Online research in philosophy

Here I present a solution to this problem. I will first explain the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs for coherentism, and then show how to avoid it. To anticipate my argument, the key is to note that there are distinct types of justification. There is the ordinary intuitive notion on which justification is roughly synonymous with reasonable or rational belief. Coherentists, however, are interested in the type of justification that is part of a proper account of knowledge, the kind of (...) justification which is such that if it is ungettiered and conjoined to true belief, yields knowledge. In slogan form, I will summarize this idea as by saying that the kind of justification in question for coherentists is the kind that puts one in a position to know. I will call such justification “epistemic justification”, and when I intend to talk about the more ordinary, commonplace justification that need not put one in a position to know, I will use the term ‘justification’ without the qualifier. I will argue, in my preferred terminology, that epistemic justification cannot be identified with justification. The key to solving the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs, then, is to allow that they are possible on the ordinary intuitive notion of justification but not on the kind of justification that puts one in a position to know. The trick is to substantiate these claims and not rely simply on the claim that such a distinction can be drawn. I will do so with little more in the way of assumptions than a relatively well-understood form of internalism, something coherentists (and others) are committed to, anyway. (shrink)

In defending his rejection of Maverick Molinism (Faith and Philosophy 20.1, (January 2003), pp. 91-100) from my criticisms (Faith and Philosophy 19 (2002), pp. 348-357), Tom Flint attributes three central claims to my argument, and disagrees with two of them. He also notes my request for a defense of the Law of Conditional Excluded Middle, which his argument employs. He portrays that discussion as taking “potshots” at his argument, in part because I denied that concerns about the Law are compelling, (...) but it is a mistake to think that controversial premises need no defense simply because the case against them is not compelling. Regarding the points where Flint is more forthcoming, one of his points places further demands on his rejection of this version of Molinism. The other point involves a serious misrepresentation of my argument. (shrink)

The heart of coherentism is found in two aspects, one negative and one positive. On the negative side, coherentism is a contrary of foundationalism, the view that the epistemic status of our beliefs ultimately traces to, or derives from, basic beliefs.

Some critics of coherentism have depicted it so that it founders on the distinction between warrant for the content of a belief and warrant for the believing itself. This distinction has to do with the basing relation: one might have warrant for the content of what one believes without basing one's belief properly, without holding the belief because of what warrants it. When the first kind of warrant obtains, I will say that a belief is propositionally warranted.

In recent years, epistemologists have become increasingly impressed with reliabilist theories of justification. 1 Reliabilism is often formulated as the claim that a belief is justified 2 just in case it is a reliable belief; however, this formulation can be somewhat misleading. There is a sense in which a set of beliefs can be reliable, just as a certain history or testimony can be reliable: what one means is that a certain set of propositions is highly accurate, has mostly true (...) members, or is not wrong in any important way. Reliabilists, though, do not just want to say that a belief is justified just in case it is a member of a type with mostly true members, i.e., just in case it is probably true; they also want to appeal to the notion of reliability in that sense in which we say that persons, processes, proce­dures, tests, and experiments are reliable. Reliabilism is a view both about the reliability of beliefs and about the reliability of the person who has the belief or the procedure that is responsible for the belief. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga and John Pollock both think that coherentism is a mistaken theory of justification, and they do so for different reasons. In spite of these differences, there are remarkable connections between their criticisms. Part of my goal here is to show what these connections are. I will show that Plantinga's construal of coherentism presupposes Pollock's arguments against that view, and I will argue that coherentists need not breathe their last in response to the contentions of either. Coherentism may be (...) a mistaken theory of justification, but if it is, it is not shown to be so by either Plantinga or Pollock. (shrink)

Craig claims that my treatment of temporal indexicals such as ‘now’ is inadequate, and that my theory gives no general account of tense. Craig’s argument misunderstands the theory of indexicals I give, and I show how to extend the theory to give a general account of tense.

