Online research in philosophy

I argue that its appearing to you that P does not provide justification for believing that P unless you have independent justification for the denial of skeptical alternatives – hypotheses incompatible with P but such that if they were true, it would still appear to you that P. Thus I challenge the popular view of ‘dogmatism,’ according to which for some contents P, you need only lack reason to suspect that skeptical alternatives are true, in order for an experience as of P to justify belief that P. I pursue three lines of objection to dogmatism, having to do with probabilistic reasoning, considerations of future or hypothetically available justification, and epistemic circularity. I briefly sketch a fall-back position which avoids the problems raised.

THE PROTAGONISTS David Sedley The primary object of this historical introduction1 is to enable a reader encountering Hellenistic philosophy for the first ...

According to dogmatism, one may know a proposition by inferring it from a set of evidence even if one has no independent grounds for rejecting a skeptical hypothesis compatible with one’s evidence but incompatible with one’s conclusion. Despite its intuitive attractions, many philosophers have argued that dogmatism goes wrong because they have thought that it licenses Moorean reasoning — i.e., reasoning in which one uses the conclusion of an inference as a premise in an argument against a skeptical hypothesis that would undermine that very inference. In this paper I defend dogmatism against this line of thought. To begin with, I argue that the common assumption that uncontroversial Bayesian principles suffice to show that Moorean reasoning is not cogent is false: for all that Bayesianism says on the matter, Moorean reasoning might be perfectly fine. Nevertheless, Moorean reasoning does seem intuitively defective. As I argue, however, this does not provide grounds for an argument against dogmatism, because — contrary to what many philosophers have thought — dogmatism need not license Moorean reasoning. On the contrary, as I argue, dogmatism predicts that Moorean reasoning suffers from a clearly identifiable defect.

Open-minded people should endorse dogmatism because of its explanatory power. Dogmatism holds that, in the absence of defeaters, a seeming that P necessarily provides non-inferential justification for P. I show that dogmatism provides an intuitive explanation of four issues concerning non-inferential justification. It is particularly impressive that dogmatism can explain these issues because prominent epistemologists have argued that it can’t address at least two of them. Prominent epistemologists also object that dogmatism is absurdly permissive because it allows a seeming to provide justification even if the seeming was caused in some apparently inappropriate way. I conclude by disarming this objection.

In this volume of essays Russell is concerned to combat, in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, whether of the Left or of the Right, which has hitherto ...