## 1. Introduction



There is a growing interest in epistemological topics and problems
among members of what may be called, somewhat artificially, "the
Latin American philosophical community". However, it should be
noted from the start that, despite the large size of that community
and its connections with philosophers and research groups particularly
from the United States and the United Kingdom, on the whole
epistemological investigation in Latin America significantly differs
in approach, breadth, and originality from mainstream Anglophone
epistemology--which at present can reasonably be taken as
emblematic owing to its depth, precision, innovation, and
fecundity.



Within Latin America, epistemology has traditionally been approached
from a historico-exegetical rather than systematic perspective. Even
today, it is not uncommon for an epistemology course in the philosophy
department of a Latin American university to focus (almost)
exclusively on the views on the nature and possibility of knowledge
found in the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, or Ricoeur rather than on the main epistemological
positions adopted in contemporary analytic philosophy. The reason is,
at least in part, that most professors in charge of courses on the
theory of knowledge have traditionally been historians of modern
philosophy or phenomenologists influenced by the way philosophy has
customarily been practiced in France, Germany, and Spain, thus
following the tradition of so-called continental philosophy. In the
Latin American academic milieu, philosophy in general has
predominantly been approached either through the exegesis of
philosophical texts or through the history of philosophical ideas,
both with a markedly continental orientation.



Even though the history of analytic philosophy in Latin America starts
in the 1950s-1960s (see Perez & Ortiz-Millan
2010), one had to wait until the last two decades of the twentieth
century for a strong and widespread trend of analytic philosophy to
emerge. The seminal impetus for the production and dissemination in
Latin America (particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico) of new
work within the analytic tradition was the founding of research
centers taking a distinctly analytic approach and the subsequent
launches of their respective journals: the Instituto de
Investigaciones Filosoficas (IIF, 1967) at the Universidad
Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), with its journal
*Critica* (1967); the Sociedad Argentina de
Analisis Filosofico (SADAF, 1972) with its journal
*Analisis Filosofico* (1981); and the Centro de
Logica, Epistemologia e Historia da Ciencia (CLE,
1976) at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil,
with its journal *Manuscrito* (1977). The founding in 2007 of
the Asociacion Latinoamericana de Filosofia
Analitica (ALFA) reflects the sustained development of analytic
philosophy in Latin American countries. The recent unprecedented
impetus in what may be regarded as the analytic way of doing
philosophy explains why, since the turn of the millennium, the
primarily historico-exegetical and continental approach to
epistemology has slowly started to be replaced by a systematic and
analytic one.



With regard to the breadth of Latin American studies in epistemology,
a considerable number of the subjects discussed in present-day
analytic epistemology have not received the slightest attention,
others have been addressed only superficially, and still others have
been tackled by but a few researchers. This situation is not limited
to relatively new areas such as the epistemology of testimony, the
epistemology of disagreement, or collective epistemology (all falling
within so-called social epistemology), but is a more general
phenomenon. This may be due to the fact that, for some reason, in
analytic-style Latin American philosophy, epistemology has received
less attention than logic, philosophy of science, or philosophy of
language.



Finally, even though original positions and arguments with regard to
specific topics have been developed by Latin American scholars, it is
safe to say that there is not a *distinctively* Latin American
epistemology. The epistemological issues and problems currently
examined in the work of those Latin American authors who adopt a
systematic approach either have been discussed throughout the history
of philosophy or have been "imported" from Anglophone
scholarship. Nor is there a particular way of doing epistemology that
could be identified as Latin American. For this reason, one may talk
of "epistemology in Latin America" or "epistemology
done by Latin Americans" rather than of "Latin American
epistemology".



A caveat is in order: the above is intended as a *general*
description of the *current* situation in the Latin American
philosophical community. The academic collaboration between research
groups within and outside Latin America, the growing number of
visiting scholars from Latin American countries at philosophy
departments of North America and Europe where the best epistemological
investigation is carried out, and the increase of financial resources
in some of those countries will, one can reasonably expect, change the
situation in the years to come by building on what has already been
done in the field and opening up further research and debate. Within
the next few decades, there will probably be a consolidated Latin
American community working on epistemological issues, and one will
perhaps even be able to start talking of a distinctively Latin
American epistemology.


## 2. Skepticism



It is safe to say that skepticism is the main issue discussed by Latin
American scholars working in epistemology, judging by the number of
works devoted to it. In addition, in certain Latin American countries
there is a short but strong tradition of scholarship on both the
history and the philosophical significance of skepticism. This is why
it is the first topic to be addressed in this entry.



