Volume VII, Issue 2, 2016

Volume VII, Issue 2, June, 2016

EXCUSING PROSPECTIVE AGENTS (pages 119-128)

Cameron BOULT ABSTRACT: Blameless norm violation in young children is an underexplored phenomenon in epistemology. An understanding of it is important for accounting for the full range of normative standings at issue in debates about epistemic norms, and the internalism-externalism debate generally. More specifically, it is important for proponents of factive epistemic norms. I examine this phenomenon and put forward a …

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TRACKING INFERENCES IS NOT ENOUGH: THE GIVEN AS TIE-BREAKER (pages 129-135)

Marc CHAMPAGNE ABSTRACT: Most inferentialists hope to bypass givenness by tracking the conditionals claimants are implicitly committed to. I argue that this approach is underdetermined because one can always construct parallel trees of conditionals. I illustrate this using the Müller-Lyer illusion and touching a table. In the former case, the lines are either even or uneven; in the latter case, a …

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IS THERE ROOM FOR JUSTIFIED BELIEFS WITHOUT EVIDENCE? A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF EPISTEMIC EVIDENTIALISM (pages 137-152)

Domingos FARIA ABSTRACT: In the first section of this paper I present epistemic evidentialism and, in the following two sections, I discuss that view with counterexamples. I shall defend that adequately supporting evidence is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for epistemic justification. Although we need epistemic elements other than evidence in order to have epistemic justification, there can be …

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EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM: INTER-CONTEXTUALITY IN THE PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION (pages 153-169)

Rodrigo LAERA ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a view on epistemic relativism that arises from the problem of the criterion, keeping in consideration that the assessment of criterion standards always occurs in a certain context. The main idea is that the epistemic value of the assertion “S knows that p” depends not only on the criterion adopted within an epistemic framework and …

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MODAL RATIONALISM AND THE OBJECTION FROM THE INSOLVABILITY OF MODAL DISAGREEMENT (pages 171-183)

Mihai RUSU ABSTRACT: The objection from the insolvability of principle-based modal disagreements appears to support the claim that there are no objective modal facts, or at the very least modal facts cannot be accounted for by modal rationalist theories. An idea that resurfaced fairly recently in the literature is that the use of ordinary empirical statements presupposes some prior grasp of …

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PHENOMENAL CONSERVATISM, REFLECTION AND SELF-DEFEAT (pages 187-199)

Julien BEILLARD ABSTRACT: Huemer defends phenomenal conservatism (PC) and also the further claim that belief in any rival theory is self-defeating (SD). Here I construct a dilemma for his position: either PC and SD are incompatible, or belief in PC is itself self-defeating. I take these considerations to suggest a better self-defeat argument for (belief in) PC and a strong form …

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EXPLANATIONISM, SUPER-EXPLANATIONISM, ECCLECTIC EXPLANATIONISM: PERSISTENT PROBLEMS ON BOTH SIDES (pages 201-213)

T. Ryan BYERLY, Kraig MARTIN ABSTRACT: We argue that explanationist views in epistemology continue to face persistent challenges to both their necessity and their sufficiency. This is so despite arguments offered by Kevin McCain in a paper recently published in this journal which attempt to show otherwise. We highlight ways in which McCain’s attempted solutions to problems we had previously raised …

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SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING AND PERCEPTUAL JUSTIFICATION (pages 215-219)

Stewart COHEN ABSTRACT: James Van Cleve raises some objections to my attempt to solve the bootstrapping problem for what I call “basic justification theories.” I argue that given 1 the inference rules endorsed by basic justification theorists, we are a priori (propositionally) justified in believing that perception is reliable. This blocks the bootstrapping result. Download PDF

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REPLY TO ADAMS AND CLARKE (pages 221-225)

Tristan HAZE ABSTRACT: Here I defend two counterexamples to Nozick’s truth-tracking theory of knowledge from an attack on them by Adams and Clarke. With respect to the first counterexample, Adams and Clarke make the error of judging that my belief counts as knowledge. More demonstrably, with respect to the second counterexample they make the error of thinking that, on Nozick’s method-relativized …

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