About
36
Publications
1,829
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
130
Citations
Introduction
I am associate professor at Zhejiang University (China).
My main interests are in Epistemology, Ethics and Philosophy of Mind. In particular, I'm interested in the nature of belief and its relation with truth (the aim of belief) and the relations between knowledge and practical rationality.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2017 - present
March 2016 - September 2017
Publications
Publications (36)
A belief is correct if and only if the believed proposition is true. Some philosophers argued that from this standard of correctness it is possible to derive the statement of a norm, a claim about what a subject ought to do. Many formulations of the standard in terms of an ‘ought’-claim have been suggested, but all resulted affected by some problem...
What is knowledge? What should knowledge be like? Call an epistemological project that sets out to answer the first question ‘descriptive’ and a project that sets out to answer the second question ‘normative’. If the answers to these two questions don’t coincide—if what knowledge should be like differs from what knowledge is like—there is room for...
A recent view in contemporary epistemology holds that practical reasoning is governed by an epistemic norm. Evidence for the existence of this norm is provided by the ways in which we assess (justify, judge and criticize) our actions and reasoning on the basis of whether certain epistemic conditions are satisfied. Philosophers disagree on what this...
I introduce and defend a view about knowledge that I call Moderate Skeptical Invariantism. According to this view, a subject knows p only if she is practically certain that p, where practical certainty is defined as the confidence a rational subject would have to have for her to believe that p and act on p no matter the stakes. I do not provide a d...
This paper focuses on the relation between epistemic reasons and the subject’s epistemic perspective. It tackles the questions of whether epistemic reasons are dependent on the perspective of the subject they are reasons for, and if so, whether they are dependent on the actual or the potential perspective. It is argued that epistemic reasons are ei...
This is an introduction to the Topical Collection Current Themes in Epistemology: Asian Epistemology Network.
In Normative Reasons: Between Reasoning and Explanation (2022), Arturs Logins provides a novel reductivist account of normative reasons, what he calls the Erotetic View of Reasons. In this paper, I provide three challenges to this view. The first two concern the extensional adequacy of the Erotetic View. The view may fail to count as normative reas...
A minimal constraint on normative reasons seems to be that if some fact is a reason for an agent to ϕ (act, believe, or feel), the agent could come to know that fact. This constraint is threatened by a well known type of counterexamples. Self-effacing reasons are facts that intuitively constitute reasons for an agent to ϕ, but that if they were to...
Recently some epistemologists have approached the question whether epistemic justification comes in degrees from a linguistic perspective. Drawing insights from linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives, they investigate whether epistemic occurrences of ‘justified’ are gradable and if yes what type of gradability they involve. These authors conclu...
The book is open access, available at this link: https://www.padovauniversitypress.it/publications/9788869383113
This is an introductory article published in French on the Encyclopédie Philosophique. The article is available at this link: https://encyclo-philo.fr/item/1705
Objectivism is the view that how an agent ought to act depends on all kinds of facts, regardless of the agent’s epistemic position with respect to them. One of the most important challenges to this view is constituted by certain cases involving specific conditions of uncertainty—so-called three-options cases. In these cases it seems overwhelmingly...
The paper investigates what type of motivation can be given for adopting a knowledge-based decision theory (hereafter, KBDT). KBDT seems to have several advantages over competing theories of rationality. It is commonly argued that this theory would naturally fit with the intuitive idea that being rational is doing what we take to be best given what...
An increasingly popular view in contemporary epistemology holds that the most fundamental norm governing belief is knowledge. According to this norm one shouldn’t believe what one doesn’t know. A prominent argument for the knowledge norm appeals to the claim that knowledge is the most general condition of epistemic assessment of belief, one entaili...
According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the...
Early pre-peer-review draft of an article appeared in French in Klesis, special issue on the philosophy of Pascal Engel. Issue 45, 2020: http://revue-klesis.org.
Link to the open-access published article: http://revue-klesis.org/pdf/klesis-45-Engel-05-Davide-Fassio-correction-doxastique-comme-ideal-de-la-raison.pdf.
