Can we show that our senses are reliable sources of information about the world? To show this, we need to establish that most of our perceptual judgments have been true. But we cannot determine these inductive instances without relying upon sense perception. Thus, it seems, we cannot establish the reliability of sense perception by means of an argument without falling into epistemic circularity. In this paper, I argue that this consequence is not an epistemological disaster. For this purpose, I (...) defend a normative claim that it is reasonable to accept the general reliability of our perceptual judgments, instead of a factual claim that our perceptual judgments are generally reliable. More specifically, I offer a normative practical argument which explains why it is reasonable to accept the general reliability of our perceptual judgments, even though we cannot establish the general reliability of our perceptual judgments by means of theoretical reasoning. (shrink)

The version uploaded to this site is a late draft. The paper arises both from William L. Rowe's classic 1979 discussion of the problem of evil, argues that there exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse, and also from Steven Wykstra's response, in the course of which he argues for the following Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access (CORNEA): "On the (...) basis of cognized situation s, human H is entitled to claim 'It appears that p' only if it is reasonable for H to believe that, given her cognitive faculties and the use she has made of them, if p were not the case, s would likely be different in some way discernible by her." My paper discusses CORNEA, and proposes a replacement principle. (shrink)

Anthony Brueckner has argued that claims about underdetermination of evidence are suppressed in closure-based scepticism (“The Structure of the Skeptical Argument”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54:4, 1994). He also argues that these claims about underdetermination themselves lead to a paradoxical sceptical argument—the underdetermination argument—which is more fundamental than the closure argument. If Brueckner is right, the status quo focus of some predominant anti-sceptical strategies may be misguided. In this paper I focus specifically on the relationship between these two arguments. I (...) provide support for Brueckner’s claim that the underdetermination argument is the more fundamental sceptical argument. I do so by responding to a challenge to this claim put forward by Stewart Cohen (“Two Kinds of Skeptical Argument”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58:1, 1998). Cohen invokes an alternative epistemic principle which he thinks can be used to challenge Brueckner. Cohen’s principle raises interesting questions about the relationship between evidential considerations and explanatory considerations in the context of scepticism about our knowledge of the external world. I explore these questions in my defence of Brueckner. (shrink)

The problem of epistemic circularity involved in justifying fundamental epistemic principles is one of the fundamental problems of epistemology. One important way out of this problem is a Sellarsian social practice theory of justification, according to which we are justified in accepting an epistemic principle if we can answer all objections raised against it in our social practice of demanding justification and responding to such demands. The main goal of this paper is to show that this (...) social practice theory can accomplish better than its rival theories, such as Alston’s doxastic practice approach, Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology, and Wright’s entitlement theory, by making comparisons with these influential theories. (shrink)

Principles -- Questions -- Ideas -- Principles of truth and acceptance -- Presumption as a pathway to plausibility -- Conjecture and the move from mere plausibility and presumption to acceptability -- Plausibility conflicts and paradox -- From conjecture to belief and from belief to knowledge -- The epistemic gap and grades of acceptance -- Cognitive thresholds -- Intuitive knowledge -- Experience and induction -- Distributive vs. collective explanation -- Cognitive importance -- Problems of prediction -- Error and (...) cognitive risk -- Problems of skepticism -- Trust -- Common sense -- How science works -- Scientific realism and its problems -- The anthomorphic contextuality of science -- Ignorance and limits of knowledge -- On systemic "best fit" reasoning -- Inference from the best systematization -- The cyclic unity of reason -- Fact, fiction and functional surrogacy -- A pragmatic coda. (shrink)

If it is certain that performing an observation to determine whether P is true will in no way influence whether P is tme, then the proposition that the observation is performed ought to be probabilistically independent of P. Applying the notion of "observation" liberally, so that a wide variety of actions are treated as observations, this proposed new principle of belief revision yields the result that simple utihty maximization gives the correct solution to the Fisher smoking paradox and the two-box (...) solution to Newcomb's paradox. Contrary intuitions are explained as arising from mistakenly treating subjective probability as a measure of the intensity of conscious assent, whereas it ought to be regarded as measuring dispositions to action. (shrink)

If it is certain that performing an observation to determine whether P is true will in no way influence whether P is tme, then the proposition that the observation is performed ought to be probabilistically independent of P. Applying the notion of "observation" liberally, so that a wide variety of actions are treated as observations, this proposed new principle of belief revision yields the result that simple utihty maximization gives the correct solution to the Fisher smoking paradox and the two-box (...) solution to Newcomb's paradox. Contrary intuitions are explained as arising from mistakenly treating subjective probability as a measure of the intensity of conscious assent, whereas it ought to be regarded as measuring dispositions to action. (shrink)

An exposition and discussion of Chisholm's “epistemic principles.” These are compared with relevant views of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Foley. A further comparison, with the approach favored by Descartes, is argued to throw light on the status of such principles.

