J Adam Carter
Biographic Data
| ID | 459618 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Adam Carter |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Carter |
| SIGNATURE | CARTER J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1222-8331 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 88 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 54 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Virtuous Deferral
Virtue epistemology has long struggled with the “Creditability Dilemma”: how can knowledge gained through deference be creditable to the knower if it primarily depends on others’ cognitive work? We propose a novel solution by developing a telic account of doxastic deference as a distinctive kind of social‐epistemic performance. On our view, such deference succeeds when a deferrer forms a true belief that p in domain d , which answers their query,…
Autonomous knowledge: Responses to my critics
I reply here to five excellent commentaries on my book, Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing (Carter, J. A. 2022. Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press). In what follows, I address objections and constructive proposals from Gloria Andrada, Kevin McCain, Jesús Vega-Encabo, Duncan Pritchard, and Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen & Pet…
Who acts when the machine decides? Intentional action and agentic AI
Action theory offers well-developed treatments of tool use and of delegation, but agentic AI belongs to neither category. The user specifies an end; the system autonomously selects the means. What, then, secures the connection between the user's intention and outcome that distinguishes intentional action from lucky coincidence when things go right? I examine five candidate approaches – Davidsonian minimalism, principal–agent decomposition, strong…
Brown on group evidence, group justification, and group responsibility
Jessica Brown’s excellent new book (2024) is highly ambitious: it develops a unified account of group doxastic, epistemic, and responsibility phenomena. Importantly for our purposes here, Brown dev
Mind-Technology Problems for Know-How Anti-Intellectualism
Clowes, Gärtner, and Hipólito (2021) describe the Mind-Technology Problem as a new constellation of philosophical problems about the nature of mind generated by advances in technology we increasingly rely on to meet both theoretical and practical aims. We agree with Clowes, Gärtner, and Hipólito that the problems they identify frame a timely and worthwhile new research programme. We aim to contribute to this research programme by motivating and c…
Easy Practical Knowledge in advance
We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is “easy” in the sense that, by manifesting one’s skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about in…
Frege on the Tolerability of Sense Variation: A Reply to Michaelson and Textor
In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege concedes that, in many ordinary cases, variation in sense is tolerable. In a recent article in this journal, Michaelson and Textor (2023) offer a new interpretation of Frege on the tolerability of sense variation according to which variation in sense is tol…
Therapeutic trust
This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust – default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust – each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic trust, and its relation to standard (non-therapeutic) …
Vices of Distrust
We explore a cluster of epistemic vices that lead us to refrain from trusting when we should
Abduction, Skepticism, and Indirect Realism
Moore and Russell thought that perceptual knowledge of the external world is based on abductive inference from information about our experience. Sosa maintains that this ‘indirect realist’ strategy has no prospects of working. Vogel disagrees and thinks it can and does work perfectly well, and his reasoning (and variations on that reasoning) seem initially promising, moreso than other approaches. My aim, however, will be to adjudicate this disput…
What the tortoise should do: A knowledge‐first virtue approach to the basing relation
What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content‐sensitive first‐personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over‐intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles…
Can AI Believe
Intentional action, knowledge, and cognitive extension
Intentional actions exhibit control in a way that mere lucky successes do not. A longstanding tradition in action theory characterizes actional control in terms of the knowledge with which one acts when acting intentionally. Given that action theorists, no less than epistemologists, typically take for granted the orthodox thesis that knowledge is in the head (viz., realized exclusively by brainbound cognition), the idea that intentional action is…
Safety and dream scepticism in Sosa’s epistemology
A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge . This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-leve…
Fake knowledge-How
Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), know-how is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley's reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be…
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement
Disagreement is one of the deepest and most pervasive topics in philosophy, arguably its very bedrock, and is an ever-increasing feature of politics, ethics, public policy, science and many other areas. Despite the omnipresence of disagreement, the topic itself has received relatively little sustained examination. In this outstanding handbook a team of international contributors examines the philosophy of disagreement and how it extends to debate…
Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Intentional Action
We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent’s control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson’s well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this c…
Intentional action and knowledge-centered theories of control
Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima…
How to be an infallibilist
