Reason Internalism

Traditional epistemological reflection on our beliefs about the world attempts to proceed without presupposing or ineliminably depending upon any claims about the world. It has been argued that epistemological externalism fails to engage in the right way with the motivations for this project. I argue, however, that epistemological externalism satisfyingly undermines this project. If we accept the thesis that certain conditions other than the truth of one's belief must obtain in the world outside of one's mind in order for one to have knowledge (or justified belief) about the world, then there is no good intellectual motivation for taking up the traditional project. This results stands even if we accept the traditional theses that knowledge requires justified belief and that justified belief requires the ability to provide good reasons for one's belief.     

Innoculi Innocula

In "Innocuous Infallibility," Earl Conee argues that the infallibility to which I argue Internalism is committed, in "An Argument that Internalism Requires Infallibility," is harmless and trivial. I maintain that this overlooks the fact that Internalism makes use of an intuitive notion of 'epistemic twinhood' to drive its position, rather than one antecedently defined with a filled-out notion of 'relevant epistemic circumstances'. Conee is correct that any theory requires, and trivially gets, some sort of infallibility-but it is not trivial that there is a coherent and univocal notion of the sort of relevant circumstances-and so, twinhood and infallibility-behind the Internalist strategy and motivation.     

PRESENTISM, TRUTHMAKERS, AND GOD

The truthmaker objection to presentism (the view that only what exists now exists simpliciter ) is that it lacks sufficient metaphysical resources to ground truths about the past. In this paper I identify five constraints that an adequate presentist response must satisfy. In light of these constraints, I examine and reject responses by Bigelow, Keller, Crisp, and Bourne. Consideration of how these responses fail, however, points toward a proposal that works; one that posits God's memories as truthmakers for truths about the past. I conclude that presentists have, in the truthmaker objection, considerable incentive to endorse theism.     

ASSOCIATIVE ENCODING OF WORDS IN PASSIVE SENTENCES

Subjects were presented with short passive sentences and timed to respond in a recognition test involving a series of single words. Items to be rejected included synonymous associates of critical words and associates which would fit sensibly into the sentence frame. Rejection latencies varied as a function of the position of the critical word in the sentence, the time to reject associates of the logical subject (the final noun in the passive sentences) being much slower than associates of the object.