Volume X, Issue 2, 2019

Adam Michael Bricker ABSTRACT: There are brains in vats (BIVs) in the actual world. These “cerebral organoids” are roughly comparable to the brains of three-month-old foetuses, and conscious cerebral organoids seem only a matter of time. Philosophical interest in conscious cerebral organoids has thus far been limited to bioethics, and the purpose of this paper is to discuss cerebral organoids …

James CARGILE ABSTRACT: It is a common idea in philosophy that some false propositions such as (C) that Charlottesville is the largest city in Virginia, have the property of being possibly true. It is not a clear idea but an important one which has inspired considerable effort at clarification. One suggestion is that there exist (really, not just possibly) “possible …

David COSS ABSTRACT: Pragmatic Encroachment (PE hereafter), sometimes called ‘anti-intellectualism,’ is a denial of epistemic purism. Purism is the view that only traditional, truth-relevant, epistemic factors determine whether a true belief is an instance of knowledge. According to anti-intellectualists, two subjects S and S*, could be in the same epistemic position with regards to puristic epistemic factors, but S might …

Christos KYRIACOU ABSTRACT: Recent literature has paid considerable attention to evolutionary debunking arguments. But the cogency of evolutionary debunking arguments is compromised by a problem for such arguments that has been somewhat overlooked, namely, what we may call ‘the demarcation problem.’ This is the problem of asking in virtue of what regulative metaepistemic norm evolutionary considerations either render a belief …

Daniella MEEHAN ABSTRACT: In contemporary epistemology, recent attempts have been made to resist the notion of epistemic blame. This view, which I refer to as ‘epistemic blame skepticism,’ seems to challenge the notion of epistemic blame by reducing apparent cases of the phenomenon to examples of moral or practical blame. The purpose of this paper is to defend the notion …

Giovanni Rolla ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that knowledge is dimly luminous. That is: if a person knows that p, she knows how she knows that p. The argument depends on a safety-based account of propositional knowledge, which is salient in Williamson’s critique of the ‘KK’ principle. I combine that account with non-intellectualism about knowledge-how – according to which, …

Michael J. SHAFFER ABSTRACT: It is an under-appreciated fact that Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction¾when coupled with some other plausible and related views¾implies that there are serious difficulties in demarcating empirical theories from pure mathematical theories within the Quinean framework.  This is a serious problem because there seems to be a principled difference between the two disciplines that cannot …

Gábor FORRAI ABSTRACT: In recent articles in this journal Benoit Gaultier and John Biro have argued that the original Gettier cases and the ones closely modelled on them fail, and the reason for the failure is that the subject in these cases does not actually have the belief that would serve as a counterexample to the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge. …

Moti MIZRAHI ABSTRACT: In this discussion note, I put forth an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. If this argument is sound, then epistemologists who think that knowledge is factive are thereby also committed to the view that knowledge is epistemic certainty. Download PDF