In clarifying and defending Molinism, Thomas Flint argues against a position he terms Maverick Molinism. This version of Molinism maintains that, though counterfactuals of freedom have their truth-value logically prior to God’s acts of will, God could have so acted that these counterfactuals would have had a different truth value from that which they actually have. Flint believes this position is flawed, and presents an argument for rejecting it. I argue that Flint’s argument against Maverick Molinism is flawed, and suggest (...) that the Maverick has a position with advantages over more traditional versions of Molinism. (shrink)

The flight from foundationalism in the earlier part of this century left several options in its wake. Distress over the possibility of foundationalist replies to the regress problem, coupled with consternation over the thought of circular reasoning mysteriously becoming acceptable as the circle gets large led to the attraction of holistic theories of a coherentist variety. Yet, such coherentisms seemed to leave the belief system cut off from the world, and perhaps a better idea was to abandon the approach to (...) epistemology that centered on the concepts of evidence and justificatory relations and focus instead on connections between our thoughts and the world which they are about, an idea leading to causal and reliability theories. (shrink)

Suppose we want to know whether a person justifiably believes a certain claim. Further, suppose that our interest in this question is because we take such justification to be necessary for knowledge. To justifiably believe a claim requires more than there being a justification for that claim. Presumably, there is a justification for accepting all sorts of scientific theories of which I have no awareness; because of my lack of awareness, I do not justifiably believe those theories. Further, even if (...) I, by chance, did believe one of those theories, I might not justifiably believe it; for I may be completely unaware of any justification for it. I then would not believe it.. (shrink)

IN COMPARISON with other doctrines Cthe doctrine of omnipotence, for example Cthe proper formulation of the doctrine of omniscience has not seemed especially problematic. Once we accept the contemporary wisdom that knowledge is knowledge of truths, the formulation of the traditional doctrine seems straightforward: to be omniscient is just to know all truths. What has seemed problematic, rather, is whether the doctrine is itself true. In particular, many have wondered whether anyone can know the parts of the future not necessitated (...) in any way by the present or past. (shrink)

THE DOCTRINE OF omniscience has been understood in two ways. Roughly, it has been taken either as the claim that God knows all that is true (Geach, Kvanvig 1986) or as the claim that God knows all that can be known (Swinbume; Mavrodes). The first construal I shall call the traditional construal, and the second I shall call a limited construal. Though the traditional construal would seem to be the natural one to hold, considerations of the analogy between the best (...) construals of the doctrine of omnipotence have suggested to some that a limited construal is prefera)1e. In particular, some have claimed that one should be careful to construe the doctrine of omnipotence, not as the.. (shrink)

Crispin Wright argues persuasively that truth cannot be understood in terms of warranted assertibility, on the basis of some very simple facts about negation. The argument, he claims, undermines not only simply assertibility theories of truth, but more idealized ones according to which truth is to be understood in terms of what is assertible in the long run, or assertible within some ideal scientific theory.

The heart of the epistemological interest of Zagzebski’s book is found in the tasks of clarifying the natures of justification and knowledge in terms of the intellectual virtues. It is in virtue of undertaking this task that Zagzebski presents a version of virtue epistemology. Though the book has several interesting features apart from this task, I want to argue that in its fundamental tasks, the book is a failure. In particular, I will argue that Zagzebski’s virtue account of justification is (...) irreparably inadequate. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard’s book (Epistemic Luck, Oxford University Press, 2005) concerns the interplay between two disturbing kinds of epistemic luck, termed “reflective” and “veritic,” and two types of arguments for skepticism, one based on a closure principle for knowledge and the other on an underdetermination thesis about the quality of our evidence for the everyday propositions we believe. Pritchard defends the view that a safety-based account of knowledge can answer the closure argument and provide an account of how veritic epistemic luck (...) is eliminated. He also argues that reflective epistemic luck cannot be eliminated, and that even though it is the sort of luck with which the underdetermination argument is concerned, the fact that this type of luck cannot be eliminated doesn’t undermine knowledge. Instead, it undermines the assertibility of our knowledge, at least in skeptical contexts. So when the skeptic challenges the idea that we know using the underdetermination principle, we have no legitimate response to offer, and it is this fundamental fact of epistemic life that Pritchard terms our inevitable epistemic angst. (shrink)

