Skepticism and Epistemic Logic

This essay attempts to implement epistemic logic through a non-classical inference relation. Given that relation, an account of '(the individual) a knows that A' is constructed as an unfamiliar non-normal modal logic. One advantage to this approach is a new analysis of the skeptical argument.     

The Epistemic Sense of the Pedigree Thesis

Jules Coleman has shown that positivism's pedigree thesis has a semantic sense and an epistemic sense. The semantic sense states the conditions a proposition must satisfy in order to be law. The epistemic sense constitutes a standard that can be used to identify the community's law. In this article, I argue the epistemic sense is considerably more modest than has often been supposed. At most, it provides a means for conclusively identifying those legislative utterances that give rise to statutory law. Accordingly, it is false that the pedigree thesis provides a test for deciding even questions of settled law.     

Skepticism and elegance: problems for the abductivist reply to Cartesian skepticism

Some philosophers argue that we are justified in rejecting skepticism because it is explanatorily inferior to more commonsense hypotheses about the world. Focusing on the work of Jonathan Vogel, I show that this “abductivist” or “inference to the best explanation” response rests on an impoverished explanatory framework which ignores the explanatory gap between an object's having certain properties and its appearing to have those properties. Once this gap is appreciated, I argue, the abductivist strategy is defeated.     

Why We Need Skepticism in Argument: Skeptical Engagement as a Requirement for Epistemic Justice

The Argumentative Adversariality debate is over the question of whether argument must be adversarial. A particular locus of this debate is on skeptical challenges in critical dialogue. The Default Skeptical Stance (DSS) in argument is a practical manifestation of argumentative adversariality. Views about the on-the-ground value of the DSS vary. On one hand, in “The Social & Political Limitations of Philosophy” (2012), Phyllis Rooney argues that the DSS leads to epistemic injustice. On the other, Allan Hazlett in his recent piece “Critical Injustice” (2020) argues for the virtues of the skeptical stance in terms of epistemic justice. Both Rooney and Hazlett are concerned with the role skeptical engagement plays in argument, but they assign opposite values to it. In this essay, I review Rooney and Hazlett’s examples and (i) show that the epistemic dysfunction in the two scholar’s going cases is one and the same, and (ii) argue that the cause of both is a lack of proper skeptical engagement. Skeptical engagement is a requirement for epistemic justice. Together (i) and (ii) constitute an initial defense of the Adversarialist position against objections regarding the social epistemic risk of the skeptical stance.

     

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 Intuitions and Epistemic Contextualism

In this paper I examine the way appeals to pretheoretic intuition are used to support epistemological theses in general and the thesis of epistemic contextualism in particular. After outlining the sceptical puzzle and the contextualist's resolution of that puzzle, I explore the question of whether this solution fits better with our intuitive take on the puzzle than its invariantist rivals. I distinguish two kinds of fit a theory might have with pretheoretic intuitions–accommodation and explanation, and consider whether achieving either kind of fit would be a virtue for a theory. I then examine how contextualism could best claim to accommodate and explain our intuitions, building the best case that 1 can for contextualism, but concluding that there is no reason to accept contextualism either in the way it accommodates nor the way it explains our intuitions about the sceptical puzzle.     

Dao and Skepticism

The Zhuangzi raises skeptical problems it does not solve. At best, it asserts that solutions are unnecessary but does not prove it. This is not a fault of the text or its author; it is the logical consequence of the arguments themselves. Philosophically speaking, The Zhuangzi raises doubts, nothing more. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and what we are supposed to do about it, is something we are left to decide for ourselves.     

Epistemic Uniqueness and the Practical Relevance of Epistemic Practices

Philosophia - By taking the practical relevance of coordinated epistemic standards into account, Dogramaci and Horowitz (Philosophical Issues, 26(1), 130–147, 2016) as well as Greco and...     

Epistemic Side Constraints and the Structure of Epistemic Normativity

In this paper, I develop the notion of an epistemic side constraint in order to overcome one of the main challenges to a goal‐based approach to the structure of epistemic normativity. I argue that the rationale for such side constraints can be found in the work of John Locke and that his argument is best understood as the epistemic analog to David Gauthier's argument as to the rationality of being moral.     

Skepticism and justification

Synthese - This paper discusses the skeptical argument presented by Keith Lehrer in his paper ‘Why Not Scepticism?’. It is argued that Lehrer's argument depends on unacceptable...