Refitting the mirrors: On structural analogies in epistemology and action theory
Structural analogies connect Williamson’s (Knowledge and its limits, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Acting on knowledge. In: Carter JA, Gordon EC, Jarvis B (eds) Knowledge first: approaches in epistemology and mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 163–181, 2017) epistemology and action theory: for example, action is the direction-of-fit mirror image of knowledge, and knowledge stands to belief as action stands to intention. These stru…
Epistemic Values: Collected Papers in Epistemology
Linda Zagzebski has made wide-ranging and influential contributions in epistemology and philosophy of religion over her career. Within epistemology specifically, Zagzebski is rightly associated with her pioneering book Virtues of the Mind, which is a core classic in virtue epistemology (Zagzebski 1996). Importantly, though, Zagzebski has also carved out notable positions in a range of other areas of epistemology, including in debates about the na…
Trust and trustworthiness
I motivate and defend a new way of theorising about trust and trustworthiness – and their relationship to each other – by locating both within a broader picture that captures largely overlooked symmetries on both the trustor's and trustee's side of a cooperative exchange. The view defended here takes good cooperation as a theoretical starting point; on the view proposed, cooperation between trustor and trustee is working well when achievements in…
Trust, distrust, and testimonial injustice
This essay investigates an underappreciated way in which trust and testimonial injustice are closely connected. Credibility deficit and credibility excess cases both (in their own distinctive ways) contribute to a speaker’s being harmed in her capacity a knower. But moreover, as we will show—by using the tools of a performance-theoretic framework—both credibility deficit and credibility excess cases also feature incompetent trusting on the part o…
Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing
Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: The case of YouTube’s recommender system
Technological Seduction and Self-Radicalization
Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviors ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In …
Knowledge‐How and Cognitive Achievement
According to reductive intellectualism, knowledge‐how just is a kind of propositional knowledge (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011 a , 2011 b ; Brogaard, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011, 2009, 2011). This proposal has proved controversial because knowledge‐how and propositional knowledge do not seem to share the same epistemic properties, particularly with regard to epistemic luck. Here we aim to move the argument forward by offering a posit…
The Defeasibility of Knowledge‐How
Reductive intellectualists (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011 a ; 2011 b ; Brogaard 2008; 2009; 2011) hold that knowledge‐how is a kind of knowledge‐that. If this thesis is correct, then we should expect the defeasibility conditions for knowledge‐how and knowledge‐that to be uniform—viz., that the mechanisms of epistemic defeat which undermine propositional knowledge will be equally capable of imperilling knowledge‐how. The goal of th…
Belief without credence
One of the deepest ideological divides in contemporary epistemology concerns the relative importance of belief versus credence. A prominent consideration in favor of credence-based epistemology is the ease with which it appears to account for rational action. In contrast, cases with risky payoff structures threaten to break the link between rational belief and rational action. This threat poses a challenge to traditional epistemology, which maint…
Extended Cognition and Propositional Memory
The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended‐memory cases’ (e.g. Clark & Chalmers 1998); though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition ( HEC ) as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended‐memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is …
The philosophy of memory technologies: Metaphysics, knowledge, and values
Memory technologies are cultural artifacts that scaffold, transform, and are interwoven with human biological memory systems. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and integrative survey of their philosophical dimensions, including their metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical dimensions, drawing together debates across the humanities, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. Metaphysical dimensions of memory technologies include…
Trust and trustworthiness
I motivate and defend a new way of theorising about trust and trustworthiness – and their relationship to each other – by locating both within a broader picture that captures largely overlooked symmetries on both the trustor's and trustee's side of a cooperative exchange. The view defended here takes good cooperation as a theoretical starting point; on the view proposed, cooperation between trustor and trustee is working well when achievements in…
Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: The case of YouTube’s recommender system
The modal account of luck revisited
According to the canonical formulation of the modal account of luck [e.g. Pritchard (2005)], an event is lucky just when that event occurs in the actual world but not in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world. This paper argues, with reference to a novel variety of counterexample, that it is a mistake to focus, when assessing a given event for luckiness, on even…
Refitting the mirrors: On structural analogies in epistemology and action theory
Structural analogies connect Williamson’s (Knowledge and its limits, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Acting on knowledge. In: Carter JA, Gordon EC, Jarvis B (eds) Knowledge first: approaches in epistemology and mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 163–181, 2017) epistemology and action theory: for example, action is the direction-of-fit mirror image of knowledge, and knowledge stands to belief as action stands to intention. These stru…
