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In order to guide the decisions of real people who want to bring about good epistemic outcomes for themselves and others, we need to understand our epistemic values. In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman has proposed an epistemic value theory that allows us to say whether one outcome is epistemically better than another. However, it has been suggested that Goldman's theory is not really an epistemic value theory at all because whether one outcome is epistemically better than another partly depends on our non-epistemic interests. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic value theory that serves the purposes of social epistemology must incorporate non- epistemic interests in much the way that Goldman's theory does. In fact, I argue that Goldman's theory does not go far enough in this direction. In particular, the epistemic value of having a particular true belief should actually be weighted by how interested we are in the topic.
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"The ineffable" in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is an essential term that has various interpretations. It could be divided into two types, namely, positive and negative, or real and fake. The negative or fake type can be clarified by logical analysis, while the positive or real type can be understood only through philosophical critique. Both the positive and negative types consist of infinity or absoluteness, but the infinity is subject to distinctions in meaning and logic. "" «» , , , . , . , .
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“The ineffable” in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is an essential term that has various interpretations. It could be divided into two types, namely, positive and negative, or real and fake. The negative or fake type can be clarified by logical analysis, while the positive or real type can be understood only through philosophical critique. Both the positive and negative types consist of infinity or absoluteness, but the infinity is subject to distinctions in meaning and logic.
In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge.
Recently, we have come across a top-secret document from the Council of Intuition Adjudicators (CIA). The document reports a series of troubling developments, all stemming from efforts to exploit patented knowledge-prevention technology developed at the University of Michigan in the mid-1970s.1 Whereas traditional efforts in this area had focused on preventing knowledge by preventing belief – and hence had fallen afoul of Federal Belief Intervention (FBI) guidelines – this new generation of products is in full conformity with FBI regulations; just as neutron bombs kill while leaving buildings intact, these products prevent knowledge without affecting beliefs. It had appeared, in the 1970s, that the effects of such weapons could be safely quarantined. Intuitions concerning their effects seemed relatively stable, and principled articulations of the circumstances under which they were effective seemed possible. But the recently discovered CIA document confirms the growing suspicion of many that such ease of containment was merely an illusion. Rather, it seems, to stop the deployment of such weapons we need to make appeal to some of the most dreaded resources in the CIA arsenal: challenging the reliability of certain widely-held intuitions about particular cases, or perhaps even by challenging the systematicity of intuitions in this realm as a whole. Below, we reproduce the CIA document in full.
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Perhaps the concept of knowledge, prior to its being fashioned and molded by certain philosophical traditions, never offered any stable negative verdict in the original fake barn case.
Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated.
Discussion of Tamar Gendler, The real guide to fake Barns: Gifts for your epistemic enemies a catalogue of
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