A complex story about simple inquirers: Micro-epistemology and animal cognition

My dissertation argues that the epistemic capacities of non-human animals are poorly understood within current standard analytic epistemology. I suggest a new epistemic framework, micro-epistemology, be adopted to address this lack of understanding.; Although there are a wide variety of opinions regarding the status of animal knowledge there is considerable consensus within standard analytic philosophy about the kind of epistemically relevant cognitive capacities that animals possess. According to this consensus animals are, at best, merely reliable inquirers; lacking any capacity for reflection on the 'beliefs' they form. One problem with this consensus is that it is based on little or no awareness of current scientific work on animal cognition; the work of Hilary Kornblith being more or less the sole exception. Despite his superior awareness of the animal cognition literature Kornblith's account of animal knowledge fails because it attempts to force the animal cognition information into a pre-existing (reliabilist) epistemic framework by glossing over important distinctions within the animal cognition literature. The question then becomes whether any broadly reliabilist epistemology is able to account for the variety animal epistemic capacities. I argue that this is not the case. I base my argument on an analysis of current work within comparative psychology on the ability of macaque monkeys to monitor their own uncertainty with regard to various tasks.; In the final portion of the dissertation I describe my new approach to epistemology, micro-epistemology. Micro-epistemology focuses on detailed investigations of particular cognitive/epistemic capacities (rather than highly general accounts of what is in common to all such capacities) and as a result emphasizes the plurality of epistemic goods. By incorporating such a micro-epistemic approach into our epistemic inquiries we achieve two important goals. The micro-epistemic framework provides both the necessary machinery to properly study the important and heretofore under appreciated area of animal epistemic capacities and in doing so both draws our attention to, and offers a method for investigating, previously unexplored regions of epistemology in general. I conclude by defending micro-epistemology against a number of possible objections and by suggesting some avenues for future micro-epistemic investigation.