As Cresto (2010a: 468) points out, the study of the history of
skepticism is one of the lines of research to be considered when
providing an overview of epistemological investigation in Latin
America. But contrary to what she claims, it is hard to find any
systematic epistemological discussion of skepticism in the numerous
works in which Latin American scholars have dealt with the history of
ancient or modern skepticism. Still, it is primarily in connection
with the study of ancient Pyrrhonism that the field has seen the
emergence of systematic discussions of the nature of skepticism and
the epistemic challenges it raises. Pyrrhonism is the variety of
skepticism most commonly dealt with in the works of Latin American
academics, both in general and in connection with epistemological
issues.



The Latin American tradition of scholarship on the history of ancient
and modern skepticism started in the 1970s with Oswaldo Porchat
Pereira (1933-2017) in Brazil and Ezequiel de Olaso
(1932-1996) in Argentina, who were in close contact and
co-organized two conferences on skepticism: one in Campinas (Brazil)
in 1986 and one in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1992. Porchat pursued
his undergraduate and graduate studies in philosophy at the
Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), obtaining a Ph.D. with a
dissertation on Aristotle's conception of science. He spent
research periods in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France,
where he was heavily influenced by French historians of philosophy. He
was professor at USP and the founder of both the philosophy department
and the Centro de Logica, Epistemologia e Historia da
Ciencia (on which see
 Section 1)
 at UNICAMP.



De Olaso obtained his B.A. (*Licenciatura*) in philosophy from
the University of Buenos Aires and his Ph.D. in the same field from
Bryn Mawr College, with a dissertation on Leibniz and ancient
skepticism. He taught at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, the
Universidad de Buenos Aires, and the Universidad de San Andres,
all in Argentina. He was also a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de
Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET) of
Argentina, and a founding member of the Centro de Investigaciones
Filosoficas (CIF, 1965) and its journal *Revista
Latinoamericana de Filosofia* (RLF, 1975). He also seems to
have helped Porchat in the foundation of CLE.



While Porchat's studies on skepticism (all but one, Porchat
Pereira 2013, collected in his 2007 book) bear almost exclusively on
the Pyrrhonism expounded in the extant works of the second-century
physician Sextus Empiricus, de Olaso's are concerned not only
with Sextus's Pyrrhonism (de Olaso 1983, 1988, 1992), but also
with Hume's and Leibniz's discussions of skepticism,
particularly in its Pyrrhonian variety (de Olaso 1974, 1977, 1978,
1980, 1984). Towards the very end of his life, de Olaso's
writings focused on epistemology as practiced in the analytic
tradition: e.g., he offered an analysis of the concepts of certainty,
knowledge, and skepticism, and of their relations, in both modern and
contemporary philosophy (de Olaso 1999), but without making an
original contribution to the present-day debates on those issues.
While Porchat considered himself a skeptic, de Olaso did not, adopting
a much more critical approach to skepticism. We will here focus on
Porchat both because he claimed to adopt a neo-Pyrrhonian stance and
particularly because it has been said that his writings offer
significant epistemological reflections on skepticism. However, first,
when discussing ancient Pyrrhonism in his published work, he seldom
touches on, or proposes solutions to, the most complex interpretive
and philosophical questions posed by Sextus's presentation of
Pyrrhonism, and he cursorily engages with only a tiny part of the vast
specialist literature. We make this remark because some of those
questions extensively discussed in the secondary literature concern
intriguing epistemological problems: e.g., the epistemic challenge
posed by the Five Modes of Agrippa, the attack on the criterion of
truth, the Pyrrhonist's stance on the standards of justification
and norms of rationality, and the possibility of skeptical inquiry.
And secondly, when proposing his neo-Pyrrhonism, he completely
disregards the hundreds of epistemological studies on skepticism in
general or on Pyrrhonism in particular published especially since the
late 1970s. The reason is simply that Porchat does not engage in any
systematic discussion of epistemological matters. (For a different
appraisal of Porchat's work, see Smith & Bueno 2016 and
Smith 2018.)



It must nonetheless be observed that, unlike de Olaso's,
Porchat's teaching and writings exerted a strong influence on
his students, to the extent that several of them devoted their own
work to the study of skepticism, creating in Brazil a relatively large
community of academics interested in that philosophical movement. The
work of those Brazilian scholars influenced by Porchat has been
primarily exegetical and historical, with special focus on ancient and
modern skepticism. A clear exception is Otavio Bueno (b. 1970),
who after completing his B.A. and M.A. studies at USP, did his Ph.D.
at the University of Leeds and is at present a professor at the
University of Miami. Although Bueno's main areas of research are
the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics, and logic,
he has also discussed epistemological issues in connection with
skepticism, particularly of a Pyrrhonian stripe. He has argued that it
is mistake to claim that the Pyrrhonist is in the end committed to
epistemic internalism, given that the latter's arguments against
epistemic externalism are merely dialectical (Bueno 2011). He has also
rejected the view that the Pyrrhonist cannot induce the state of
suspension of judgment on the basis of the Agrippan mode from
disagreement alone (Bueno 2013). In other articles in which Pyrrhonism
is also taken into account, Bueno has critically assessed Donald
Davidson's and Ernest Sosa's responses to skepticism
(Bueno 2005 and 2009, respectively). It is finally worth mentioning
that he has defended a Pyrrhonian approach to contemporary science, in
connection with Bas van Fraassen's (1980) constructive
empiricism (Bueno 2015, 2021).