In this paper, I engage in a preliminary discussion to the thorny problem of analogous naming in Aquinas; namely, the Maimonidean problem of how ourconceptual content can relate to us any knowledge of God. I identify this problem as the First Semantic/Epistemic Problem (FSEP) of religious language. Theprimary determination of semantic content for Aquinas is what I call the Aristotelian Epistemic Principle (AEP). This principle holds that a belief is related tosome experience in order to be known. I (...) show how an examination of the extent the AEP engenders the problem and allows us to find a way out of the FSEP. Forexample, through such an analysis, we can see how the AEP relates to Aquinas’s use of the distinction between the res significata and the modus significandi; the latter which includes the intension of being a created being where the former does not. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to James Keller 's criticisms of my Foundationalism, Coherentism and the Levels Gambit.Foundationalists have often claimed that, within a foundationalist framework, one can justify beliefs about epistemic principles in a mediate, empirical fashion, while escaping the charge of vicious circularity that is usually thought to afflict such methods of justification. In my original paper I attacked this foundationalist strategy; I argued that once mediate, empirical justification of epistemic principles is allowed, the (...) foundationalist must also allow circular patterns of justification of the sort that he typically criticizes coherentists for espousing. Here I argue that Keller 's reply only makes matters worse for the foundationalist. At several points, his reply turns out to be inconsistent either with reliabilism or with the foundationalist strategy he is trying to defend. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers influenced by Peirce's pragmatism have contributed to the democracy debate by offering not simply a justification of democracy that relies on epistemic as well as moral presumptions, but a justification on purely epistemic grounds, that is, without recourse to any moral values or principles. In a nutshell, this pragmatist epistemic argument takes as its starting-point a few fundamental epistemic principles we cannot reasonably deny, and goes on to claim that a (...) number of interpersonal epistemic commitments follow, which in turn justify democracy in a fullfledged, deliberative sense. In light of the fact of reasonable pluralism, this freestanding epistemic justification of democracy is allegedly superior to the mainstream, morally anchored liberal alternatives, because epistemic principles are universally shared despite moral disagreement. The pragmatist epistemic approach has been praised for being a valuable contribution to democratic theory, but few attempts have so far been made to systematically scrutinize the argument as a whole. The present paper sets out to do that. In particular, our investigation focuses on the underappreciated but central coherence form of the pragmatist epistemic argument: the central claim that in order to be an internally coherent believer, one must accept democracy. While we endorse the fundamental premise for the sake of argument, our analysis shows that the argument fails in both of the two further steps, and. More specifically, the epistemic principles are too weak to entail the suggested interpersonal epistemic commitments; and even if these epistemic commitments are granted, they are insufficient to ground democracy. (shrink)

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between (...) logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, the knowledge norm and the truth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. (shrink)

Is logic normative for belief? A standard approach to answering this question has been to investigate bridge principles relating claims of logical consequence to norms for belief. Although the question is naturally an epistemic one, bridge principles have typically been investigated in isolation from epistemic debates over the correct norms for belief. In this paper we tackle the question of whether logic is normative for belief by proposing a Kripkean model theory accounting for the interaction between (...) logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions and using this model theory to show which bridge principles are implied by epistemic norms that we have independent reason to accept, for example, theknowledge normand thetruth norm. We propose a preliminary theory of the interaction between logical, doxastic, epistemic and deontic notions that has among its commitments bridge principles expressing how logic is normative for belief. We also show how our framework suggests that logic is exceptionally normative. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the important semantic components involved in analogy in hopes of providing an epistemic ground for predicating names of God analogously. To this task, I address a semantic/epistemic problem, which concludes that the doctrine of analogy lacks epistemological grounding insofar as it presupposes a prior understanding of God in order to sufficiently alter a given concept to be proportionate to God. In hopes of avoiding this conclusion, I introduce Aquinas’s specifically semantic aspects that (...) follow after the real distinction between a thing’s esse and its essence or form in the context of analogy and show that the ratio of a term can be altered in a way proportionate to a consideration of the mode of being of God. (shrink)

