knowledge-first epistemology places knowledge at the normative core of epistemological affairs: on this approach, central epistemic phenomena are to be analyzed in terms of knowledge. This Element offers a defence of an integrated, naturalistic knowledge-first account of justified belief, reasons, evidence and defeat, permissible assertion and action, and the epistemic normativity of practical and theoretical reasoning. On this account, the epistemic is an independent normative domain orga...

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It...

We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, but efforts to spread this knowledge often encounter resistance to evidence. The phenomenon of resistance to evidence, while subject to thorough investigation in social psychology, is acutely under-theorised in the philosophical literature. Mona Simion's book is concerned with positive epistemology: it argues that we have epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs on available and undefeated evidence. I...

Shifty Speech and Independent Thought is a manifesto for epistemic independence: the independence of good thinking from practical considerations. Mona Simion defends the independence of thought from the most prominent threat that has surfaced in the last twenty years of epistemological theorizing: the phenomenon of shiftiness of proper assertoric speech with practical context. This study does four things: firstly, it shows that, against orthodoxy, the argument from practical shift...

Traditionally, the notion of defeat has been central to epistemology, practical reasoning, and ethics. Within epistemology, it is standardly assumed that a subject who knows that p, or justifiably believes that p, can lose this knowledge or justified belief by acquiring a so-called 'defeater', whether that is evidence that not-p, evidence that the process that produced her belief is unreliable, or evidence that she has likely misevaluated her own evidence. Within...

This guide outlines concepts and principles of philosophy in an easy to understand format. Topics covered in this guide include: metaphysics, mind body problems, language games and much more.

Human life is conducted within a network of social relations, social groups, and societies. Grasping the implications of that fact starts with understanding social metaphysics. Social metaphysics provides a foundation for social theory, as well as for social epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, action theory, ethics, and political philosophy. This volume will interest anyone concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.Socializing Metaph...

The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity maps a central terrain of philosophy, and provides an authoritative guide to it. Few concepts have received as much attention in recent philosophy as the concept of a reason to do or believe something. And one of the most contested ideas in philosophy is normativity, the 'ought' in claims that we ought to do or believe something. This is the first volume to provide broad coverage of the study of reasons and normativity across multiple philosop...

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of social work find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and ed...

What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all; the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should reject both these extremes and hold that truth is a functional property. To understand truth we must...

This new edition of Alexander Miller’s highly readable introduction to contemporary metaethics provides a critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary metaethics. Miller traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism.From Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism, A....