Regarding Brazilian scholarship on epistemological skepticism, three
other researchers may be mentioned: Plinio Junqueira Smith (b.
1964), Waldomiro Jose da Silva Filho (b. 1966), and Claudio
Goncalves de Almeida (1960).



Smith, who pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in
philosophy at USP, is probably the Brazilian scholar most influenced
by Porchat's teaching and writings. He is currently a professor
at the Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (UNIFESP) and the
editor of the Brazilian journal *Skepsis*
(2007)--one of the two journals devoted to skepticism (co-)edited
in Latin America. Although his work bears mainly on the history of
modern skepticism, Smith has recently written somewhat more
epistemologically oriented papers devoted to Porchat's skeptical
stance (Smith 2015) and to what he regards as Barry Stroud's
neo-Pyrrhonism (Smith 2016).



Da Silva Filho obtained his B.A. in philosophy from the Universidade
Estadual de Santa Cruz and his M.A. and Ph.D. in communication and
contemporary culture from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA).
Currently a professor at UFBA, he works in the fields of philosophy of
mind and epistemology. In some of his publications, he has examined
certain skeptical difficulties concerning self-knowledge (da Silva
Filho 2007, 2008). Even though he was not one of Porchat's
students, he has also been influenced by Porchat's skeptical
stance.



De Almeida obtained his B.A. in social communication from the
Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul
(PUCRS), his M.A. in philosophy from USP, and his Ph.D. in philosophy
from McMaster University (Canada). Currently a professor at PUCRS, his
main area of research is epistemology. He has written on epistemic
closure and skepticism--arguing *inter alia* that neither
knowledge nor epistemic justification are closed under logical
implication and that this closure-failure does not affect Cartesian
skepticism (de Almeida 2007, 2012)--and on Stroud's
influential interpretation of Cartesian skepticism, which de Almeida
claims is crippled by a level confusion (de Almeida 2016).



As regards Argentina, one finds several researchers exploring
skepticism in the context of contemporary epistemology, among whom one
may mention Eleonora Cresto (b. 1971), Juan Comesana (b. 1972),
and Diego Machuca (b. 1976).



Cresto's initial interest in skepticism arose under the
influence of de Olaso, who supervised her B.A. thesis at the
Universidad de Buenos (UBA). She later on pursued her M.A, M.Phil.,
and Ph.D. at Columbia University. Currently a researcher at CONICET
and a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in
Argentina, she works primarily in formal epistemology (on which see
 Section 4).
 In her first published papers, she critically examined both
reliabilist and naturalistic anti-skeptical responses proposed in the
literature, finding them unsatisfactory (Cresto 1996a, 1996b), but
also put forward a reliabilist reply of her own to skepticism (Cresto
1997).



After pursuing his undergraduate studies at UBA, Comesana
obtained his Ph.D. from Brown University under Sosa's
supervision, and is at present a professor at Rutgers University. In
Buenos Aires, he was a founding member of the influential but
now-defunct Grupo de Accion Filosofica (GAF). Having
published on various epistemological issues (on which see
 Section 3),
 he has devoted some studies to skepticism. He has offered useful
overviews of both the so-called Pyrrhonian problematic and skepticism
in general (Comesana 2006a and 2009a, respectively). He has
also explored whether the contemporary theories of contextualism and
contrastivism can help Pyrrhonists offer a philosophically
satisfactory reply to the traditional objection according to which
they are reduced to inactivity because action requires belief and they
claim to suspend judgment regarding either philosophico-scientific
beliefs or all beliefs whatsoever. Comesana's verdict is
negative (Comesana 2011).



Machuca, who pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in
Argentina, obtaining his Ph.D. at UBA, is currently a researcher at
CONICET and the editor (with Duncan Pritchard) of the
*International Journal for the Study of Skepticism* (2011).
Having initially devoted himself to examining Sextus's
Pyrrhonism and moral skepticism, he has more recently focused also on
a systematic discussion of skepticism in relation to epistemological
issues. He has looked at the relevance of Pyrrhonism to contemporary
theories of knowledge and justification and, in particular, to the
present-day debate over the epistemic significance of disagreement,
defending a neo-Pyrrhonian stance (Machuca 2013b, 2015a, 2017a, 2022).
He has also examined the connection between disagreement and
skepticism in general, arguing *inter alia* that a radical
disagreement-based skepticism cannot be dismissed out of hand as being
patently untenable or absurd (Machuca 2015b, 2017b).



