R.M. FARLEY ABSTRACT: In A Priori Justification, Albert Casullo argues that extant attempts to explicate experiential justification—by stipulation, introspection, conceptual analysis, thought experimentation, and/or appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases—are unsuccessful. He draws the following conclusion: “armchair methods” such as these are inadequate to the task. Instead, empirical methods should be used to investigate the distinction between experiential and non-experiential …
Read More »JUSTIFIED BY THOUGHT ALONE (pages 195-208)
Andrei MĂRĂŞOIU ABSTRACT: The new rationalists – BonJour and Bealer – have characterized one type of a priori justification as based on intellectual intuitions or seemings. I argue that they are mistaken in thinking that intellectual intuitions can provide a priori justification. Suppose that the proposition that a surface cannot be red and green all over strikes you as true. …
Read More »DOES SUPPOSITIONAL REASONING SOLVE THE BOOTSTRAPPING PROBLEM? (pages 351-363)
James VAN CLEVE ABSTRACT: 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 …
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