Review of Isaac Levi's "Pragmatism and Inquiry"

Mind (forthcoming)
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Abstract

The twin pillars of Levi’s epistemology are his infallibilism and his corrigibilism. According to infallibilism, any agent is committed to being absolutely certain about anything she fully believes. From her own perspective, there is no serious possibility that any proposition she believes is false. She takes her own beliefs to be infallible, in this sense. But this need not make her dogmatic, on Levi’s view. According to his corrigibilism, an agent might come to have good reason to change her beliefs and respond accordingly. She might also recognise this possibility ex ante, despite being absolutely certain that her current beliefs are true. This brief review explores whether Levi’s infallibilism can be made to sit comfortably both with his account of rational belief change, and his account of epistemic value (or with any reasonable account of epistemic value for that matter). I argue that it cannot.

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Author's Profile

Jason Konek
University of Bristol

Citations of this work

Imprecise Epistemic Values and Imprecise Credences.B. A. Levinstein - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):741-760.

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