representations, for the unconditioned transcendent surpasses every possible conception of a being, including even the conception of a Supreme Being... It is the religious function of atheism ever to remind us that the religious act has to do with the unconditioned transcendent, and that the representations of the Unconditioned are not objects concerning whose existence.., a discussion would be possible. The word >God= involves a double meaning: it connotes the unconditioned transcendent, the ultimate, and also an object somehow endowed with (...) qualities and actions. The first is not figurative or symbolic, but is rather in the strictest sense what it is said to be. The second, however, is really symbolic, figurative. = Tillich=s view on transcendence is a quite radical view. However, his view serves to illustrate two things: (i) the importance of the concept of transcendence in discussions about God, and (ii) the implications for religious language resulting from God.. (shrink)

The Swamping Problem is one of the central problems in the new valuedriven approach to epistemology that has arisen recently. Issues concerning epistemic value, however, are not new. We can find them first in Plato’s dialogue Meno, where Socrates and Meno have a discussion about what type of guide one should prefer if one wants to get to Larissa. The first suggestion is that one should want a guide who knows the way, but Socrates notes that a guide with true (...) opinions will work just as well. Meno’s response to Socrates’ objection raises precisely the correct worries: he wonders about the nature of knowledge (whether it differs from true opinion) and about the value of knowledge (why we prize it over true opinion). The point of view of value-driven epistemology is that a myopic focus on the former question is a mistake and that questions about the value of knowledge and other epistemic phenomena are important in their own right and can help evaluate the adequacy of proposals concerning the nature of knowledge and other epistemic phenomena. (shrink)

Philosophical reflection concerning heaven and hell has focused on the place of such doctrines in the great monotheistic religions emanating from the religion of the ancient people of Israel--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The philosophical issues that arise concerning these doctrines is not limited to such traditions, however. Consider, for example, the doctrine of hell. Any religion promises certain benefits to its adherents, and these benefits require some contrast that befalls, or might befall, those who fail to adhere to the religion (...) in question. (shrink)

Every religion offers both hope and fear. They offer hope in virtue of the benefits promised to adherents, and fear in virtue of costs incurred by adversaries. In traditional Christianity, the costs incurred are expressed in terms of the doctrine of hell, according to which each person consigned to hell receives the same infinite punishment. This strong view of hell involves four distinct theses. First, it maintains that those in hell exist forever in that state (the Existence Thesis) and that (...) at least some human persons will end up in hell (the Anti-Universalism Thesis). Once in hell, there is no possibility of escape (the No Escape Thesis), and the justification of and purpose for hell is to mete out punishment to those whose earthly lives and character deserve it (the Retribution Thesis). (shrink)

Reflection on the issues surrounding the value of knowledge and other cognitive states of interest to epistemologists can be traced to the conversation between Socrates and Meno in Plato’s dialogue named after the latter. The context of discussion concerns the hiring of a guide to get one to Larissa, and the proposal on the table is that one would want a guide who knows the way. Socrates sees a problem, however, for it is not clear why a guide with merely (...) true opinion will not be just as good. (shrink)

I begin by expressing my sincere thanks to my critics for taking time from their own impressive projects in epistemology to consider mine. Often, in reading their criticisms, I had the feeling of having received more help than I really wanted! But the truth of the matter is that we learn best by making mistakes, and I appreciate the conscientious attention to my work that my critics have shown.

The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose.

