There is a debate over the acceptance or rejection of the conjunction thesis. That debate is linked to the concept of truthmaker. The aim of this paper is not to enter that discussion or try to clarify the concept of truthmaker. The goal is just to address the thesis from Non-Axiomatic Logic. I will attempt to show that the latter logic can be used both accepting and rejecting the conjunction thesis. The key is how the relations between truthmakers and conjunctions are expressed.
The gradability of know-how presents a persistent puzzle for theories of skill. While knowing that p is typically binary, knowing how to φ admits of degrees of excellence. Leading Intellectualist accounts (Pavese 2017; Zhang 2025) typically explicate this gradability in terms of representational resolution or default reliability in the actual world. This paper argues, however, that these "Actualist" metrics are insufficient because they fail to distinguish between the intrinsic competence of an "Unlucky Expert"(whose skill is masked by environmental deviation) and the structural luck of a "Lucky Novice"(whose skill is mimicked by environmental assistance). Mere reliability allows luck to masquerade as competence. Drawing on Modal Virtue Epistemology, we propose that gradability is best measured not by actual success frequencies, but by the agent's Weighted Modal Volume across counterfactual worlds. We conclude that propositional knowledge contributes to skill precisely by functioning as a "Modal Extender"that insulates the agent against modal fragility, resulting in a view I term Modal Intellectualism.
This paper asks the following question: How is deduction non-ampliative? It answers with a conditional: If deduction is non-ampliative then its premises are noninformative. To establish the truth of this conditional, is the task of this paper. I argue that the non-ampliative nature of deduction entails the non-informative epistemic status of the sentences which are its premises. In other words, by non-informative I do not mean there is no more information in the conclusion than in the premises. This construal of ‘noninformative’ is already what we mean by ‘non-ampliative’, and is typically not acontroversial claim. By non-informative I mean that the premises themselves are noninformative sentences. Such an account of deduction I call an analytic account of deduction. Three conditions are required to support an analytic account of deduction: 1. epistemic closure, 2. uniformity and 3. intensional semantics. If an analytic account of deduction is correct then it poses problems for philosophical positions that deny the possibility of analytic truth and a priori knowledge. But it also poses problems for philosophical positions that accept analytic truth and a priori knowledge, but nevertheless maintain that deduction is more informative than a mere rearrangement of meanings or ideas along inferential lines.
This paper identifies a structural feature of Gettier cases that has received little attention in the literature. In such cases, there is a decisive fact that explains why a subject’s justified true belief fails to constitute knowledge, yet that fact is inaccessible to the subject. By contrast, an evaluator who correctly judges that the subject lacks knowledge must have access to it. I argue that this asymmetry generates what I call the Evaluator’s Paradox: the epistemic position from which knowledge failure can be correctly diagnosed is precisely the position from which the belief cannot constitute knowledge.
The reductionist and anti-reductionist debate features prominently within the larger canon of literature devoted to the epistemology of testimony. Reductionism is the thesis, roughly, that testimonial knowledge is reducible to some other, more general, form(s) of knowledge. We take anti-reductionism’s thesis to be the denial of reductionism. In this note, we develop an attempted counterexample to reductionism by way of discussing animal testimony. We don’t mean to suggest that the reductionist is without a response to the counterexample proposed, but we think it’s about time epistemologists start focusing on how broad we should understand testimony and to what degree, animals might guide our process in developing our epistemology of testimony.
