Gettier cases in epistemic logic

Standard models of epistemic-doxastic logic predict Gettier cases of justified true belief without knowledge in a wide variety of cases, of both traditional and ‘fake barn’ types. This both corroborates the usual arguments for Gettier cases by means of thought experiments against critiques from experimental philosophy and provides more theoretical insight into the phenomena. The prediction survives even if one moves from the standard accessibility semantics to the more general neighbourhood semantics in order to avoid the principle of multi-premise closure. Some ways of rethinking the results in the framework of knowledge-first epistemology will also be discussed.

Causal perception, interventionism, and causal laws in science

Much of scientific practice is intended to bridge the inferential gap between observations and causal laws. In this talk, I will focus on a corresponding, but less commonly discussed, conceptual gap: the content of particular observations of causation seems to be quite different than the content of the causal regularities and mechanisms we discover in science. More specifically, the direct perception of causation that occurs regularly in science appears to be quite different from interventionist causal regularities, particularly in the social sciences. In order to bridge this gap, I will argue that causal perception is intimately connected with action and behavior. I will then show that these two features of causal perception can provide the grounding required for interventionist causation, and thereby provide exactly the bridge required to connect causal perception and causal laws.