Research Publications
Publications by the KNOW-HOW team, newest first.
Books
Knowledge, Action, and Accident: An Epistemic Theory of Control
Carter, J. A. and Kearl, T. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming (open access).
How We Govern Our Minds Through Others: Epistemic Autonomy Beyond the Myth of Independence
Carter, J. A. and Levy, N. (2026). MIT Press. Open access.
Carter and Levy argue that the epistemic autonomy worth having depends on other people, and on tools and technology, rather than on going it alone. Self-governance runs through social relationships and institutions: we manage our beliefs and attention through collaboration, trust and the influence of others. The book applies this to hijacked attention, intellectual collaboration, artificial intelligence, first-hand insight, nudging, feedback loops and adaptive control.
Knowledge and Conceptual Engineering: The Epistemology, Ethics, and Politics of Meaning Production
Simion, M. and Kelp, C. (2026). Oxford University Press. Open access.
A systematic, functionalist account of conceptual engineering: whether it is possible, what makes it succeed, when it is epistemically and morally permissible, and what it means for conceptual ignorance and understanding, social-kind concepts, hermeneutical injustice and conceptual disinformation. Simion and Kelp argue that conceptual engineering is something we can and should do, and that it is not distinctively difficult.
Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence: A Foundational Framework for the Epistemology of AI
Kelp, C. and Simion, M. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Elements), forthcoming.
A foundational framework for the epistemology of AI: a metaepistemology that separates genuine artificial epistemic agents from mere data processors; an individual epistemology of AI covering inquiry, justification, knowledge, understanding and assertion; and a social epistemology of AI that sets out when to trust AI outputs.
Journal articles
The Epistemology and Semantics of Ignorance
Simion, M., Kelp, C. and Mace, L. (2026). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, online first. Open access.
This paper develops a novel, full account of the nature and epistemic normativity of objectual and factual ignorance, degrees of ignorance, comparative ignorance, and the semantics of permissible outright attributions of ignorance of facts and phenomena.
Ignorance and Autonomous Belief
Carter, J. A. and Piedrahita, O. A. (2026). Australasian Journal of Philosophy, online first. Open access.
A common thesis about ignorance is the Knowledge View, which holds that S is ignorant that p if and only if S doesn't know that p. We present a new argument against the Knowledge View. According to the argument, which draws from recent insights about epistemic autonomy, knowledge undermining infringements on a belief's autonomy don't necessarily lead to ignorance, and on this basis, the Knowledge View should be rejected.
Who Acts When the Machine Decides? Intentional Action and Agentic AI
Carter, J. A. (2026). Inquiry, online first. Open access.
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. On the know-how account defended here, a user intentionally ϕ-s through agentic AI when her success manifests the exercise of supervisory know-how – viz., the competence to define an "acceptable corridor" of outcomes and means, to monitor for departures from that corridor, and to intervene or abort when drift threatens.
Autonomous Knowledge: Responses to My Critics
Carter, J. A. (2026). Inquiry, online first. Open access.
I reply here to five excellent commentaries on my book, Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing. Topics range from the application of autonomy to know-how and cognitive development, the resilience of evidentialism and virtue epistemology against non-autonomous enhancement cases, the distinction between positive and negative epistemic autonomy, and the axiological foundations of autonomous belief and self-constitution.
Virtuous Deferral
Carter, J. A. and Kallestrup, J. (2026). Noûs, early view. Open access.
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.
Virtue Epistemology for the Zetetic Turn
Carter, J. A. and Willard-Kyle, C. (2025). Mind 134(536): 943–966. Open access.
This article develops and argues for a virtue epistemology that includes performance-normative evaluations of interrogative attitudes (IAs) We argue that (1) IAs are competent when they manifest (rightly situated) dispositions to form IAs in sound questions reliably enough, and (2) IAs are apt when their being directed towards a sound question manifests the relevant competence.
Easy Practical Knowledge
Kearl, T. and Carter, J. A. (2025). Journal of Philosophy, online first. Free to read.
This paper develops a novel account of practical knowledge by connecting the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning. We argue that practical knowledge—the knowledge agents have of what they're doing as they act intentionally—is "easy" in the technical sense that manifesting one's skills provides a priori propositional justification for beliefs about one's actions. The account explains why practical knowledge typically accompanies intentional action while accommodating problematic cases involving epistemic defeat or unsafe beliefs, where agents act intentionally without knowledge. The view charts a middle path between strong Anscombian requirements and deflationary accounts that deny substantive epistemic conditions on intentional action.
Chapters and forthcoming articles
Trusting AI: Explainability versus Trustworthiness
Simion, M. and Willard-Kyle, C. (2026). In H. Cappelen and R. Sterken (eds), Communicating with AI: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford University Press, pp. 251–266. Open access.
Simion and Willard-Kyle reject the Explanation View, on which rationally trusting an AI requires an explanation of why it reached its verdict. Rational trust does not generally require understanding why, and AI communication creates no special requirement that it should. On their Simple View, rational trust in AI requires AI trustworthiness, so efforts to raise appropriate trust should target trustworthiness rather than explainability.
On Exercising Epistemic Agency
Simion, M. Criminal Law and Philosophy, forthcoming (special issue on Jennifer Lackey’s work on criminal testimonial injustice).
Against scepticism about epistemic agency, and against the view that exercising it is simply a matter of responding to evidence, Simion argues that exercising epistemic agency requires only an unobstructed capacity to respond to evidence. This minimal account better explains the difference between poor exercises of epistemic agency and the cases of agential epistemic injustice at the centre of Jennifer Lackey’s Criminal Testimonial Injustice.
Epistemic Polarization
Carter, J. A. In S. D. Hales (ed.), Reason and Relevance: Philosophy for Today. Hackett, forthcoming.
Working papers
Good Moves
Carter, J. A. Draft, September 2026.
The topic of this paper is telic know-how. Telic know-how ranges over tasks defined by a clear terminus. It is argued that telic know-how is a stable, trainable disposition to select and sequence good moves across the live contexts the (telic) task presents, viz., those at which the agent's choice still bears on the outcome. A move is good when it issues from a policy the agent herself implements that robustly improves the prospects of completion over entry-level engagement, and no available alternative clearly betters it.