In other Latin American countries, one finds some epistemological
studies on skepticism, and Pyrrhonism in particular, but interest in
this topic is much more sporadic. We will here summarize the works of
Pedro Stepanenko (Mexico) and Mauricio Zuluaga (Colombia) that are
more epistemological in nature.



Stepanenko (b. 1960), a specialist on Kant, obtained a Ph.D. in
philosophy at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, where
he is currently a professor and a member of the Instituto de
Investigaciones Filosoficas (on which see
 Section 1).
 In Stepanenko (2011), he argues that, by using either a conditional
or a disjunctivist interpretation of his appearance-statements, the
Pyrrhonian skeptic can report on his own experiences without being
epistemically committed to the beliefs one usually accepts when
ascribing mental states to oneself.



Zuluaga obtained his B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from the Universidad
de los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, respectively,
and his Ph.D. in the same field from the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen (Germany). He is
currently a professor at the Universidad del Valle (Colombia). Zuluaga
has looked at Agrippa's trilemma in the context of contemporary
epistemological discussions of the regress argument, but his approach
is merely expository: he limits himself to providing an overview of
part of the literature on the trilemma and on the problems faced by
foundationalism and coherentism (Zuluaga 2005). He has also written
about contemporary reconstructions of Cartesian skepticism that are
based on the closure principle (Zuluaga 2012), but his approach is
again entirely expository.


## 3. Core Epistemology



Core epistemology is concerned basically with the systematic analysis
of knowledge and justified belief. So, in this section we will refer
to works that examine fundamental epistemological concepts--such
as knowledge, truth, and justification--or that defend or attack
certain general epistemological theories--such as reliabilism and
fallibilism.



The Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas is where Luis
Villoro (1922-2014) spent the bulk of his academic career. Born
in Barcelona (Spain) to a Mexican mother and a Spanish father, and
raised in Spain and Belgium, he settled in Mexico at the outbreak of
the Second World War and became a Mexican citizen. He did his
undergraduate and graduate studies at the Universidad Autonoma
de Mexico and spent research periods in France and Germany. In
1982, he published the first analytically oriented book on
epistemology written in Spanish: *Creer, saber, conocer*
(Villoro 1982), translated into English as *Belief, Personal, and
Propositional Knowledge* (Villoro 1998). Villoro examined
fundamental concepts such as belief, knowledge, truth, objectivity,
and epistemic communities. He distinguished between *saber* and
*conocer*, which roughly correspond to what may be called
"propositional" and "personal knowledge",
respectively, the latter consisting in having direct experiences of a
given object. *S* can assert that he has personal knowledge of
*x* provided that he has the relevant personal experiences, but
if *S* wants to justify to someone else the claim that he has
such knowledge of *x*, *S* must show that he has
propositional knowledge of his personal knowledge. Villoro seems to
have defended a form of epistemic relativism inasmuch as he claimed
that to know (in the sense of *saber*) that *p* is to
believe that *p*, and to have objectively sufficient reasons to
so believe--an objectively sufficient reason being one that is
conclusive, coherent, and complete--but also maintained that what
is considered as an objectively sufficient reason in one epistemic
community may not be so considered in another. For this reason, he
claimed that empirical knowledge is fallible: on the basis of the
reasons that are objectively sufficient for any member of his
epistemic community, *S* knows that *p*, but he cannot
rule out the possibility that there might be contrary reasons
available to a different epistemic community that would undermine his
knowledge that *p*. Objectively sufficient reasons are our best
guarantee of empirical truths, but they do not of necessity imply such
truths (Villoro 1982: 180, 192). Villoro held that the view that all
knowledge is socially conditioned is the only valid alternative to
skepticism (1982: 164). He also proposed a surprising reform of the
traditional concept of knowledge: the notion of truth should not be
included in the definition of knowledge because, even though the
notion of an *objectively* sufficient reason cannot be
*understood* without the notion of truth, one may know that
*p* even if *p* is not true, for truth is not a
necessary condition for a reason to be objectively sufficient (1982:
ch. 8). (For a fuller overview of Villoro's book, see Cresto
2010a: 474-477.)



Villoro's position has been criticized by Guillermo Hurtado (b.
1962), a professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico who
obtained a B.A. in philosophy at this university as well as a B.A. and
a Ph.D. in the same field at the University of Oxford. Hurtado (2003)
argues that Villoro's epistemic relativism and his redefinition
of the concept of knowledge are the result of the fact that Villoro
grants the skeptic the unacceptable view that, in order to be able to
claim that one knows that *p*, one must have an infallible
criterion for knowing that one knows.



