Epistemology's search for significance (original) (raw)
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Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification
2017
Endriss Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification 2 [J]ustification is primarily a status which knowledge can confer on beliefs that look good in its light without themselves amounting to knowledge. Timothy Williamson(2000),p. 9. 0. BACKGROUND Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. 1 And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition: (i) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's evidence for (i) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (i) implies: (ii) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Let us further suppose that Smith sees the implication from (i) to (ii) and accepts (ii) on the grounds of (i), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (ii) is true. But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (ii) is then true, though proposition (i), from which Smith inferred (ii), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (ii) is true, Smith believes that (ii) is true, and Smith is justified in believing that (ii) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (ii) is true; for (ii) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in 1 The following case study is taken directly from Edmund Gettier's (1963/2008) "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Some minor changes have been made to remove elements of the original language that are unnecessary for this paper. Endriss Justify This! The Roles of Epistemic Justification
Are Epistemic Reasons Instrumental?
In a recent article (2011), Steglich-Petersen claims to be able to provide a teleological account of the nature of epistemic reasons which (i) avoids the standard objections to this kind of approach and (ii) is compatible with the evidentialist claim that epistemic reasons always trump non-epistemic reasons (assuming there are such reasons). I argue that his proposal is unable to do justice to the idea that epistemic reasons are constituted by the evidence, and more generally, that it is incoherent to hold simultaneously that epistemic reasons are instrumental, that believing the true and not believing the false is what has epistemic value and that epistemic reasons are evidential in nature.
The epistemic significance of non-epistemic factors: an introduction
Synthese
We constantly assess each other's epistemic positions. We attempt to distinguish valuable from worthless information, reliable from unreliable informants, etc. Without established social practices of epistemic evaluations we could not navigate the flood of information we are exposed to every day in order to perform essential selections of valiable information. Yet the way we epistemically evaluate each other, ascribe or deny knowledge, who we deem knowledgeable or ignorant, and whom we refer to as an expert or a layman also crucially shape our epistemic milieu and the structure of our society. Epistemic asymmetry often results in and reflects social asymmetry; higher epistemic appraisal often increases social standing. Also, epistemic evaluations such as knowledge ascriptions are commonly performed against the background of certain epistemic and non-epistemic (e.g., practical) concerns and interests. Consequently, epistemic and non-epistemic factors interact in guiding our epistemic practice. To advance our understanding of how they do so is not only a worthwhile project from an epistemological point of view but can be expected to have repercussions on decision making, in debates within political and social theory as well as within ethics, and help us understand and evaluate how we act and even how to act. Moreover, it might shed light on the perennial question of how theoretical and practical rationality relate to one another. A much-discussed question in recent debates on knowledge ascriptions is the question of whether-and if so, how-epistemic standards (standards of how much it takes to count as knowing or as a knower) are influenced by, and/or contextually vary with, non-epistemic factors such as stakes, interests, aims, etc., and whether this in turn affects the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions or only their assertibility (or sayability) conditions. This has been a main point of contention between contextualists, invariantists and relativists (of various brands) concerning knowledge acsriptions (cf.,
On Divorcing the Rational and the Justified in Epistemology
Many epistemologists treat rationality and justi cation as the same thing. Those who don't lack detailed accounts of the di erence, leading their opponents to suspect that the distinction is an ad hoc attempt to safeguard their theories of justi cation. In this paper, I o er a new and detailed account of the distinction. The account is inspired by no particular views in epistemology, but rather by insights from the literature on reasons and rationality outside of epistemology. Speci cally, it turns on a version of the familiar distinction in meta-ethics between possessing apparent normative reasons (which may be merely apparent) and possessing objective normative reasons. The paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I discuss the history of indi erence to the distinction between rationality and justi cation in epistemology and the striking contrast with meta-ethics. I introduce the distinction between apparent reasons and possessed objective reasons in §2 and provide a deeper basis for it in §3. I explain how the ideas extend to epistemology in §4 and explore the upshots for some central issues in §5.
lecture in Conference The Explantion of human Action, Lisboa 2000, and in ECAP 2002, Lund published in Portugese in « Poderào Razoes Epistemicas Mover-nos? », in J. Saagua, ed. A Explicaçào da Interpreçào Humana , Colibri, Lisboa, 2005 71-84
The Death of Epistemology: A Premature Burial
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1981
is alivc and well and living in Miami, among other places. This despite premature obituaries from Princeton, and derivatively from New Haven. Richard Rorty and Michael Williams, a student of Rorty, in books recently published,' argue that epistemology, as conceived at least since Descartes, is a useless enterprise doomed to failure because o f the incoherence o f its fundamental prob lem. Williams' book is the more accessible. In light of the boldness of its theses, I want in this paper to examine several arguments put forward by Williams in support of his conclusion. 1 want to see whether these arguments are sufficient for their lethal task; and whether what is offered in place o f the defunct discipline avoids the problems supposed insuperable for it, whether indeed what is offered is not simply a more vulnerable epistemological theory. Williams identifies epistemology with what is normally considered one type of epis temological theory: a foundational view of empirical knowledge which appeals to a certain class of perceptual beliefs as basic. He (emotively?) lables this form of epistemic system 'phenomenalism,' thus defining both too broadly and too narrowly for apparent rhetorical purposes. He views epistemological theories of this form as reactions to radical skeptical challenges taken seriously. Radical skepticism questions whether any of our beliefs can be rationally justified; it subjects all our beliefs at once to skeptical doubt. If this challenge is taken seriously, a foundationalist view, which seeks intrinsically credible or immediately or self-justified beliefs, in relation to which other empirical beliefs may be justified, is the natural response according to Williams. He argues that all attempts to provide answers to the radical skeptic are doomed to failure. He attacks both the notion of epistemological foundations and the attempt to move from these foundatons to the justification o f beliefs about physical objects. The moral he draws is that the skeptic is not to be taken seriously, indeed that his doubts are incoherent. A relaxed coherentist concept of justification then recommends itself, but not one to be confused with traditional epistemological theories as reactions to skeptical doubts. This paper will evaluate each of these steps in the argument.