Logos & Episteme

In this paper, I defend Moorean Dogmatism against a novel objection raised by Adam Leite. Leite locates the defectiveness of the Moorean reasoning explicitly not in the failure of the Moorean argument to transmit warrant from its premises to its conclusion but rather in the failure of an epistemic agent to satisfy certain epistemic responsibilities that arise in the course of conscious and deliberate reasoning. I will first show that there exist cases of Moorean reasoning that are not put into jeopardy by the considerations that Leite presents. Second, I will argue that certain commitments of Leite’s concerning the notion of warrant are in tension with his verdict that the Moorean reasoning is defective.

I present two counterexamples to the recently back-in-favour truthtracking account of knowledge: one involving a true belief resting on a counterfactuallyrobust delusion, one involving a true belief acquired alongside a bunch of false beliefs. These counterexamples carry over to a recent modification of the theory due to Rachael Briggs and Daniel Nolan, and seem invulnerable to a recent defence of the theory against known counterexamples, by Fred Adams and Murray Clarke.

One of the philosophical uses of Dedekind’s categoricity theorem for Peano Arithmetic is to provide support for semantic realism. To this end, the logical framework in which the proof of the theorem is conducted becomes highly significant. I examine different proposals regarding these logical frameworks and focus on the philosophical benefits of adopting open-ended schemas in contrast to second order logic as the logical medium of the proof. I investigate Pederson and Rossberg’s critique of the ontological advantages of open-ended arithmetic when it comes to establishing the categoricity of Peano Arithmetic and show that the critique is highly problematic. I argue that Pederson and Rossberg’s ontological criterion deliver the bizarre result that certain first order subsystems of Peano Arithmetic have a second order ontology. As a consequence, the application of the ontological criterion proposed by Pederson and Rossberg assigns a certain type of ontology to a theory, and a different, richer, ontology to one of its subtheories.

Explanationists about epistemic justification hold that justification depends upon explanatory considerations. After a bit of a lull, there has recently been aresurgence of defenses of such views. Despite the plausibility of these defenses, explanationism still faces challenges. Recently, T. Ryan Byerly and Kraig Martin have argued that explanationist views fail to provide either necessary or sufficient conditions for epistemic justification. I argue that Byerly and Martin are mistaken on both accounts.

In a 2002 article Stewart Cohen advances the “bootstrapping problem” for what he calls “basic justification theories,” and in a 2010 followup he offers a solution to the problem, exploiting the idea that suppositional reasoning may be used with defeasible as well as with deductive inference rules. To curtail the form of bootstrapping permitted by basic justification theories, Cohen insists that subjects must know their perceptual faculties are reliable before perception can give them knowledge. But how is such knowledge of reliability to be acquired if not through perception itself? Cohen proposes that such knowledge may be acquired a priori through suppositional reasoning. I argue that his strategy runs afoul of a plausible view about how epistemic principles function; in brief, I argue that one must actually satisfy the antecedent of an epistemic principle, not merely suppose that one does, to acquire any justification by its means – even justification for a merely conditional proposition.

According to one line of thought only propositions can be part of one’s evidence, since only propositions can serve the central functions of our ordinaryconcept of evidence. Ram Neta has challenged this argument. In this paper I respond to Neta’s challenge.

In this paper I defend the view that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient from an important objection due to DanielWhiting, in this journal. Whiting argues that this view fails to deal adequately with a familiar sort of counterexample to analyses of knowledge, fake barn cases. I accept Whiting's conclusion that my earlier paper offered an inadequate treatment of fake barn cases, but defend a new account of basic perceptual reasons that is consistent with the account of knowledge and successfully deals with fake barns.

