Epistemic justification puzzle
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Date
24/11/2011Author
Kyriacou, Christos
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Abstract
The thesis explores the semantics of epistemic justification discourse, a very important
part of overall epistemic discourse. It embarks from a critical examination of
referentialist theories to arrive at a certain nonreferential, expressivist approach to
the semantics of epistemic justification discourse. That is, it criticizes the main referentialist
theories and then goes on to argue for an expressivist approach on the basis
of its theoretical capacity to outflank the problems referentialist theories meet. In the
end, I also identify some problems for a prominent expressivist theory and, as a response
to these problems, propose a novel norm-expressivist approach that seems to
evade these problems.
In particular, in Ch.1 I introduce what I call ‘the epistemic justification puzzle’
and then in Chs.2-4 criticize naturalistic referential theories: analytic naturalistic reductionism,
synthetic naturalistic reductionism and epistemic kinds realism. In Ch.5
I criticize nonnaturalist referential theories: what I call ‘naïve’ nonnaturalism and
J.McDowell’s (1994) more sophisticated quietist version of nonnaturalism. Next, in
Ch.6 I introduce the semantic programme of expressivism and go on to construct a
simple version of epistemic norm-expressivism (inspired by A.Gibbard (1990)) in
order to explain how expressivism can easily outflank the identified problems of referentialist
theories. This simple norm-expressivist theory, however, is only used as a
theoretical ‘toy’ for the mere sake of motivating the possibility of expressivism, as in
Ch.7 I go on to argue for a more sophisticated version of norm-expressivism: habitsendorsement
expressivism.
In Ch.7 I introduce a prominent expressivist theory of moral and knowledge discourses,
namely, plan-reliance expressivism (credited to A.Gibbard (2003, 2008))
and extend it cover the epistemic justification discourse. I then identify some problems
for plan-reliance expressivism as extended to cover justification discourse and
in response to these problems propose habits-endorsement expressivism. Habits-endorsement
expressivism builds on the intuition that (justified) belief-fixation is habitual
and exploits the theoretical flexibility of the notion of habits in order to overcome
the identified problems of plan-reliance expressivism.