De Minimis Normativism: A New Theory of Full Aptness
Full aptness is the most important concept in performance-based virtue epistemology. The structure of full aptness, in epistemology and elsewhere, is bilevelled. At the first level, we evaluate beliefs, like performances, on the basis of whether they are successful, competent, and apt-viz successful because competent. But the fact that aptness itself can be fragile-as it is when an apt performance could easily have been inapt-points to a higher z…
Extended cognition and epistemic luck
Understanding a communicated thought
The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a species of what contemporary epistemologists characterise as objectual understanding. Second, we demonstrate that even though this type of understanding differs from linguistic understanding, in many instances of successful communication, these two types of understanding jointly contribut…
Intellectual autonomy, epistemic dependence and cognitive enhancement
Intellectual autonomy has long been identified as an epistemic virtue, one that has been championed influentially by (among others) Kant, Hume and Emerson. Manifesting intellectual autonomy, at least, in a virtuous way, does not require that we form our beliefs in cognitive isolation. Rather, as Roberts and Wood (Intellectual virtues: an essay in regulative epistemology, OUP Oxford, Oxford, pp. 259–260, 2007) note, intellectually virtuous autonom…
Knowledge and the value of cognitive ability
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement
Disagreement is one of the deepest and most pervasive topics in philosophy, arguably its very bedrock, and is an ever-increasing feature of politics, ethics, public policy, science and many other areas. Despite the omnipresence of disagreement, the topic itself has received relatively little sustained examination. In this outstanding handbook a team of international contributors examines the philosophy of disagreement and how it extends to debate…
Trust, distrust, and testimonial injustice
This essay investigates an underappreciated way in which trust and testimonial injustice are closely connected. Credibility deficit and credibility excess cases both (in their own distinctive ways) contribute to a speaker’s being harmed in her capacity a knower. But moreover, as we will show—by using the tools of a performance-theoretic framework—both credibility deficit and credibility excess cases also feature incompetent trusting on the part o…
Exercising abilities
According to one prominent view of exercising abilities (e.g., Millar in Acta Anal 24(4):223–236, 2009), a subject, S , counts as exercising an ability to $$ \phi $$ φ if and only if S successfully $$ \phi $$ φ s. Such an ‘exercise-success’ thesis looks initially very plausible for abilities, perhaps even obviously or analytically true. In this paper, however, I will be defending the position that one can in fact exercise an ability to do one thi…
Epistemic value in the subpersonal vale
A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology—one with origins in Plato’s Meno —concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere (unknown) true opinion. The recent literature is deeply divided on the matter of how best to address the problem. One point, however, remains unquestioned: that if a solution is to be found, it will be at the personal level, the level at which states of…
Cognitive Goods, Open Futures and the Epistemology of Education
What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Joel Feinberg's observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child's right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to, run in to problems. A promising alternativ…
Sosa on knowledge, judgment and guessing
In Chapter 3 of Judgment and Agency , Sosa (Judgment and Agency, 2015) explicates the concept of a fully apt performance. In the course of doing so, he draws from illustrative examples of practical performances and applies lessons drawn to the case of cognitive performances, and in particular, to the cognitive performance of judging. Sosa’s examples in the practical sphere are rich and instructive. But there is, I will argue, an interesting disan…
A new maneuver against the epistemic relativist
Self-Creation and Self-Destruction: Irony, Ideology, and Politics in Richard Rorty and Friedrich Schlegel
On Cappelen and Hawthrone’s “Relativism and Monadic Truth”
Review of Herman Cappelenand John Hawthorne, Relativism and Monadic Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009
Knowledge and the value of cognitive ability
Extended cognition and epistemic luck
A new maneuver against the epistemic relativist
Knowledge‐How and Cognitive Achievement
According to reductive intellectualism, knowledge‐how just is a kind of propositional knowledge (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011 a , 2011 b ; Brogaard, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011, 2009, 2011). This proposal has proved controversial because knowledge‐how and propositional knowledge do not seem to share the same epistemic properties, particularly with regard to epistemic luck. Here we aim to move the argument forward by offering a posit…
Extended Cognition and Propositional Memory
The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended‐memory cases’ (e.g. Clark & Chalmers 1998); though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition ( HEC ) as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended‐memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is …
Metaepistemology and Relativism
This chapter has two primary aims. Firstly, the conclusions drawn from Chapters 2–8 will be situated within a wider context: that of the complicated relationship between metaepistemology, realism and relativism, with an eye to answering some questions left outstanding at the end of Chapter 1. The second thing I want to do is to motivate, in light of what’s been argued for already, an entirely different way of thinking about the relationship betwe…
Metaepistemology and Relativism
Belief without credence