In this paper, I focus on the disputes arising in regions of discourse in which bare sentences with predicates of personal taste occur. After I introduce, in thefirst section, the distinction between the disputes arising in regions of discourse concerning objective matters of fact and those arising in regions of discourse about subjective matters of personal taste, I present, in the second section, the solutions which the main semantic theories have offered to the puzzle of faultless disagreement. In the third and the fourth section of the paper, I discuss the proposal advocated by truth perspectivalism, according to which the disputes concerning matters of personal taste constitute faultless disagreements. After I present the solution proposed by Kölbel to an argument whose conclusion establishes that no disagreement can be faultless, I show that this solution presents major disadvantages for truth perspectivalism. These disadvantages highlight the fact that the disputes concerning matters of personal taste, as they are construed in truth perspectivalism, do not constitute authentic examples offaultless disagreements, and that the coherence of the semantic program which truth perspectivalism advocates, with regard to sentences from regions of discourse about matters of personal taste, must be put in doubt.

Plantinga argues that cases involving ‘fixed’ beliefs refute the coherentist thesis that a belief’s belonging to a coherent set of beliefs suffices for its havingjustification (warrant). According to Plantinga, a belief cannot be justified if there is a ‘lack of fit’ between it and its subject’s experiences. I defend coherentism by showing that if Plantinga means to claim that any ‘lack of fit’ destroys justification, his argument is obviously false. If he means to claim that significant ‘lack of fit’ destroys justification, his argument suffers a critical lack of support. Either way, Plantinga’s argument fails and coherentism emerges unscathed.

Pierre Duhem is the discoverer of the physics of the Middle Ages. The discovery that there existed a physics of the Middle Ages was a surprise primarily forDuhem himself. This discovery completely changed the way he saw the evolution of physics, bringing him to formulate a complex argument for the growth and continuity of scientific knowledge, which I call the ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ (not to be confused either with what Roger Ariew called the ‘true Duhem thesis’ as opposed to the Quine-Duhem thesis, which he persuasively argued is not Duhem’s, or with the famous ‘Quine-Duhem Thesis’ itself). The ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ consists of five sub-theses (some transcendental in nature, some other causal, factual, or descriptive), which are not independent, as they do not work separately (but only as a system) and do not relate to reality separately (but only simultaneously). The famous and disputed ‘continuity thesis’ is part, as a sub-thesis, from this larger argument. I argue that the ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ wraps up all of Duhem’s discoveries in the history of science and as a whole represents his main contribution to the historiography of science. The ‘Pierre Duhem Thesis’ is the central argument of Pierre Duhem's work as historian of science.

We have recently proposed a diagnosis of what goes wrong in cases of ‘easy-knowledge.’ Erik Wielenberg argues that there are cases of easy knowledge thatour proposal cannot handle. In this note we reply to Wielenberg, arguing that our proposal does indeed handle his cases.

Most of our memories are inferential, so says Sven Bernecker in Memory: A Philosophical Study. I show that his account of inferentially remembering that p is too strong. A revision of the account that avoids the difficulty is proposed. Since inferential memory that p is memory that q (a proposition distinct from p) with an admixture of inference from one’s memory that q and a true thought one has that r, its analysis presupposes an adequate account of the (presumably non-inferential) memory that q. Bernecker’s account of non-inferentially remembering-that is shown to be inadequate. A remedy lies in strengthening the account by requiring the rememberer to have had prima facie justification to believe that q, any defeaters of which were misleading.

Joel Pust has recently challenged the Thomas Reid-inspired argument against the reliability of the a priori defended by Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff,William Alston, and Michael Bergmann. The Reidian argument alleges that the Cartesian insistence on the primacy of a priori rationality and subjective sensoryexperience as the foundations of epistemic justification is unwarranted because the same kind of global skeptical scenario that Cartesians recognize as challenging the legitimacy of perceptual beliefs about the external world also undermine the reliability of a priori rationality. In reply, Pust contends that some a priori propositions are beyond doubt and that fact can be used to support the overall reliability of reason. This paper challenges Pust’s argument. I argue that while Pust successfully undermines a radical skeptical view of reason, he does not refute a more modest skepticism. I conclude with some suggestions for Cartesian a priorists.

Mark Schroeder has recently proposed a new analysis of knowledge. I examine that analysis and show that it fails. More specifically, I show that it faces aproblem all too familiar from the post-Gettier literature, namely, that it is delivers the wrong verdict in fake barn cases.