Eleonora Cresto (on whom see
 Section 2)
 has devoted some papers to examining core epistemological issues. For
instance, adopting a moderately Peircean perspective, she has called
into question the traditional picture of knowledge attribution
according to which one can attribute knowledge of *p* to
*S* only if *p* is true and *S* is epistemically
justified in believing in *p*. Cresto maintains that epistemic
justification (understood either in internalist or externalist terms)
is not *always* viewed as a necessary condition for knowledge,
and hence as a necessary condition for making a correct knowledge
attribution, according to our pre-theoretical usage of standard
epistemic terms (Cresto 2018; cf. Cresto 2012: 928-929).



There has also been some discussion of the concept of knowledge in
terms of both reliability and fallibility. Let us begin with the
former. Succinctly put, reliabilism holds that a belief is knowledge
if it is true and if it was produced, or is sustained, by a reliable
process that yields mostly true beliefs. Reliabilist theories of
knowledge require a reliable mechanism for belief formation, but do
not require that the epistemic agent be aware or have evidence of the
mechanism's reliability. For this reason, reliabilism is a form
of externalism. Juan Comesana (on whom see the previous
section) has proposed an original theory of epistemic justification
that combines elements of both reliabilism and
evidentialism--which represent two competing approaches in
contemporary analytic epistemology. This theory, which he calls
"evidentialist reliabilism", is intended to incorporate
the best aspects of both positions while avoiding the most serious
problems they face (Comesana 2010). Comesana has also
argued that reliabilism is able to successfully deal with the
so-called "generality problem" (Comesana 2006b),
and that the epistemological problems stemming from lotteries either
are not peculiar to reliabilism or can be solved by appealing to a
probabilistic account of reliability (Comesana 2009b). He has
as well referred to reliability in his discussion of
"safety". Several epistemologists (such as Ernest Sosa,
Timothy Williamson, and Duncan Pritchard) have defended the view that
safety is a necessary condition for knowledge. Roughly put, what that
condition says is that *S* knows that *p* if and only if
*S* would believe that *p* only if *p* were true.
On the basis of a counterexample, Comesana (2005) has argued
that safety, as this notion has been defined by Sosa, is not actually
a necessary condition for knowledge. The reason is that, whereas
reliability is plausibly a necessary condition for knowledge, reliable
reliability is not, and whereas knowledge is compatible with
unreliably reliable beliefs, safety is not. Hence, one can have
"unsafe" knowledge. Comesana's more recent
work in collaboration with Matthew McGrath and Stewart Cohen has
focused on the part played by false beliefs in epistemology. He has
argued that false propositions can be part of one's evidence or
can be reasons to do something (Comesana & McGrath 2014,
2016) and, against Williamson, that one can have rational or justified
false beliefs (Cohen & Comesana 2013a, 2013b,
forthcoming).



As regards fallibilism, it is safe to say that nearly all present-day
epistemologists are fallibilists: we sometimes make
mistakes--occasionally even about those things we deem to be most
evident--despite having good justification for our beliefs. More
precisely, *S* fallibly knows that *p* in case, despite
the good justification underlying one's knowledge,
*S*'s belief that *p* might have been false or
might have been accidentally true (cf. Reed 2002). Hurtado (2000)
rejects such a virtually unanimous position--which he defines as
"the doctrine that any of our beliefs might turn out to be
false"--on the grounds both that it is revisionist and that
we lack good reasons to accept it. Fallibilism is revisionist because,
he argues, it runs counter to common sense both by erasing the
ordinary distinction between those beliefs that cannot be false and
those that can, and by claiming that no evidence or no reasons can
guarantee the truth of a given belief. And there are no good reasons
to accept fallibilism because Hurtado claims to be able to refute what
he describes as the historico-pragmatic, epistemological, and ethical
arguments in its favor, and because he believes that fallibilism is
dialectically weak against both skepticism and dogmatism.



It is also worth mentioning that Claudio de Almeida (on whom see
 Section 2)
 has devoted part of his work to the so-called Moore's paradox,
arguing that none of the most influential analyses of the paradox
provides a successful solution to it, and proposing a solution of his
own (de Almeida 2001, 2009). More recently, he has published on the
defeasibility theory of knowledge, arguing that a fallibilistic
version of this theory provides the correct solution to the Gettier
problem (de Almeida & Fett 2016, de Almeida 2017).



