It is officially Spring Break for us at SMU and while my students party on islands so exclusive their names are unknown to me, I’ll be heading to Oklahoma for the Epistemic Goodness Conference. I’m not jealous, by the way. … Continue reading
I have a question about the epistemic internalism and externalism debate. After the first round of the debate in the 1980s, several philosophers began claiming to be internalists about justification but externalists about knowledge. Although this became a somewhat common … Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about the connection between restrictivism and the equal weight view about rational disagreement. There are different versions of the equal weight view, but the rough idea is that the existence of disagreement has a tendency to undermine … Continue reading
What evidential/motivational support relations do the following four claims (which all seem to be ‘internalist’ claims, in one sense or another) bear to one another? 1. Whether a person is justified in her doxastic attitude towards p (or whether a … Continue reading
Have intuitions, will travel — but not very far this time without your help. Recent work by Peter Klein on benign falsehoods leads to the recognition of conflicting intuitions about testimonial knowledge in a particularly bewildering case for all parties … Continue reading
Some have argued that the generality problem Feldman and Conee raise for reliabilism will plague every theory of justification. I don’t recall the precise nature of these arguments, but I wasn’t convinced. I’m worried, however, even though not convinced. Here’s … Continue reading
While at Brown, a quite interesting issue came up a couple of times, both during one of the sessions and also in converstation, that I thought would be good to pursue here. A common assumption is that what divides epistemologists … Continue reading
In the “Hot Topics” post, a new topic of discussion has begun, and it may be useful to call attention to it in a separate post so that it doesn’t get lost in the other one. It is about the … Continue reading
Suppose, with Boghossian, that we distinguish epistemic rules and principles. Both are conditionals, but rules have imperatival consequents whereas principles are true or false. To each rule, there corresponds a principle: if the rule says “In C, believe p,” the … Continue reading
I was re-reading BonJour’s wonderful classic “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge” and was struck by the following comments, which come right before BonJour presents his cases against externalism: Clairvoyance, the alleged psychic power of perceiving or intuiting the existence and … Continue reading