I came to epistemology through an interest in the concept of rationality, and especially through the attacks on the rationality of religious believers. My thoughts at the time focused on the disappointing quality of the arguments for and against religious belief, and I recall being astonished at the time that philosophers capable of such penetrating insight in other areas had nothing that seemed either penetrating or original. The defenders sounded too much like mere apologists for the faith, and the attackers (...) arid and dull, with both sides often exuding a scent of intellectual dishonesty. (shrink)

Philosophical reflection concerning the afterlife has focused on the place of such doctrines in the great monotheistic religions of the Abrahamic tradition--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The philosophical issues that arise concerning these doctrines is not limited to such traditions, however. Consider, for example, the doctrine of hell. Any religion promises certain benefits to its adherents, and these benefits require some contrast that befalls, or might befall, those who fail to adhere to the religion in question. This contrast to the benefits (...) the religion proffers will raise many, if not all, the same philosophical concerns as are raised by the vivid imagery that has come to be associated with the doctrine of hell in western culture. Here the focus will be on the philosophical issues arising out of such doctrines in the great monotheistic traditions, and especially within Christianity. The first point to recognize, however, is that such narrowing still preserves in microcosm the general philosophical contours any religion will encounter when it advocates certain patterns of life and rejects others. (shrink)

The best defense of the doctrine of the Incarnation implies that traditional Christianity has a special stake in the knowability paradox, a stake not shared by other theistic perspectives or by non-traditional accounts of the Incarnation. Perhaps, this stake is not even shared by antirealism, the view most obviously threatened by the paradox. I argue for these points, concluding that these results put traditional Christianity at a disadvantage compared to other viewpoints, and I close with some comments about the extent (...) of the burden incurred. (shrink)

The knowability paradox derives from a proof by Frederic Fitch in 1963. The proof purportedly shows that if all truths are knowable, it follows that all truths are known. Antirealists, wed as they are to the idea that truth is epistemic, feel threatened by the proof. For what better way to express the epistemic character of truth than to insist that all truths are knowable? Yet, if that insistence logically compels similar assent to some omniscience claim, antirealism is in jeopardy. (...) Response to the paradox has drifted toward a common theme, a theme I will argue is a non-starter in resolving the paradox. Seeing this point will also make clear the philosophical inadequacy of simply viewing the paradox as a refutation of a wide range of antirealisms. (shrink)

This paper argues for a solution to a problem that contrastivism faces. The problem is that contrastivism cannot preserve closure, in spite of claims to the contrary by its defenders. The problem is explained and a response developed.

‘propositionalism’. It counsels beginning inquiry into the nature of justification by adopting a particular form of evidentialism, according to which the first task is to describe the abstract relation of evidencing that holds between propositional contents. Such an approach has a variety of implications for the theory of justification itself, and many of the motivations for the view are of a standard internalist variety. Some of these motivations will be described in due course, but there is also a further motivation (...) to mention here as well. Such a theory, beyond enabling a theory to satisfy typical internalist strictures, also allows a strong relationship between the theory of justification and more standard confirmation theory where claims are confirmed and disconfirmed by information gleaned from experiments and other sources. It is a natural and pleasing result if confirmation theory can be embedded within the theory of justification developed in the context of more traditional epistemology. (shrink)

There are two different kinds of theories of the concept of epistemic defeat. One theory begins with propositional relationships, only by implication describing what happens in the context of a noetic system. Such a theory places inforrmation about defeat up front, not informing us of how the defeat relationships play out in the context of actual belief, at least not initially. The other theory takes a back door to the concept of defeat, assuming a context of actual belief and an (...) entire noetic system, and describing defeat in terms of what sort of doxastic and noetic responses would be appropriate to the addition of particular pieces of information. Where the house is the noetic structure itself, the front door approach characterizes the concept of defeat in terms of the propositional contents a belief might have, thus characterizing defeat at the front door. The backdoor approach characterizes defeat in terms of what leaves the house, in terms of beliefs that exit the noetic system in response to changes to it, in terms of what the staff of a well-run household kicks out the backdoor for making a mess of things. Alvin Plantinga’s theory of epistemic defeat is a back-door theory, and here I will argue that his theory and approaches like it will be unable to explicate accurately the concept of epistemic defeat. I will argue that a front door approach is needed rather than a back door approach. (shrink)

