Online research in philosophy

The logical treatment of the nature of religious belief (here I will concentrate on belief in Christianity) has been distorted by the acceptance of a false dilemma. On the one hand, many (e.g., Braithwaite, Hare) have placed the significance of religious belief entirely outside the realm of intellectual cognition. According to this view, religious statements do not express factual propositions: they are not made true or false by the ways things are. Religious belief consists in a certain attitude toward the world, life, or other human beings, or in what sorts of things one values. On the other hand, others (such as Swinburne, 1981, Chapers 1 and 4) have taken religious belief to include (at least) being certain of the truth of particular factual religious propositions. The strength of a person's religious belief is identified with his degree of confidence in the truth of those propositions, measured by the "subjective probability" which those propositions have for that person. I propose a third alternative, according to which, (1) contrary to the first view, religious belief does involve a relation to factual religious propositions, such as that God exists, that Jesus was God and man, etc., -- propositions which are made true or false by the way things actually are -- but, (2) contrary to the second view, the strength of religious belief is measured, not by the degree of one's confidence1 in the truth of these propositions, but rather by the way in which the value or desirability to oneself of the various ways the world could be is affected by their including or not including the truth of these religious propositions. Thus, religious belief does consist in what one values or prizes, not in what..

‘Skepticism’ refers primarily to two positions. Knowledge skepticism says there is no such thing as knowledge, and justification skepticism denies the existence of justified belief. How closely the two views are related depends on the relationship between knowledge and justification: if knowledge entails justified belief, as many theorists say, then justification skepticism entails knowledge skepticism (but not vice versa). Either form of skepticism can be limited in scope. Global (or radical) skepticism challenges the epistemic credentials of all beliefs, saying that no one knows anything, or no belief is justified. More local skepticism is restricted to some domain; thus some skeptics question the epistemic credentials of beliefs about other minds (but not beliefs about one’s own mind), or beliefs concerning empirical matters (but not concerning a priori matters).

Cartesian skepticism about epistemic justification (‘skepticism’) is the view that many of our beliefs about the external world – e.g., my current belief that I have hands – aren’t justified. I examine the two most influential arguments for skepticism – the Closure Argument and the Underdetermination Argument – from an evidentialist perspective. For both arguments it is clear which premise the anti-skeptic must deny. The Closure Argument, I argue, is the better argument in that its key premise is weaker than the Underdetermination Argument’s key premise. However, it’s also likely that the motivation for accepting both key premises is exactly the same. So there may be a sense in which both arguments provide exactly the same motivation for skepticism. Then I argue that if I I’m right about what the motivation for accepting the arguments’ key premises is, then neither argument succeeds in providing a good reason to accept skepticism. I conclude by explaining why I think epistemologists are right to expend a lot of time and effort on refuting these arguments, even if neither argument provides any motivation for skepticism.

Radical skepticism about the external world is founded on two assumptions: one is that the mind and the external world are logically independent; the other is that all our evidence for the nature of that world consists of facts about our minds.

Skepticism and its Legacy (first 1 1/2 weeks) i) Skepticism about the external world: Skepticism in some form or another is a philosophical perennial, but even so it is not unreasonable to suggest that with Descartes, skepticism of an entirely new form made its first appearance on stage. Descartes deployed a radical doubt about the external world, with methodical ambitions, and in doing so he might be taken to have raised the stakes for epistemology. What if the Cartesian response to Skepticism fails? Is our ordinary knowledge of the world impeached if we cannot refute the hypothesis that we are dreaming, or that we are the playthings of a malign demon? There is also a historical question: is Cartesian skepticism interestingly different from the Pyrrhonian and academic skepticism that was "in play" long before Descartes?

“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s commitment to immediate epistemic warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world.

Possible worlds semantics has been very useful in modeling not only the intensionality of necessity and possibility, future and past. It has also found its place in modeling the intentionality of propositional attitudes like belief and knowledge. There is something fruitful in analyzing a belief as a set of possible worlds. The belief is the set of possible worlds in which the belief is true. The belief is true if and only if the actual world is in the corresponding set of propositions. The possible worlds in the set corresponding to the belief represent how the agent per- ceives the world to be. If the belief is false, then the world isn’t how the agent sees the world to be, and so the actual world isn’t in the set of worlds corresponding to the belief (see Lewis [4] and Stalnaker [9]). The same can be said of whole belief states just as much as it can be said of individual beliefs. My belief state is the set of worlds consistent with what I believe. This view has been very fruitful, not least because the set-theoretic structure of sets of possible worlds corresponds nicely with the logical structure of entailment relations among propositions and the behavior of propositional connectives like conjunction, disjunction, and negation. However, the story does not deal well with inconsistent belief. Inconsistent beliefs are true in no possible worlds, so they are each modeled by the same set of worlds—the empty set. My beliefs are often inconsistent, and so are those of many..

There are a number of apparent parallels between belief in God and belief in the existence of an external world beyond our experiences. Both beliefs would seem to condition one's overall view of reality and one's place within it – and yet it is difficult to see how either can be defended. Neither belief is likely to receive a purely a priori defence and any empirical evidence that one cites either in favour of the existence of God or the existence of the external world would seem to blatantly beg the question against a doubter. I will explore just how far this parallel can be pushed by examining some strategies for resisting external world scepticism1.

I argue that our justification for beliefs about the external physical world need not be constituted by any justified beliefs about perceptual experiences. In this way our justification for beliefs about the physical world may be nondoxastic and this differentiates my proposal from traditional foundationalist theories such as those defended by Laurence BonJour, Richard Fumerton, and Timothy McGrew. On the other hand, it differs from certain non-traditional foundationalist theories such as that defended by James Pryor according to which perceptual experience is sufficient to justify beliefs about the external world. I propose that justification for propositions describing our perceptual experiences partially constitutes any justification we may possess for beliefs concerning the external world. In this way, our justification for beliefs about the physical world may only be inferential since it is grounded in any justification we have for at least one other proposition. This theory occupies an intermediate position between the two aforementioned foundationalist accounts, which allows it to sidestep problems that confront each of them.

Michael Williams and Crispin Wright have claimed that we are epistemically justified in believing hinge propositions, such as there is an external world. In a recent paper Allan Hazlett puts forward an argument that purports to elucidate the source of such justification. This paper reconstructs Hazlett's argument and offers a criticism of it.