Date of Graduation

Fall 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Philosophy

Committee Chairperson

Cassie Striblen, Ph.D

Committee Member

Stephen James, Ph.D

Committee Member

Larry Udell, Ph.D

Abstract

American law sometimes assigns responsibility under conditions of uncertainty–even when there’s no completed harm, no demonstrable knowledge, and no identifiable victim. This thesis argues that across three otherwise unrelated doctrines, courts engage in what might be called epistemic exchange: when the kind of knowledge normally required for responsibility is unavailable, some alternative epistemic basis gets treated as functionally sufficient for judgment instead. Courts never state this practice outright; it is a philosophical description of what they are doing. In criminal attempt law, a justified but false belief can stand in for knowledge of whether the contemplated crime could actually be completed. In the insanity defense, judgments about a defendant's capacity substitute for inaccessible direct knowledge of another person's subjective experience. In climate litigation, scientifically grounded probabilistic foresight substitutes for individualized knowledge of harms that have not yet occurred. These three exchanges differ in both what gets substituted and in whose epistemic limitation the law is accommodating. Because of that, the thesis argues, their defensibility cannot simply be assumed: the farther a substitution strays from ordinary knowledge, the stronger the justification needed to ground responsibility in it. Naming this pattern of epistemic exchange makes visible a structure that recurs across otherwise separate areas of law, and offers a  framework for judging when something short of–or different from–knowledge can legitimately do the work that knowledge usually does in grounding responsibility.

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