Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock
RESEARCH
My research projects are sorted below into four categories:
Journal Publications: published and forthcoming work in refereed journals.
Other Publications: Reviews, encyclopedia entries, etc.
In the works: Projects still under development. I may have a draft version I'd be happy to share by email, depending on stage of development.
Others: At the bottom of the page, there is a copy of my dissertation, and other non-academic work, and projects on hold.
(For drafts, email me at jpinerosglasscock@gsu.edu).
Journal Publications
(2024) "A Fitting Definition of Epistemic Emotions" (with Mike Deigan), The Philosophical Quarterly, 74.3: 777-798.
Epistemic emotions like surprise are those with fittingness conditions that distinctively involve some epistemic evaluation.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
(2022) "The Puzzle of Learning by Doing and the Gradability of Knowledge-How", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 105: 619-637.
To solve a modern version of the Aristotelian puzzle of how it is possible to learn by practice, we must accept that knowledge-how is a gradable quality, and its gradability is neither reducible to a mere matter of practical ability (as per anti-intellectualism), nor information-possession (as per intellectualism).
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
(2022) "Acquittal from Knowledge Laundering", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 193.1: 39-54.
Interest-relativism about knowledge is consistent with standard transition principles for memory and testimony so long as these transition principles are themselves relativized to interests.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]-
(2022) "Authoritative Knowledge", Erkenntnis, 87: 2475-2502.
An agent who exercises authority can obtain a neglected form of practical knowledge that I call ‘authoritative knowledge’. It is a form of non-inferential knowledge obtained by 'keeping the world on track'.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
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(2021) "Alienation or Regress: On the Non-Inferential Character of Agential Knowledge" Philosophical Studies, 178.6:1757-68.
Inferentialism, the view that we gain knowledge of our actions based on an inference from knowledge of our intentions, faces a dilemma: either it faces a vicious regress, or else it yields alienated knowledge of our actions. Neither option is attractive, so inferentialism should be rejected.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
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(2020) "Practical Knowledge and Luminosity" Mind, 129:1237-67.
A particularly strong version of Williamson's anti-luminosity argument calls into question the Anscombean view that whenever we act intentionally we know what we're doing. It is particularly damning since one can have false beliefs about how one is acting. The argument generalizes for other practical states. Our wills may yet be good sources of knowledge, just as our fallible perceptual capacities.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
(2019) "Reason in Action in Aristotle: A Reading of EE 5.12 /NE 6.12" Journal of the History of Philosophy, 57.3:391-417.
In EE 5.12/NE 6.12 Aristotle shows that φρόνησις (practical wisdom) is not just deliberative but executive, and this explains why it is useful to possess this virtue. The practically wise person's actions are expressive of a knowledge of the fine only he possesses. This is why he must cunning (δεινότης), the ability to execute his actions successfully. A corollary of this reading is that the debate about whether Aristotle holds a Humean account of practical reason is based on assumptions about the scope of rationality that Aristotle rejects.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
Other Publications
(2023) 'Action' entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (co-written with Sergio Tenenbaum)
[link]
(2022) Book Review of Tamar Schapiro, Feeling Like It" European Journal of philosophy, 30: 1208-1212.
[link to penultimate version] [link to journal page]
In the works
Defends a second-personal account of testimonial knowledge on the basis of general principles concerning the personal and direct nature of this type of knowledge.
Practical knowledge is constituted by states that are both intentions and beliefs. That doesn't entail that intentions are kinds of beliefs; but rather that a single representational state can type both kinds. Only such states can constitute practical knowledge, since the only way to rule out a practical alternative is from the standpoint of an intention.
[link to Copenhagen 11.24 Handout]
TITLE REMOVED (draft available on request)
A defense of my application of Williamson's anti-luminosity argument from recent criticisms.
TITLE REMOVED (draft available on request)
Friendship is an arena for self-revelation. Thus, when working properly, friends experience each other in deeper ways than anyone outside the friendship could hope for. This explains why friends often should have beliefs that represent the other 'in a good light', but in a way consistent with standard evidential norms.
[link to Inquiry Network Handout]
TITLE TBD [A critical comparison of Ryle and Plato, commissioned for The Rylean Mind, Matt Dougherty (ed.), Routledge] (co-authored with Allison Piñeros Glasscock)
Critically compares Ryle and Plato's views, with a focus on teaching and learning.