We should finally refer to the work of Carlos Pereda (b. 1944), even
though epistemology has not been the focus of his research. Born in
Uruguay, he obtained a B.A. in philosophy and educational sciences
from the Universidad de la Republica in his home country, as
well as a M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Universitat
Konstanz (Germany). He pursued most of his academic career in Mexico,
first at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana and then at
UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas. His work
is mainly concerned with the nature and purpose of argumentation
(Pereda 1994a, 1994b), and it is in this context that he deals with
certain epistemological subjects. For instance, he calls the rules
that govern the way in which the argumentative game is to be played
"epistemic virtues", which are character traits or
dispositions of those involved in a debate, such as coherence, rigor,
and willingness to consider one's rival theses. The exercise of
the epistemic virtues is what makes argumentation possible and what
enables us to resolve conflicts of beliefs. Pereda also discusses what
he calls "the trilemma of knowledge" (*el trilema del
saber*), which arises from the following three claims:


1. We know (understood in the sense that many of our beliefs are
knowledge).
2. We are fallible (understood in the sense that any of our beliefs
may turn out to be false).
3. *S* knows that *p* iff (a) *S* believes that
*p*, (b) *p* is true, (c) *S* is wholly justified
in believing that *p*, and (d) between the fact *p* and
the belief that *p* there is an appropriate causal connection
and *S* correctly reconstructs such a connection in her
justification.



The trilemma emerges because, given that (3) formulates the concept of
knowledge as infallible knowledge, only two of (1), (2), and (3) can
be held together: if (1) and (2) are true, then (3) is false (there is
fallible knowledge); if (1) and (3) are true, then (2) is false (there
is infallible knowledge); and if (2) and (3) are true, then (1) is
false (there is no knowledge). Pereda maintains that the solution to
the trilemma is not to abandon one of the claims, but to recognize
that there is both a strong and a weak sense of the concept of
knowledge. Pereda's view has been criticized by Guillermo
Hurtado (1996), who contends that the trilemma results from
incorrectly analyzing (2), which should be understood not as the claim
that *any* of our beliefs may turn out to be false, but as the
claim that *some* of our beliefs may turn out to be false.


## 4. Formal Epistemology



Formal epistemology is concerned with the examination of traditional
epistemological questions using the formal tools of logic and
probability. There has been a small but important group of Latin
American researchers working within this subfield of
epistemology--sometimes in close collaboration with scholars from
the United States, Europe, and Australia--particularly on such
topics as belief change, Bayesian epistemology, and theory choice.



Argentina has been the main center of development of the subfield of
formal epistemology in Latin America, beginning in the mid-1980s. The
first central figure was the Argentinian Carlos Alchourron
(1931-1996), who obtained his B.A. in law and his Ph.D. in law
and social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), where he
taught until his death. He was one of the founders of the Sociedad
Argentina de Analisis Filosofico (on which see
 Section 1).
 He also founded, at UBA's philosophy department, a logic group
that would eventually incorporate researchers working on artificial
intelligence at UBA's computer science department. The
interdisciplinary group became a hotbed of formal epistemology.



Alchourron's main line of research concerned the theory
of belief change, which basically deals with the question of how a
belief set is to be updated in light of new information. In 1985 he
published, together with Peter Gandenfors and David Makinson, a
seminal article in which they advanced an axiomatic theory that has
come to be known as "the AGM theory of belief change",
"the AGM account of the logic of belief change", or
"the AGM theory of belief revision" (Alchourron,
Gandenfors, & Makinson 1985; cf. Alchourron &
Makinson 1982, 1985, 1986). The AGM theory identifies three types of
belief change: expansion, contraction, and revision, focusing on the
last two. Roughly put, expansion consists in adding to a given belief
set a new belief that does not conflict with the current beliefs of
the set; contraction involves removing a belief from the set; and
revision amounts to adding a new belief to the set and removing others
from it so that the resulting set stays consistent. The AGM theory
proposes six basic and two supplementary postulates for each of the
two operations of contraction and revision that every appropriate
belief-change method must satisfy. Since its appearance in 1985, the
AGM theory has had a tremendous impact on subsequent discussions of
belief change, becoming the predominant paradigm, even though some of
its main assumptions have been questioned and several modifications or
extensions of it have been proposed (for an overview, see
Arlo-Costa & Ferme 2010 and Hansson 2011; see also
Ferme & Hansson 2011, which is a special issue on the
occasion of the 25 years of the AGM theory). The theory has also had a
considerable influence on research on artificial intelligence (on
which see Carnota & Rodriguez 2010). Towards the end of his
life, Alchourron's work focused on the logic of
defeasible conditionals (Alchourron 1993, 1995, 1996; see
Ferme & Rodriguez 2006 for an analysis of his theory
of conditionals).



A second key contributor to the development of formal epistemology,
not only in Latin America but worldwide, was Horacio Arlo-Costa
(1956-2011). Born in Montevideo (Uruguay), he pursued his
undergraduate studies at UBA, obtaining his B.A. in philosophy under
the supervision of Alchourron, and was a member of
Alchourron's logic group since its founding. He later on
obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University under the
supervision of Isaac Levi, with whom he would collaborate in a number
of publications. From 1997 until his death, he worked at Carnegie
Mellon University, where he helped found the Center for Formal
Epistemology. Arlo-Costa made significant contributions to the
study of the logic of belief change (Arlo-Costa 1990, 2006;
Arlo-Costa & Levi 2006), conditionals (Arlo-Costa
1995, 1999; Arlo-Costa & Levi 1996), Bayesian epistemology
(Arlo-Costa 2001, Arlo-Costa & Thomason 2001,
Arlo-Costa & Parikh 2005, Arlo-Costa & Pedersen
2012), and rationality and decision theory (Arlo-Costa 1996;
Arlo-Costa, Collins, & Levi 1995; Arlo-Costa &
Helzner 2010; Arlo-Costa & Pedersen 2011, 2013). (For a
brief presentation of Arlo-Costa's original contributions
to those subjects as well as to modal logic, see Cresto 2011.)