This paper discusses the normative structure of principles that require belief-revision in the face of disagreement, the role of self-trust in our epistemic lives, and the tensions that arise between the two. Section 2 argues that revisionary principles of disagreement share a general normative structure such that they prohibit continued reliance upon the practices via which one came to hold the beliefs under dispute. Section 3 describes an affective mode of epistemic self-trust that can be characterised (...) as one’s having an attitude of optimism about the reliability of the practices via which one forms beliefs. The availability of affective self-trust is crucial to being able to rationally resist doubts about those practices. However, as argued in the final section of the paper, following revisionary principles of disagreement can render such trust psychologically unavailable. Consequently, attempts to follow such principles can have doxastic consequences that predictably exceed their normative implications. (shrink)

How should we understand validity? A standard way to characterize validity is in terms of the preservation of truth (or truth in a model). But there are several problems facing such characterizations. An alternative approach is to characterize validity epistemically, for instance in terms of the preservation of an epistemic status. In this paper, I raise a problem for such views. First, I argue that if the relevant epistemic status is factive, such as being in a position to (...) know or having conclusive evidence for, then the account runs into trouble if we endorse certain familiar logical principles. Second, I argue that if the relevant epistemic status is non-factive, such as is rationally committed to or has justification for believing, then a similar problem arises if we endorse the logical principles as well as a sufficiently strong epistemic “level-bridging” principle. Finally, I argue that an analogous problem arises for the most natural characterization of validity in terms of rational credence. (shrink)

Consequentialist positions in philosophy spell out normative notions by recourse to final aims. Hedonistic versions of ETHICAL consequentialism spell out what is MORALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. Veritistic versions of EPISTEMIC consequentialism spell out what is EPISTEMICALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing the number of true beliefs and decreasing the number of false ones. Even though these theories are in many respects structurally analogous, there are also interesting disanalogies. (...) For example, popular versions of epistemic consequentialism implicitly endorse the truth-indication principle (which claims that a belief is epistemically justified only if there are factors indicating that the belief itself is true), whereas popular versions of ethical consequentialism do not subscribe to an analogous pleasure-indicating principle (which claims that an act is morally justified only if there are factors indicating that performing the act itself is pleasurable). In a first step I will argue that this difference rests on the fact that plausible versions of epistemic consequentialism have to meet certain constraints, which versions of ethical consequentialism do not have to satisfy. As these constraints can be easily met by incorporating the truth-indication principle, epistemic consequentialists tend to subscribe to it. In a second step I will investigate whether the identified constraints can also be met independent from the truth-indication principle. Are there plausible versions of veritistic epistemic consequentialism that reject the principle, thereby allowing that some beliefs can be epistemically justified even though no factors speak in favor of their truth? Building on ideas put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Crispin Wright, and others, I will answer this question affirmatively. (shrink)

Epistemic injustice is injustice to a person qua knower. In one form of this phenomenon a speaker’s testimony is denied credence in a way that wrongs them. I argue that the received definition of this testimonial injustice relies too heavily on epistemic criteria that cannot explain why the moral concept of injustice should be invoked. I give an account of the nature of the wrong of epistemic injustice that has it depend not on the accuracy of judgments (...) that are used or made in the process of deciding whether to listen to or trust a speaker, but on whether the basis of the decision about a speaker is their reliability or their identity, and the account explains why the latter is a moral wrong. A key difference between the two accounts is how they classify the use of true statistical generalizations connecting identity and reliability. The received view implies that this cannot be an injustice, while the view proposed here implies that it can. As such the new view appears to imply a conflict between moral and epistemic obligations: it is morally wrong to use true statistical generalizations in certain contexts, yet they are part of our evidence, and we are epistemically obligated to take all of our evidence into account. I reconcile these two thoughts without adopting the currently popular view that a belief’s being morally wrong makes it epistemically unjustified, and I argue that following the principle of total evidence encourages epistemic justice rather than thwarting it. (shrink)

This paper evaluates a number of closure principles (for both knowledge and justification) that have appeared in the literature. Counterexamples are presented to all but one of these principles, which is conceded to be true but trivially so. It is argued that a consequence of the failure of these closure principles is that certain projects of doxastic logic are doomed, and that doxastic logic is of dubious merit for epistemologists interested in actual knowers in the actual world.

Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance shows how a strongly internalist conception of justification can be derived from a strongly externalist conception of knowledge, given an identification of justification with second-order ignorance and a set of structural principles concerning knowing and being in a position to know. Among these principles is an epistemic analogue of the Geach modal schema which states that one is always in a position to know that one doesn’t know p or in a position (...) to know that one doesn’t know not-p. Even suitably refined, the principle faces a range of counterexamples in which it misleadingly and persistently seems to one that one knows whether p without it seeming to one that one knows p nor that one knows not-p. These cases also threaten the book’s case for the luminosity of second-order ignorance, which is in turn central to its derivation of strongly internalist principles of justification. (shrink)

칸트의 의무 · 능력 원리에 따르면, 의무는 능력을 함축한다. 다시 말해 우리가 어떤 행위를 해야 하는 의무가 있다는 것은 우리가 그 행위를 할 수 있음을 함축한다. 이 원리는 매우 오랫동안 당연한 것으로 간주되어 왔다. 그렇지만 최근 이 원리는 철학자들 사이에 큰 논란거리이다. 대표적으로 라이언과 펠드먼에 따르면 이 원리는 거짓이다. 이 논문에서 필자는 의무 · 능력 원리를 책임의 면제조건과 관련하여 이해함으로써 이 원리에 대해 지금껏 제기돼 온 여러 비판들을 물리칠 수 있음을 주장한다. 또한 올스턴의 반의지주의 논변이 옳지 않는 이유가, 라이언과 펠드먼의 (...) 주장과 달리 의무 · 능력 원리가 거짓이기 때문이 아님을 주장한다. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia article about epistemic closure principles. The article explains what they are, their various philosophical uses, how they are argued for or against, and provides an overview of the related literature.

The paper addresses charges of risk and loss aversion as well as of irrationality directed against the precautionary principle, by providing an epistemic analysis of its specific role in the safety law system. In particular, I contend that: 1) risk aversion is not a form of irrational or biased behaviour; 2) both risk and loss aversion regard the form of the utility function, whereas PP rather regards the information on which to base the decision; 3) thus PP has formally (...) nothing to do with risk or loss aversion but rather with risk awareness; 4) PP removes a fictional construct in the legal system, according to which any hazard should be ignored and denied until it is scientifically proven; 5) the quandary originates in the tension between current methods of evidence evaluation, and the logic underlying PP which demands for a probabilistic epistemology. (shrink)

Most of us think we can always enlarge our knowledge base by accepting things that are entailed by (or logically implied by) things we know. The set of things we know is closed under entailment (or under deduction or logical implication), which means that we know that a given claim is true upon recognizing, and accepting thereby, that it follows from what we know. However, some theorists deny that knowledge is closed under entailment, and the issue remains controversial. The arguments (...) against closure include the following. (shrink)

According to the unrestricted version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), every truth has an explanation. I argue that there is defeasible methodological justification for belief in an unrestricted PSR. The argument is based on considerations about our cognitive limitations. It is possible that our cognitive limitations prevent us from even recognizing the explanatorily open character of some propositions we can now represent: the fact that these propositions are explicable in the first place. If this is the case, then (...) a proper recognition of our limitations and a standing goal of reasoning to attain complete explanatory knowledge justify the adoption of an unrestricted PSR. (shrink)