According to a popular view in contemporary epistemology, a belief is justified if, and only if, it amounts to knowledge. Upholders of this view also hold that knowledge is the fundamental norm governing belief and that conforming to this norm is both necessary and sufficient for justification. I argue against the claim that mere norm conformity is...
While buck-passing accounts are widely discussed in the literature, there have been surprisingly few attempts to apply buck-passing analyses to specific normative domains such as aesthetics and epistemology. In particular, there have been very few works which have tried to provide complete and detailed buck-passing analyses of epistemic values and...
Benjamin Kiesewetter has recently provided an argument to the effect that necessarily, if one has decisive reason to φ, then one has sufficient reason to believe that she herself has decisive reason to φ. If sound, this argument has important implications for several debates in contemporary normative philosophy. I argue that the main premise in the...
Some philosophers have argued that a standard of correctness is constitutive of the concept or the essence of belief. By this claim they mean, roughly, that a mental state is a belief partially in virtue of being correct if and only if its content is true. In this paper I provide a new argument in support of the constitutivity of the correctness st...
Deontic Doxastic Constitutivism is the view that beliefs are constitutively
governed by deontic norms. This roughly means that a full account and understanding of
the nature of these mental attitudes cannot be reached unless one appeals to some norm of
this type. My aim in this article is to provide an objection to such a conception of the
normativ...
Commonality is the claim that there is a common epistemic standard for assertion, practical reasoning and belief. Assuming that commonality is true, a further issue is whether it is a matter of mere coincidence that different attitudes and practices are governed by the same standard, or whether there is some deeper motivation for it. Attempts have...
Some philosophers have recently argued that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge in a specific circumstance depends on features of the subject’s practical situation that are unrelated to the truth of the subject’s belief, such as the costs for the subject of being wrong about whether the believed proposition is true. One of the best-known arg...
Dispositionalist accounts of belief define beliefs in terms of specific sets of dispositions. In this article, I provide a blind-spot argument against these accounts. The core idea of the argument is that beliefs having the form [p and it is not manifestly believed that p] cannot be manifestly believed. This means that one cannot manifest such beli...
With the claim that “belief aims at truth,” philosophers designate a specific feature of belief according to which believing a proposition carries with it some sort of commitment or teleological directedness toward the truth of the believed proposition. The hypothesis that beliefs involve an aim at truth has been used by philosophers to explain a n...
Il Paradosso della Conoscibilità è un breve argomento la cui conclusione è che se ogni verità è conoscibile, allora ogni verità è conosciuta. Se si accetta l’ulteriore plausibile assunzione che vi siano verità che di fatto nessuno conosce, dalla conclusione dell’argomento è possibile derivare che ci sono verità che è impossibile conoscere. L’argome...
The Knowability Paradox is a logical argument to the effect that, if there are truths not actually known, then there are unknowable truths. Recently, Alexander Paseau and Bernard Linsky have independently suggested a possible way to counter this argument by typing knowledge. In this article, we argue against their proposal that if one abstracts fro...
The Knowability Paradox is a logical argument that, starting from the plainly innocent assumption that every true proposition is knowable, reaches the strong conclusion that every true proposition is known; i.e. if there are unknown truths, there are unknowable truths. The paradox has been considered a problem for every theory assuming the Knowabil...
Nicholas Rescher, in The Limits of Science (1984), argued that: «perfected science is a mirage; complete knowledge a chimera» . He reached the above conclusion from a logical argument known as Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability. The argument, starting from the assumption that every truth is knowable, proves that every truth is also actually known and,...
In "The Limits of Science" N. Rescher introduces a logical argument known as the Knowability Paradox, according to which, if every true proposition is knowable, then every true proposition is known, i.e. if there are unknown truths, there are unknowable truths. Rescher argues that the Knowability Paradox, giving evidence to a limit of our knowledge...
A logical argument known as Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability, starting from the assumption that every truth is knowable, leads to the consequence that every truth is also actually known. Then, given the ordinary fact that some true propositions are not actually known, it concludes, by modus tollens, that there are unknowable truths. The main literatu...