The Priority of Margin-for-Error
Safety (no false belief in nearby cases) is often assumed to be prior to Margin-for-Error (truth in nearby cases). However, Margin-for-Error turns out to be the stronger principle, needed to explain failures of knowledge across cases where Safety is powerless. Thus, Margin-for-Error is more fundamental, which means that certain criticisms of Williamson's anti-luminosity argument miss the mark.
Plain Intentions
Ordinary intentions are non-conditional in nature. But they're not unconditional. To draw the right boundaries we must carefully distinguish between the content of an attitude, and the background assumptions against which they are held.
Practical Demonstratives and the Nature of Skill
One knows how to Φ iff one knows a practical answer to the question ⌜how to Φ?⌝. Such practical answers, in turn, require knowing an answer of the form ⌜this [displaying an action] is a way to Φ⌝, and knowing such an answer is irreducibly a manifestation of agency. The result is a view on which the knowledge and the practical capacities constitutive of skill are co-dependent.
Know-How and Generality
Skills enable their possessors to succeed across an indefinite variety of tasks. To explain this, we must appeal to two features of propositional knowledge: its anti-modularity, and its modal robustness. This vindicates the intellectualist view that skill is fundamentally constituted by propositional knowledge.
Against Cognitivism in the Philosophy of Action
Since one can intend and act intentionally without knowing how one acts, one can intend and act intentionally without a corresponding belief.
Peril and Courage in Plato's Phaedo. (co-authored with Allison Piñeros Glasscock)
Courage involves risk, but the intellectualist account of virtue in in terms of knowledge (e.g. in the Protagoras) is incompatible with risk. In the Phaedo, Plato essentially invents the notion of 'rational belief' to provide a more realistic intellectualist account of courage.
Evidence, Transparency, and Knowledge
Reasons to believe that p are not exhausted by reasons that bear on the question 'whether p?'. However, they are exhausted by reasons that bear on the question 'do I know p?'. This vindicates a more defensible form of evidentialism than the standard argument from transparency.
Intention §45
There are two viable interpretations for how Anscombe deals with cases where one doesn't act as one takes oneself to be acting: (i) an ahead-of-its-time disjunctivist interpretation, or a (ii) 'botched' interpretation, on which 'what happens' can deviate a lot before it proves one's thought false.
The Unity in Aristotle's Account of Proper and Incidental Perception
For Aristotle, the most basic forms of perception are already about unified objects rather than properties. This view plays a crucial role in the argument in DA 3.1 for why there aren't special senses for common perceptibles. Incidental perception requires only our ability to recognize by identifying and reidentifying an 'incidental object' (e.g. Diares's son) with a proper object of perception (e.g. a white thing). It is as such a genuine form of perception, rather than an act of reason, as some have thought.
Knowing and Valuing
Why remember facts about a friend or a city you love, when you can simply store this information on your cell phone? Answer: Because valuing isn't constituted simply by practical attitudes; knowing is itself a form of valuing.
Protest as Second-Personal, Social Address
Political protests are essentially second-personal social engagements, with their distinctive rational requirements. Because they are second-personal, they aim to give reasons that are grounded in the very act of making a claim; and because they are social, the claim takes an irreducibly plural form ('We demand that you F'). Following MLK, this shows that there's an intrinsic incompatibility between protests and violence.
Puzzlement (co-authored with Mike Deigan)
You should puzzle just in case you have no viable answers to to a live question. Puzzlement thus plays a crucial re-structuring role in inquiry, motivating you to reconceive your doxastic structures that prevent you from so much as conceptualizing an answer.
Others
FOR A GENERAL AUDIENCE
Guns and Steroids
Reflection on the normative structure of restrictions of drug-enhancement drugs in sports suggests that even if there were gun rights, these would have to be strongly restricted.
[link to draft]
DISSERTATION: ACTION, KNOWLEDGE, AND AUTHORITY: VARIATIONS ON A REIDEAN THEME
Click here to download.
On hold
Projects I may return to at some point...
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[Causality and Intensionality]
Defends the view that canonical causal sentences are intensional, and that this is not in tension, as has usually been thought, with the objectivity of causality. [On hold since 2017]
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