Meaning and Conversational Impropriety in Sceptical Contexts

According to “disjunctivist neo‐Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is entirely successful. For if a proposition can be known, it can also be claimed to be known. If the latter is not possible, this is not because certain propositions are either “intrinsically” conversationally inappropriate (as Pritchard claims in his book) or else “rationally groundless” (as Pritchard claims in his paper), but rather that we are dealing with something that merely presents us with the appearance of being an epistemic claim.     

A strategy for assessing closure

This paper looks at an argument strategy for assessing the epistemic closure principle. This is the principle that says knowledge is closed under known entailment; or (roughly) if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. The strategy in question looks to the individual conditions on knowledge to see if they are closed. According to one conjecture, if all the individual conditions are closed, then so too is knowledge. I give a deductive argument for this conjecture. According to a second conjecture, if one (or more) condition is not closed, then neither is knowledge. I give an inductive argument for this conjecture. In sum, I defend the strategy by defending the claim that knowledge is closed if, and only if, all the conditions on knowledge are closed. After making my case, I look at what this means for the debate over whether knowledge is closed.     

No Justificatory Closure without Truth

It is well-known that versions of the lottery paradox and of the preface paradox show that the following three principles are jointly inconsistent: (Sufficiency) very probable propositions are justifiably believable; (Conjunction Closure) justified believability is closed under conjunction introduction; (No Contradictions) propositions known to be contradictory are not justifiably believable. This paper shows that there is a hybrid of the lottery and preface paradoxes that does not require Sufficiency to arise, but only Conjunction Closure and No Contradictions; and it argues that, given any plausible solution to this paradox, if one is not ready to deny Conjunction Closure (and analogous consistency principles), then one must endorse the thesis that justified believability is factive.     

论《易经》非占筮记录

自20世纪初古史辨运动兴起,易学界受科学主义思潮影响,多视"经"为卜筮记录,"传"为哲理新创,"经"与"传"必须分别而观,不可以以"经"释"传",亦不可以以"传"解"经"。本文列举九个论点,论证《易记》为政治典册,蕴含义理;《易传》义理之精义即多承继自"经"。《周易》"经""传"关系,一如父母子女之关系。父母之基因为子女所承继,"经"之基因亦为"传"所传承。"经"与"传"固有区别,就像父母子女各具独立人格。我们当然不应混"经""传"为一,但亦不宜认"经""传"为绝无关系之两种文献。