Another former student of Alchourron to be mentioned is the
Argentinian Eduardo Ferme (b. 1964), who was also a member of
Alchourron's group when it became interdisciplinary.
Currently a professor at the Universidad de Madeira (Portugal), he
obtained his B.A. and Ph.D. in computer science at UBA, and his Ph.D.
in philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden).
Ferme's research has focused mainly on theory contraction
and on epistemic entrenchment, extending or modifying in several of
his publications the AGM theory (Ferme 1998, 2000, 2001;
Ferme & Hansson 1999; Ferme & Reis 2013).



A leading international specialist in database theory, the Argentinian
Alberto Mendelzon (1951-2005), also deserves a mention because
of his key contribution to the theory of belief change. He obtained a
B.Sc. from UBA as well as a M.S.E., a M.A., and a Ph.D. from Princeton
University. From 1980 until his death, he taught at the University of
Toronto. He also contributed to the creation of UBA's computer
science department in the early 1980s. In 1992 he published, together
with Hirofumi Katsuno, a highly influential paper that addresses the
issue of updating knowledge bases (Katsuno & Mendelzon 1992). They
distinguished between two kinds of modification to a knowledge base:
*update* and *revision*. While the former consists in
bringing the knowledge base up to date when the world it describes
changes, the latter consists in modifying the knowledge base when new
information about a static world is acquired. Mendelzon and Katsuno
claimed that the AGM postulates describe only *revision* and
hence that, in order to describe *update*, the AGM theory
should be considerably modified by adding new postulates. (On
Mendelzon's work on belief change, see also Katsuno &
Mendelzon 1989 and 1991.)



Regarding formal epistemology in Argentina, one may finally refer to a
number of works by Eleonora Cresto, who completed her Ph.D. under the
supervision of Isaac Levi. Her first publications in the field were
concerned with formal belief-revision theories (Cresto 2008, 2010b).
She later on offered a defense of a moderate version of the so-called
KK principle--according to which if *S* knows that
*p*, then *S* knows that she knows that
*p*--as a normative rather than descriptive epistemic
principle. Her defense of such a principle of epistemic transparency
is different from that traditionally proposed by epistemic
internalists inasmuch as her argument is a formal one that appeals to
lower- and higher-order probabilities (Cresto 2012). Cresto's
more recent research in the subfield of formal epistemology focuses on
such topics as group knowledge and probability aggregation (Cresto
2015a, 2016, 2017).



Research in formal epistemology has also been important in Brazil,
where several researchers from artificial intelligence and computer
science have examined the application of belief-change theory to
various areas. Among them one may mention Odinaldo Rodrigues (b. 1968)
and Renata Wassermann (b. 1971).



Rodrigues, who has been teaching at King's College London since
1998, obtained his B.Sc. in computer science at the Universidade de
Fortaleza, his MSc in computer science at the Universidade Federal do
Rio de Janeiro, and his Ph.D. in computing at Imperial College London.
He has applied the principles of belief change to non-classical
logics, software engineering, and social choice theory (Gabbay &
Rodrigues 1996; Gabbay, Pigozzi, & Rodrigues 2006, 2007; Gabbay,
Rodrigues, & Russo 2008; Gabbay, Rodrigues, & Pigozzi
2009).



Wassermann obtained her B.Sc. in computer science and her M.Sc. in
applied mathematics at the Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP), and
her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Amsterdam. She is
at present a professor at USP's computer science department and
a member of the research group "Logica,
Inteligencia Artificial e Metodos Formais" (LIAMF),
which was founded in 2000 at USP and is one of the most active Latin
American groups working on belief change. Wassermann has published
extensively in this field, examining local belief change and applying
the AGM theory to non-classical logics and to computer science
(Wassermann 1999; Chopra, Parikh, & Wassermann 2001; Hansson &
Wassermann 2002; Ribeiro, Wassermann, Flouris, & Antoniou 2013;
Wassermann & Ribeiro 2015).


