Volume IX, Issue 2, 2018

David COSS ABSTRACT: Contextualism is the view that the word ‘knows’ is context sensitive. While contextualism developed as a response to skepticism, there’s concern that it’s too easy for skeptics to undermine ordinary knowledge attributions. Once skeptical hypotheses are made salient, the skeptic seems to win. I first outline contextualism and its response to skepticism. I then explicate the resources …

Micah DUGAS ABSTRACT: Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in relativism. Proponents have defended various accounts that seek to model the truth-conditions of certain propositions along the lines of standard possible world semantics. The central challenge for such views has been to explain what advantage they have over contextualist theories with regard to the possibility of disagreement. I …

Tammo LOSSAU ABSTRACT: Epistemological disjunctivists such as Duncan Pritchard claim that in paradigmatic cases of knowledge the rational support for the known propositions is both factive and reflectively accessible. This position faces some problems, including the basis problem – how can our knowledge be based on such strong reasons that seem to leave no room for non-knowledge and therefore presuppose …

Kirk LOUGHEED ABSTRACT: Many religious believers do not appear to take the existence of epistemic peer disagreement as a serious challenge to the rationality of their religious beliefs. They seem to think they have different evidence for their religious beliefs and hence aren’t really epistemic peers with their opponents. One underexplored potential evidential asymmetry in religious disagreements is based on …

Janet MICHAUD and John TURRI ABSTRACT: Understanding science requires appreciating the values it presupposes and its social context. Both the values that scientists hold and their social context can affect scientific communication. Philosophers of science have recently begun studying scientific communication, especially as it relates to public policy. Some have proposed “guiding principles for communicating scientific findings” to promote trust …

Michael J. SHAFFER ABSTRACT: In the preface paradox the posited author is supposed to know both that every sentence in a book is true and that not every sentence in that book is true. But, this result is paradoxically contradictory. The paradoxicality exhibited in such cases arises chiefly out of the recognition that large-scale and difficult tasks like verifying the …

Eric WILAND ABSTRACT: When you discover that an epistemic peer disagrees with you about some matter, does rationality require you to alter your views? Concessivists answer in the affirmative, but their view faces a problem in special cases. As others have noted, if concessivism itself is what’s under dispute, then concessivism seems to undermine itself. But there are other unexplored …