Moore's Paradox and Epistemic Norms

We shall evaluate two strategies for motivating the view that knowledge is the norm of belief. The first draws on observations concerning belief's aim and the parallels between belief and assertion. The second appeals to observations concerning Moore's Paradox. Neither of these strategies gives us good reason to accept the knowledge account. The considerations offered in support of this account motivate only the weaker account on which truth is the fundamental norm of belief.     

Moore's Paradox And Self-Ascribed Belief

Moore's paradox arises from the logicaloddity of sentences of the form`P and I do not believe that P'or `P and I believe that not-P'. Thiskind of sentence is logically peculiarbecause it is absurd to assert it, although it isnot a logical contradiction. In this paperI offer a new proposal. I argue that Moore's paradox arises because there is a defaultprocedure for evaluating a self-ascribed belief sentence and one is presumptivelyjustified in believing that one believes a sentence when one sincerely assents to it.     

Martin Bucers Deutsche Schriften: Current Work,Future Projects

Abstract

The edition of Martin Bucer's German writings has often puzzled its readers by the varying frequency with which its volumes have been published as well as by the order in which these have been published. The very first volume of the edition went to press in 1960.¹ Volume Two, which appeared in 1962,² was followed in 1964 not by Volume Three but by Volume Seven.³ Whereas these volumes had been produced in intervals of two years, it took a total of 14 years for Volumes Three, Four and Five⁴ to be edited, the latter of which was printed in 1978. The next volume to appear carried the number 17,⁵ thus skipping the numbers of 11 volumes which had yet to be edited. The Sixth Volume, which began appearing in 1984, was edited in three separate instalments,⁶ the last of which was printed in 1988. Each one of these instalments could be considered a volume in its own right. Then, in 1995, the first part of Volume Nine was published, also a volume in its own right with the number 9,1,⁷ the first part of Volume 11 in 1999,⁸ and Volume Ten went to press in March of 2001.⁹ Thus a total of thirteen volumes have been produced in a matter of fourty-one years, an average of somewhat over three years per volume. This statistic obscures the sometimes significant hiatuses between the appearances of certain volumes, the longest of which included six years between Volumes Three and Four, and even seven years between Volumes 6,1 and 9,1.

Anybody leafing through the first three volumes and comparing them will immediately note that they neatly fit within a broader chronological continuum. Volume One bears the title Early writings: 1520 to 1524,¹⁰ Volume Two Writings of the years 1524 to 1528,¹¹ and Volume Seven is entitled Writings of the years 1538 to 1539.¹² These titles suggest a strictly chronological conception of the entire edition. On the other hand, the last volume to appear, number Ten, carries a thematic title: Writings on marriage and matrimonial law¹³ and includes writings ranging all the way from 1524 to 1543. It is therefore obvious that a major change in the conception of the edition as a whole has taken place between those early volumes and the last one.     

Moore's paradox

G. E. Moore famously noted that saying ‘I went to the movies, but I don't believe it’ is absurd, while saying ‘I went to the movies, but he doesn't believe it’ is not in the least absurd. The problem is to explain this fact without supposing that the semantic contribution of ‘believes’ changes across first-person and third-person uses, and without making the absurdity out to be merely pragmatic. We offer a new solution to the paradox. Our solution is that the truth conditions of any moorean utterance contradict its accuracy conditions. Thus we diagnose a contradiction in how the moorean utterance represents things as being; so we can do justice to the intuition that a Moore-paradoxical utterance is in some way senseless, even if we know what proposition it expresses.     

Epistemic Principles and Epistemic Circularity

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.     

Epistemic Contextualism

Any contextualist approach to knowledge has to provide a plausible definition of the concept of context and spell out the mechanisms of context changes. Since it is the dynamics of context change that carry the main weight of the contextualist position, not every mechanism will be capable of filling that role. In particular, I argue that one class of mechanisms that is most popularly held to account for context changes, namely those that arise out of shifts of conversational parameters in discourses involving knowledge claims, are not suited to the job because they cannot account for the genuinely epistemic nature of the context shift. A form of epistemic contextualism that defines the context through the structure of our epistemic projects is suggested. Context changes in this account are linked to changes in the background assumptions operative in our epistemic projects and the methods used to carry out our inquiries.     

Epistemic Pluralism

In this paper epistemic pluralism concerning knowledge is taken to be the claim that very different facts may constitute knowledge. The paper argues for pluralism by arguing that very different facts can constitute the knowledge-making links between beliefs and facts. If pluralism is right, we need not anxiously seek a unified account of the links between beliefs and facts that partly constitute knowledge in different cases of knowledge. The paper argues that no good reasons have been put forward in favour of believing in a unified maker of knowledge. It then appeals to the role of knowledge in order to argue that we have positive reason to embrace pluralism.     

“物理对象”到底存在不存在?——维特根斯坦评论摩尔对怀疑主义者的反驳

摩尔用"我知道这是一只手"来反驳怀疑主义者对外在物理对象存在的怀疑,这在哲学史上是一件饶有趣味的事情,更加有趣的是维特根斯坦对这件事情的评论和处理,它们集中在维特根斯坦最后阶段的著作——《论确定性》中。维特根斯坦对摩尔反驳的前提、结论,以及摩尔与怀疑主义者的共同预设进行了细致的剖析,澄清了人们在搞哲学的时候对"怀疑"和"知道"的误用,这和他希望把词语从形而上学的"使用"下降到日常使用的日常语言分析方法是完全一致的。     

Self-Knowledge, Rationality and Moore's Paradox

I offer a model of self-knowledge that provides a solution to Moore's paradox. First, I distinguish two versions of the paradox and I discuss two approaches to it, neither of which solves both versions of the paradox. Next, I propose a model of self-knowledge according to which, when I have a certain belief, I form the higher-order belief that I have it on the basis of the very evidence that grounds my first-order belief. Then, I argue that the model in question can account for both versions of Moore's paradox. Moore's paradox, I conclude, tells us something about our conceptions of rationality and self-knowledge. For it teaches us that we take it to be constitutive of being rational that one can have privileged access to one's own mind and it reveals that having privileged access to one's own mind is a matter of forming first-order beliefs and corresponding second-order beliefs on the same basis.