Certain puzzling cases have been discussed in the literature recently which appear to support the thought that knowledge can be obtained by way of deduction from a falsehood; moreover, these cases put pressure, prima facie, on the thesis of counter closure for knowledge. We argue that the cases do not involve knowledge from falsehood; despite appearances, the false beliefs in the cases in question are causally, and therefore epistemologically, incidental, and knowledge is achieved despite falsehood. We also show that the principle of counter closure, and the concomitant denial of knowledge from falsehood, is well motivated by considerations in epistemological theory-in particular, by the view that knowledge is first in the epistemological order of things.

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Stewart Cohen's (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman (1988) and Ernest Sosa (1993;2001), involves distinguishing different notions of justification. Juan Comesaña (2002;2010) has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaña's proposal, suffers serious difficulties from the perspective of the philosophy of language. More specifically, we show that the two readings of sentences involving the word 'justified' which are required for Comesaña's solution to the problem are not recoverable within the two-dimensional framework of Robert Stalnaker (1999) to which he appeals. We then consider, and reject, an attempt to overcome this difficulty by appeal to a complication of the theory involving counterfactuals, and conclude the paper by sketching our own preferred solution to Cohen's New Evil Demon. Indexical ReliabilismStewart Cohen's (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. Here is the argument (we let 'NED' denote the New Evil Demon Thesis, 'SR' the thesis of Standard Reliabilism, and 'Biv' the brain in a vat in the closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat 1 ):* Thanks to …. The paper is fully collaborative; authors are listed alphabetically. 1 This way of introducing the name 'Biv' commits us to the Limit Assumption (Lewis 1973, pp. 19-21) that there is exactly one closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat. This assumption could be avoided at someThe New Evil Demon Argument:(NED) Biv's beliefs are as justified as our own beliefs. A(1) Our beliefs are justified. A(2) Biv's beliefs are justified.From NED, 1 (SR) x's belief that p is justified iff it was produced by a reliable process. A(3) Biv's beliefs were produced by a reliable process. 2 From 2, SRThe argument is valid, but its conclusion-(3)-is clearly false. Thus, we have to reject at least one of its premises-that is, either (NED), ( 1) or (SR). Typically, epistemologists opt to reject (SR) and consider the example a reductio of Standard Reliabilism. 3

There are two views of the essences of speech acts: according to one view, they are natural kinds; according to the other, they are what I call normative kinds-kinds in the (possibly non-reductive) definition of which some normative term occurs. In this article I show that speech acts can be normative but also natural kinds by deriving Williamson's account of assertion, on which it is an act individuated, and constitutively governed, by a norm (the knowledge rule), from a consideration of the natural characteristics of normal cases of its performance.