One of the deepest ideological divides in contemporary epistemology concerns the relative importance of belief versus credence. A prominent consideration in favor of credence-based epistemology is the ease with which it appears to account for rational action. In contrast, cases with risky payoff structures threaten to break the link between rational belief and rational action. This threat poses a challenge to traditional epistemology, which maint…
The philosophy of memory technologies: Metaphysics, knowledge, and values
Memory technologies are cultural artifacts that scaffold, transform, and are interwoven with human biological memory systems. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and integrative survey of their philosophical dimensions, including their metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical dimensions, drawing together debates across the humanities, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. Metaphysical dimensions of memory technologies include…
Assertion, uniqueness and epistemic hypocrisy
The modal account of luck revisited
According to the canonical formulation of the modal account of luck [e.g. Pritchard (2005)], an event is lucky just when that event occurs in the actual world but not in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world. This paper argues, with reference to a novel variety of counterexample, that it is a mistake to focus, when assessing a given event for luckiness, on even…
The Defeasibility of Knowledge‐How
Reductive intellectualists (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011 a ; 2011 b ; Brogaard 2008; 2009; 2011) hold that knowledge‐how is a kind of knowledge‐that. If this thesis is correct, then we should expect the defeasibility conditions for knowledge‐how and knowledge‐that to be uniform—viz., that the mechanisms of epistemic defeat which undermine propositional knowledge will be equally capable of imperilling knowledge‐how. The goal of th…
Extended Epistemology
One of the most important research programs in contemporary cognitive science is that of extended cognition. In this area of study, features of a subject’s cognitive environment can, in certain conditions, become constituent parts of the cognitive process itself. The aim of this volume is to explore the epistemological ramifications of this idea. The book brings together papers written by a range of distinguished and emerging academics, from a va…
Extended Knowledge, the Recognition Heuristic, and Epistemic Injustice
This chapter argues that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. It explains the recognition heuristic as studied by Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to the cognitive agent. Having connected the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, it a…
Meta-epistemic defeat
An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional (first-order) epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory (e.g., Olson 2011, Reasons for belief; cf., Streumer 2012, J Philos 110:1–25) and epistemic relativism (e.g., MacFarlane 2005, Oxford Stud Epistemol 1:197–233; 2011; 2014, Assessment sensitivity: Relative truth and its applications). Mechanisms of traditional epist…
Technological Seduction and Self-Radicalization
Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviors ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In …
Socially Extended Epistemology
Kornblith versus Sosa on grades of knowledge
In a series of works Sosa (in: Knowledge in perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991; A virtue epistemology: apt belief and reflective knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Reflective knowledge: apt belief and reflective knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009; 'How Competence Matters in Epistemology', Philos Perspect 24(1):465-475, 2010; Knowing full well, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2011; Judgment…
In Search of the Ideal Tool for International School Teachers to Increase their Global Competency: An Action Research Analysis of the Global Competency Learning Continuum
It is clear that if international school teachers are to be able to properly prepare students for a 21st century globalized workplace, they must first develop the global competence and intercultural skills needed to implement their students’ development of global knowledge, skills and attitudes. Unfortunately, in many public schools and international schools, teachers do not possess the global competency needed to do so effectively. Since it can …
Skepticism Motivated: On the Skeptical Import of Motivated Reasoning
Empirical work on motivated reasoning suggests that our judgments are influenced to a surprising extent by our wants, desires, and preferences (Kahan 2016; Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979; Molden and Higgins 2012; Taber and Lodge 2006). How should we evaluate the epistemic status of beliefs formed through motivated reasoning? For example, are such beliefs epistemically justified? Are they candidates for knowledge? In liberal democracies, these questi…
Cognitive Goods, Open Futures and the Epistemology of Education
What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Joel Feinberg's observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child's right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to, run in to problems. A promising alternativ…
Introduction to special issue: Knowledge, virtue and action—eastern and western perspectives
Sosa on knowledge, judgment and guessing
In Chapter 3 of Judgment and Agency , Sosa (Judgment and Agency, 2015) explicates the concept of a fully apt performance. In the course of doing so, he draws from illustrative examples of practical performances and applies lessons drawn to the case of cognitive performances, and in particular, to the cognitive performance of judging. Sosa’s examples in the practical sphere are rich and instructive. But there is, I will argue, an interesting disan…
Philosophy (47 works) · Epistemology (46 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (44 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (26 works) · Metaphysics (24 works) · Philosophy of science (22 works) · Philosophy of language (20 works) · Cognition (14 works)