Contextualists claim two important virtues for their view. First, contextualism is a non-skeptical epistemology, given the plausible idea that not all contexts invoke the high standards for knowledge needed to generate the skeptical conclusion that we know little or nothing. Second, contextualism is able to preserve closure concerning knowledge – the idea that knowledge is extendable on the basis of competent deduction from known premises. As long as one keeps the context fixed, it is plausible to think that some closure (...) principle can be articulated that will survive scrutiny. Opponents of contextualism often try to gain an advantage over it by claiming that their view mimics these virtues of contextualism as well as having other virtues. A recent example of the same is termed ‘contrastivism," as presented by Jonathan Schaffer. I will argue that the representation made is chimerical, that in fact contrastivism has no hope of mirroring these twin virtues of contextualism. (shrink)

The questions concerning the value of knowledge and truth range from complete skepticism about such value to more discriminating concerns about the precise nature of the value in question and the comparative judgment that one of the two is more valuable than the other.

There is a great divide between two approaches to epistemology over the past thirty to forty years. Some label the divide that between internalists and externalists, and that characterization may be accurate on some account of the distinction. I will pursue the divide from a different direction, in part because the literature on the distinction between internalism and externalism has become a mess, and I don’t want to clean up the mess here.

Epistemology has for a long time focused on the concept of knowledge and tried to answer questions such as whether knowledge is possible and how much of it there is. Missing from this inquiry, however, is a discussion on the value of knowledge. In The Pursuit of Knowledge and the Value of Understanding Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology properly conceived cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He also questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in epistemology, namely (...) that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its subparts. Taking Platos' Meno as a starting point of his discussion, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that knowledge is less valuable than generally assumed. Clearly written and well argued, the book will appeal to students and professionals in epistemology. (shrink)

The knowability paradox threatens metaphysical or semantical antirealism, the view that truth is epistemic, by revealing an awful consequence of the claim [i] that all truths are knowable. Various attempts have been made to find a way out of the paradox.

Finkish dispositions, those dispositions that are lost when their conditions of realization occur, pose deep problems for counterfactual accounts of dispositions. David Lewis has argued that the counterfactual approach can be rescued, offering such an account that purports to handle finkish as well as other dispositions. The paper argues that Lewis's account fails to account for several kinds of dispositions, one of which involves failure to distinguish parallel processes from unitary processes.

Plantinga thus offers an approach that begins by assessing the faculties or abilities of a cognitive system or agent. Once such an assessment is complete, the epistemologist is in a position to infer the epistemic status of the doxastic products of those faculties or abilities.

Van Fraassen's epistemology is forged from two commitments, one to a type of Bayesianism and the other to what he terms voluntarism. Van Fraassen holds that if one is going to follow a rule in belief-revision, it must be a Bayesian rule, but that one does not need to follow a rule in order to be rational. It is argued that van Fraassen's arguments for rejecting non-Bayesian rules is unsound, and that his voluntarism is subject to a fatal dilemma arising (...) from the non-monotonic character of reasoning. (shrink)

Coherence theorists have universally defined justification as a relation only among (the contents of) belief states, in contradistinction to other theories, such as some versions of founda­tionalism, which define justification as a relation on belief states and appearance states.

