Online research in philosophy

This paper clarifies and evaluates a premise of William Alston’s argument in Perceiving God. The premise in question: if it is practically rational to engage in a doxastic practice, then it is epistemically rational to suppose that said practice is reliable. I first provide the background needed to understand how this premise fits into Alston’s main argument. I then present Alston’s main argument, and proceed to clarify, criticize, modify, and ultimately reject Alston’s argument for the premise in question. Without this premise, Alston’s main argument fails.

In an article previously published in this journal, Phillip Montague critically surveys and rejects a handful of contemporary attempts to explain why state punishment is morally justified. Among those targeted is one of my defences of the censure theory of punishment, according to which state punishment is justified because the political community has a duty to express disapproval of those guilty of injustice. My defence of censure theory supposes, per argumentum, that there is always some defeasible moral reason for the state to proportionately punish the guilty, and then demonstrates that censure theory best entails and explains this intuition. Montague does not question the intuition, but instead argues that three rival theories of punishment, including his societal-defence view, account for it to no worse a degree than my censure theory. In this article I defend my initial argument, noting resources for its defence that Montague does not appreciate and that, I maintain, provide those who believe that there is always pro tanto injustice in the state failing to proportionately punish the guilty reason to adopt censure theory over all competitors, including Montague’s societal-defence theory.

What is social epistemology? Or what might it be? According to one perspective, social epistemology is a branch of traditional epistemology that studies epistemic properties of individuals that arise from their relations to others, as well as epistemic properties of groups or social systems. A simple example (of the first sort) is the transmission of knowledge or justification from one person to another. Studying such interpersonal epistemic relations is a legitimate part of epistemology. A very different perspective would associate ‘social epistemology’ with movements in postmodernism, social studies of science, or cultural studies that aim to replace traditional epistemology with radically different questions, premises, or procedures. Although these enquiries examine the social contexts of belief and thought, they generally seek to debunk or reconfigure conventional epistemic concepts rather than illuminate the nature and conditions of epistemic success or failure. Under the first construal social epistemology is a bona fide part of the mainstream, and hence ‘real’ epistemology. Under the second construal, it is not part of epistemology at all. If protagonists of the latter-day movements marketed their products under the guise of epistemology, they would be imposters. Their products are not real epistemology. ‘Is social epistemology real epistemology?’ is a question posed by William Alston (2005). He raises it en passant, while noting that epistemology’s boundaries are controversial, drawn differently by different thinkers. To illustrate his point, he suggests that much of the material in my book on social epistemology, Knowledge in a Social World (Goldman 1999), ‘would be rejected by many contemporary epistemologists as ‘‘not real epistemology’’ ’ (Alston 2005: 5). The epistemologists in question, says Alston, would relegate much of this so-called social epistemology to sociology, social psychology, or other social sciences, or perhaps to the philosophical foundations thereof..

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. This article will provide a systematic overview of the problems that the questions above raise and focus in some depth on issues relating to the structure and the limits of knowledge and justification.

William Alston’s argument against Deontological Theories of Epistemic Justification constitutes a classic$and much debated$piece of contemporary epistemology. At the heart of Alston’s argument, however, lies a very simple mistake which, surprisingly, appears to have gone unnoticed in the vast literature now devoted to the argument. After having shown why the standard response to Alston’s argument doesn’t work, we diagnose the mistake and offer a plausible hypothesis as to why it has remained concealed for so long.

John Turri claims to have refuted the main argument of William Alston’s Perceiving God. He contests Alston’s claim that “for any established doxastic practice it is rational to suppose that it is reliable.” I show that Turri has misinterpreted Alston at several key points, and that his refutation of Alston’s argument fails.

In this paper I examine William Alston's work on the epistemology of religious belief, focusing on the threat to the epistemic status of Christian belief presented by awareness of religious diversity. I argue that Alston appears to misunderstand the epistemic significance of the ‘practical rationality’ of the Christian mystical practice. I suggest that this error is due to a more fundamental misunderstanding, regarding the significance of practical rationality, in Alston's ‘doxastic practice’ approach to epistemology; an error that leads to arbitrariness among the class of rational doxastic practices. I suggest how one might remedy this weakness, with an additional, epistemic, criterion that rational doxastic practices must satisfy.

After a justificationist period, William P. Alston has tried to eliminate justification from the epistemology of belief. He introduced a list of epistemic desiderata all of which contribute to the positive status of beliefs and none of which has an exclusive and decisive role so that it could be isolated as the property of being justified. Careful examination reveals, however, that this list includes fewer desiderata than advertised. Truth-conducive desiderata are most important for Alston, and these are five; during his discussion, however, Alston reduces these desiderata to only one, the reliability of process, which has an externalist character. Besides this desideratum, there is one other group of desiderata, all of which have an internalist character. What Alston has in fact done, then, through the presentation of his anti-justificationist list, is to separate externalist and internalist elements for the positive status of belief and to give an independent role to each. Since Alston regards the truth-conducive group as the most important, however, and since he has failed to show a real pluralism in this group, we may conclude that he continues to have a monistic approach to the evaluation of beliefs, which belies his alleged pluralism.

William Alston has articulated a powerful defence of the claim that mystical perception generates prima facie justified beliefs about God. At the heart of his defence is the claim that mystical perception is 'innocent until proven guilty'; that is, Alston claims that the practice of forming beliefs on the basis of putative perceptions of God should be accorded the same presumptive innocence we accord to other standard ways of forming beliefs like sense perception, memory and introspection. But Alston employs a strategy for defending mystical perception that seems to obviate the possibility of criticizing mystical perception and thus that renders otiose Alston's claim that that practice is innocent only until proven guilty. I argue that this appearance is deceptive; Alston's strategy does not render effective criticism of mystical perception unreasonably difficult. I further argue that granting the legitimacy of Alston's strategy is essential to a fair, measured criticism of mystical perception.