Referential Intentions: A Response to Buchanan and Peet

Buchanan [2014] argues for a Gricean solution to well-known counterexamples to direct reference theories of content. Peet [2016] develops a way to change the counterexample so that it seems to speak against Buchanan's own proposal. I argue that both theorists fail to notice a significant distinction between the kinds of cases at issue. Those appearing to count against direct reference theory must be described such that speakers have false beliefs about the identity of the object to which they intend to refer, beliefs that appear relevant to the determination of what constitutes communicative success. This suggests, further, that cases of this sort do not provide a basis for robust generalizations about singular reference.     

The Epistemic Criterion: A Response to Michael Hand

This article is a response to Michael Hand’s critique in this issue of my response to his use of the epistemic criterion as the sole means for identifying whether or not an issue should be identified as controversial. I argue that he has misunderstood my intention in suggesting that I was seeking to replace the epistemic criterion. Rather my purpose was to challenge his over-confidence in the decisiveness of reason and to temper his use of the epistemic criterion by suggesting it needed to embrace ethical concerns.     

Epistemic Norms and Democracy: a Response to Talisse

John Rawls argued that democracy must be justifiable to all citizens; otherwise, a democratic society is oppressive to some. In A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy ( 2007 ), Robert B. Talisse attempts to meet the Rawlsian challenge by drawing from Charles S. Peirce's pragmatism. This article first briefly canvasses the argument of Talisse's book and then criticizes its key premise concerning (normative) reasons for belief by offering a competing reading of Peirce's “The Fixation of Belief” ( 1877 ). It then proceeds to argue that Talisse's argument faces a dilemma: his proposal of epistemic perfectionism either is substantive and can be reasonably disagreed about or is minimal but insufficient to ground a democratic society. Consequently, it suggests that the Rawlsian challenge can only be solved by abandoning Rawls's own notion of reasonableness, and that an interesting alternative notion of reasons can be derived from Peirce's “Fixation.”     

Philosophy, Social Institutions, and the Ethics of Belief: A Response to Buchanan

abstract   First, Allen Buchanan, in the version of his paper entitled 'Philosophy and public policy: a role for social moral epistemology' that he presented at the workshop on 'Philosophy and Public Policy' held at the British Academy in London on March 8^th 2008, seems to imply that professional, academic philosophers have had little impact upon public policy. I mention an area where it can be argued in response that they have had a more benign, as well as a more widespread, influence on society than Buchanan acknowledges in that version of his paper: in legislation concerning animal welfare. Second, I question whether or not the liberal commitment to freedom of religion is compatible with the ethics of belief that Buchanan appears to advocate .     

Constructive Empiricism and Epistemic Modesty: Response to van Fraassen and Monton

Bas van Fraassen claims that constructive empiricism strikes a balance between the empiricist’s commitments to epistemic modesty – that one’s opinion should extend no further beyond the deliverances of experience than is necessary – and to the rationality of science. In “Should the Empiricist be a Constructive Empiricist?” I argued that if the constructive empiricist follows through on her commitment to epistemic modesty she will find herself adopting a much more extreme position than van Fraassen suggests. Van Fraassen and Bradley Monton have recently responded. My purpose here is to contest their response. The goal is not merely the rebuttal of a rebuttal; there is a lesson to learn concerning the realist/anti-realist dialectic generated by van Fraassen’s view.     

Epistemic and Ethical Constraints in Personal and Social Constructions: A Response to Raskin and Debany

In response to Raskin and Debany's lead article (this issue Raskin, J. D., &; Debany, A. E. (this issue). The inescapability of ethics and the impossibility of “anything goes”: A constructivist model of ethical meaning making. Journal of Constructivist Psychology. (Reprinted from Ethics in action: Dialogue between knowledge and practice, pp. 13–32, by S. Cipolletta &; E. Gius (Eds.), 2012, Milan, Italy: LED) [Google Scholar]), I offer support for their general conclusion that ethical implications are inescapable in relation to any version of constructionism, and concur that the frequent characterization of constructivism as ultimately reducing to a position of “anything goes” is not sustainable. I depart from Raskin and Debany on the question of whether an integrative framework for constructivist positions is possible, especially in relation to questions concerning the ethical dimension. I suggest that the reasons for considering the anything goes charge inappropriate are different for different versions of constructivism, and illustrate with analysis of the ethical dimensions of personal construct theory and social constructionism.     

Epistemic Gradualism and Ordinary Epistemic Practice: Responce to Hetherington

This paper responds to Stephen Hetherington's discussion of my ‘Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?’ (2004). The Infallibilist skeptic holds that in order to know something, one must be able to rule out every possible alternative to the truth of one’s belief. This requirement is false. In this paper I first clarify this requirement’s relation to our ordinary practice. I then turn to a more fundamental issue. The Infallibilist holds – along with many non-skeptical epistemologists – that Infallibility is epistemically superior to the epistemic position attained when we have (what we ordinarily call) knowledge. This is false, too, as our ordinary practices show. Ordinary epistemic appraisal does not concern our standing on a scale of evaluation which has Infallibility at its apex. For this reason, even if gradualism is correct, it does not show how Infallibilist skepticism can arise out of our ordinary practice.     

Vector Reliability: A new Approach to Epistemic Justification

Critics of reliability theories of epistemic justificationoften claim that the `generality problem' is an insurmountabledifficulty for such theories. The generality problem is theproblem of specifying the level of generality at which abelief-forming process is to be described for the purposeof assessing its reliability. This problem is not asintractable as it seems. There are illuminating solutionsto analogous problems in the ethics literature. Reliabilistsought to attend to utilitarian approaches to choices betweeninfinite utility streams; they also ought to attend towelfarist approaches to social choice situations that donot demand full aggregation of individual welfares.These analogies suggest that the traditional `single number'approach to reliability is misguided. I argue that a newapproach – the `vector reliability' approach – is preferable.Vector reliability theories associate target beliefs withreliability vectors – that is, structured collections ofreliability numbers – and construct criteria of epistemicjustification that appeal to these vectors. The bulk of thetheoretical labor involved in a reliability account of epistemicjustification is thus transferred from picking a uniquereliability number to constructing a plausible criterionof epistemic justification.     

Epistemic Instrumentalism and Reasons for Belief: A Reply to Tom Kelly's "Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique"

Tom Kelly argues that instrumentalist accounts of epistemic rationality fail because what a person has reason to believe does not depend upon the content of his or her goals. However, his argument fails to distinguish questions about what the evidence supports from questions about what a person ought to believe . Once these are distinguished, the instrumentalist can avoid Kelly's objections. The paper concludes by sketching what I take to be the most defensible version of the instrumentalist view.     

Epistemic Emotions and Co-inquiry: A Situated Approach

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures.

     

The Epistemic Status of Auxiliary Hypotheses: A Reply to Douven

I have previously argued that anti-realism cannot use the claim that theories have empirically equivalent rivals (EE) to establish that theories are underdetermined by evidence (UD). Douven objects that the auxiliary hypotheses needed to generate observational equivalence need not as I claimed be themselves underdetermined if (EE) is true, because they may be either compatible with observation or acceptable in the constructive-empiricist sense. I reply that these conditions are not strong enough to establish (EE): the auxiliaries have to be epistemically warranted if they are to fix a theory's observational commitments unambiguously. The support they require need not presuppose their respective observational consequences, because there are more holistic sources of warrant.     

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.