Epistemologists often offer theories of justification without paying much attention to the variety and diversity of locutions in which the notion of justification appears. For example, consider the following claims which contain some notion of justification: B is a justified belief, S's belief that p is justified, p is justified for S, S is justified in believing that p, S justifiably believes that p, S's believing p is justified, there is justification for S to believe that p, there is justification (...) for S's believing p, and S has a justification for believing that p. In addition to these passive uses of the notion of justification, there are active uses as well: S justified his belief in p, believing e justifies believing p, etc. The syntactic variety involves semantic difference as well. For example, the proposition S has a justification for believing that p does not entail that S believes p, whereas the proposition S justifiably believes that p does entail that S believes p. (shrink)

According to the TDT, no singular propositions about an individual and no "thisnesses" of individuals exist prior to the existence of the indivi­dual in question, where a thisness "is the property of being x, or of being identical with x" and a "singular proposition about an individual x is a proposition that involves or refers to x directly, perhaps by having x or the thisness of x as a constituent, and not merely by way of x's qualitative properties or relations (...) to other individuals" (p. 315) The support for this position comes from two sources, according to Adams. (shrink)

Foundationalism came under attack in two areas in the first half of this century. First, some doubted whether the foundations were adequate to support the entire structure of knowledge, and second, the doctrine of the Agiven@ came under serious attack. = However, many epistemologists were not convinced that foundationalism was to be abandoned even if the criticisms were granted. According to these epistemologist, far from having shown that foundationalism itself was at fault, the critics of foundationalism had only been attacking (...) one particular version of foundationalism--that version that included infallibility, incorrigibility,, or some appeal to a Agiven@ at the base of the structure of justification. The claim of these defenders was that there are other possible types of foundationalism than this version of foundationalism, which has come to be called Classical Foundationalism. And thus opened up a new area of philosophical lexicography: the attempt to say what foundationalism itself is, so that Classical Foundationalism turned out to be one instance of foundationalism but not the only possible one. (shrink)

A critical question for epistemologists is whether there are any inter-subjective requirements for having a justified belief C whether there is an >us= in >justification=. One recent epistemologist that has addressed this issue is Keith Lehrer. In Knowledge, Lehrer presents a..

attacks new defenders of foundationalism. Some simply took on the critics, 2 but others attempted to argue that even if the critics were right, only one form of foundationalism was suspect, not foundationalism itself. For, according to these defenders, foundationalism is not to be identified with the view of Classical Foundationalism (CE) that all of our knowledge rests on incorrigible beliefs. Rather foundationalism is the view that all of our knowledge rests on beliefs that are self-warranting in some sense. Thus, (...) even if CF is false, it does not follow that foundationalism is false. (shrink)

Some recent philosophers of religion have addressed the question of how, and whether it is possible, that the religious experiences some persons have had can give reasons for believing that God exists. Swinburne, for example, claims that what he calls the principle of credulity implies that the religious experiences of those that have them do provide evidence for others that God exists. He formulates the principle as follows: 1 (1) if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present, (...) then probably x is present (all else being equal). (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga thinks Leibniz made a mistake. Leibniz claimed that God could have created any possible world, but Plantinga thinks this view amounts to a lapse in judgment on Leibniz =s part. = Plantinga terms this mistake ALeibniz= Lapse,@ and his rejection of this Leibuizian claim plays an important role in Plantinga =s free wili defense against the problem of evil. I will argue that Plantinga fails to show that Leibniz lapsed in thinking about which worlds are actualizable by God; (...) in particular, his argument for this claim is not sound. If I am right, the last lapse is on Plantinga. (shrink)

LEMKE has recently taken issue (see ANALYSIS 46.3, June 1986, pp. 138-44) with my claim that no counterfactual causal account of the basing relation is plausible (see ANALYSIS 45.3, June 1985, pp. 153-8). Intuitively, a counterfactual causal account claims that belief is based on evidence if and only if the evidence either causes the belief or would have caused it had the actual cause been absent. This intuitive formulation accounts only for counterfactual causes of level one: events which would have (...) been a cause had only the actual cause been absent. As I argued, there is as much support for allowing counterfactual causes having a higher cardinality: events which would have been a cause had the actual cause and some other counterfactual causes been absent. (shrink)