Jim Joyce has presented an argument for Probabilism based on considerations of epistemic utility [Joyce, 1998]. In a recent paper, I adapted this argument to give an argument for Probablism and the Principal Principle based on similar considerations [Pettigrew, 2012]. Joyce’s argument assumes that a credence in a true proposition is better the closer it is to maximal credence, whilst a credence in a false proposition is better the closer it is to minimal credence. By contrast, my argument in (...) that paper assumed (roughly) that a credence in a proposition is better the closer it is to the objective chance of that proposition. In this paper, I present an epistemic utility argument for Probabilism and the Principal Principle that retains Joyce’s assumption rather than the alternative I endorsed in the earlier paper. I argue that this results in a superior argument for these norms. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to undermine G.A. Cohen ’s polemical use of a metaethical claim he makes in his article, ‘ Facts and Principles’, by arguing that that use requires an unsustainable equivocation between epistemic and logical grounding. I begin by distinguishing three theses that Cohen has offered during the course of his critique of Rawls and contractualism more generally, the foundationalism about grounding thesis, the justice as non-regulative thesis, and the justice as all-encompassing thesis, and briefly (...) argue that they are analytically independent of each other. I then offer an outline of the foundationalism about grounding thesis, characterising it, as Cohen does, as a demand of logic. That thesis claims that whenever a normative principle is dependent on a fact, it is so dependent in virtue of some other principle. I then argue that although this is true as a matter of logic, it, as Cohen admits, cannot be true of actual justifications, since logic cannot tell us anything about the truth as opposed to the validity of arguments. Facts about a justification cannot then be decisive for whether or not a given argument violates the foundationalism about grounding thesis. As long as, independently of actual justifications, theorists can point to plausible logically grounding principles, as I argue contractualists can, Cohen ’s thesis lacks critical bite. (shrink)

A naturalistic impulse has taken speculative analytic metaphysics in its critical sights. Importantly, the claim that it is desirable or requisite to give metaphysics scientific moorings rests on underlying epistemological assumptions or principles. If the naturalistic impulse toward metaphysics is to be well-founded and its prescriptions to have normative force, those assumptions or principles should be spelled out and justified. In short, advocates of naturalized or scientific metaphysics require epistemic infrastructure. This paper begins to supply it. The (...) author first sketches her conception of suitably naturalized or scientific metaphysics. She then lays out a number of candidate epistemic principles centring around the notion of theoretical constraint. The author offers several arguments for the principles, based on statistical likeliness, agreement, falsity avoidance, and methodological efficiency and inefficiency. Finally, she shows how scientific metaphysics satisfies the epistemic principles and is therefore preferable to its traditional rivals. (shrink)

The debate between Habermas and Rawls that took place in 1990s concerned how philosophy can justify the principles of justice under the conditions of pluralism of different and irreconcilable moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines. The context of the debate was mainly Rawls’ Political Liberalism and Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms as well. This paper argues that a wider geo-cultural perspective is pertinent in order to better comprehend the different justification strategies in Habermas and Rawls, concerning the principle of justice. (...) This goes for their different geo-cultural experiences and presuppositions – in short, Rawls living in a self-confident North America in the post-war period versus Habermas’ German experience of civilization breakdown. However, it might also be relevant for the assessment of these two strategies in our time, faced with new kinds of geo-political differences and conflicts. (shrink)

Epistemic rationality is typically taken to be immodest at least in this sense: a rational epistemic state should always take itself to be doing at least as well, epistemically and by its own light, than any alternative epistemic state. If epistemic states are probability functions and their alternatives are other probability functions defined over the same collection of proposition, we can capture the relevant sense of immodesty by claiming that epistemic utility functions are (strictly) proper. (...) In this paper I examine what happens if we allow for the alternatives to an epistemic state to include probability functions with different domains. I first prove an impossibility result: on minimal assumptions, I show that there is no way of vindicating strong immodesty principles to the effect that any probability function should take itself to be doing at least as well than any alternative probability function, regardless of its domain. I then consider alternative, weaker generalizations of the traditional immodesty principle and prove some characterization results for some classes of epistemic utility functions satisfying each of the relevant principles. (shrink)

The so-called debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls concentrated mainly on the latter’s political liberalism. It dealt with the many aspects of Rawls’s philosophical project. In this article, I focus only on one of them, namely the epistemic or cognitivistic nature of principles of justice. The first part provides an overview of the debate, while the second part aims to show that Habermas has not misinterpreted Rawls’s position. I argue that Habermas rightly considers Rawls’s conception of justice (...) as a moral one. In the last part, I discuss two key questions raised by Habermas. The first concerns the relation between justification and acceptance of the principles of justice. The second concerns the relation between two validity terms: truth and reasonableness. (shrink)