## 5. Wittgenstein: Epistemology and Skepticism



Another line of epistemological research in Latin America concerns
Ludwig Wittgenstein's thought. The first scholar to be mentioned
is Alejandro Tomasini Bassols (b. 1952). A member of the Instituto de
Investigaciones Filosoficas at the Universidad Autonoma
de Mexico, he has devoted a considerable part of his work to
interpreting Wittgenstein's thought and endorses what he
describes as "a radical Wittgensteinism". Although from
the vantage point of the numerous Anglophone specialists on
Wittgenstein his writings might not offer original insights, they have
contributed to the dissemination of the Austrian philosopher's
thought in the Spanish-speaking world. In his 2001 book, Tomasini
Bassols examines the concept of knowledge, the problem of skepticism,
and various issues concerning perception, memory, self-knowledge,
personal identity, and truth by contrasting the
"classical" and the Wittgensteinian approaches to each of
those questions. Availing himself primarily of the epistemological
considerations found in *On Certainty*, his main contention is
that the type of grammatical analysis proposed by Wittgenstein shows
that the traditional problems that classical epistemology intended to
solve through the construction of elaborate theories are nothing but
pseudo-problems arising from conceptual misunderstandings. For this
reason, he contends, it is no longer possible to continue to practice
epistemology the way it was practiced before Wittgenstein.



In Colombia, one finds several scholars interested in
Wittgenstein's philosophy, among whom one should mention
Magdalena Holguin (b. 1950) and Raul Melendez (b.
1964). Holguin obtained her B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from
Georgetown University, her M.A. in law from the Universidad de los
Andes (Colombia), and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia
University. She taught at the Universidad de los Andes and the
Universidad Nacional de Colombia. In her short 1997 book, she explores
Wittgenstein's stance on certain skeptical problems. After
presenting Wittgenstein's view that philosophy is not a theory
or a doctrine but an activity, as well as the changes in his
conception of philosophy over the different phases of his thought,
Holguin examines the distinction between appearance and
reality, the distinction between subjective and objective, and the
idea, shared by skeptics and dogmatists but rejected by Wittgenstein
as being based on confusion, that knowledge requires an ultimate
foundation. (It should be noted that skeptics of a Pyrrhonian stripe
suspend judgment about whether knowledge requires an ultimate
foundation.)



Melendez is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de
Colombia, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy. In his 1998
book, he explores the notion of truth from the vantage point of
Wittgenstein's later philosophy, although he also takes into
account the conception of truth defended in the *Tractatus*.
Melendez's main aim is to call into question the attempts
to construct a general theory of truth that would make it rest on an
ultimate and unshakable foundation. In a later publication, he
discusses Wittgenstein's examination of the notions of
justification, persuasion, and world-picture (*Weltbild*) in
*On Certainty*, focusing on whether world-pictures are taken to
be incommensurable and hence on whether Wittgenstein endorses a form
of epistemic relativism (Melendez 2014).



It should finally be pointed out that in Brazil there has been some
discussion of the philosophical connections between
Wittgenstein's thought and Pyrrhonian skepticism--a
comparison first made, to the best of my knowledge, by Richard Watson
(1969) and Robert Fogelin (1981). Plinio Junqueira Smith (1993)
has claimed that there are strong similarities between
Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the Pyrrhonism expounded in
Sextus Empiricus's surviving works. For instance, according to
Smith, both reject the conception of philosophy as a theory that
provides us with knowledge of the essence of things that lies beneath
their surface, conceiving of it instead as an ability and a
therapeutic practice whose function is negative and critical.
Smith's interpretation was later on called into question by
Paulo Roberto Margutti Pinto--currently a professor at the
Faculdade Jesuita de Filosofia e Teologia--who maintained
that, although there exist similarities, they are merely superficial
while the differences are radical: e.g., while the Pyrrhonist accepts
that there are philosophical problems to be solved, Wittgenstein
dissolves them by appealing to the way in which words are used in
ordinary language (Margutti Pinto 1996).


## 6. Epistemology of Law



We can also briefly refer to an area that has received some attention
in recent years, namely, the epistemology of law. In this area, we can
mention the work of Andres Paez and Eleonora Cresto.



Paez obtained his B.A. in philosophy from the Universidad de
los Andes (Colombia) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from The
City University of New York. He is currently a professor at the
Universidad de los Andes. While in Paez (2014) he examines the
relevance of the epistemological debate between reductionism and
anti-reductionism about testimony to the problem of the reliability of
testimonial evidence by focusing on both Colombian and American
legislation, in Paez (2016) he explores the nature of legal
reputation from the point of view of social epistemology by
considering recent views on group beliefs.



We have already discussed Cresto's work in epistemology in
previous sections. Concerning the epistemology of law, while Cresto
(2015b) outlines a theory of evidence in the legal context by focusing
on a particular model of the inference to the best explanation that is
based on elements of decision theory, Cresto (2016) proposes a
solution to the problem of judgment aggregation that can be applied to
the problem of opinion aggregation in the context of a court of
appeals or a jury.