Tag Archives: Epistemology

Mohammadreza ESMKHANI ABSTRACT: This essay examines the different fates of philosophy in Bloor’s and Rorty’s post-epistemological inquiries, tracing their sharp disagreement to their distinct conceptions of ‘naturalism’ and ‘language.’ To this end, the first section outlines their main reasons for overcoming the epistemologically-centered philosophy, as well as their reassessments of key concepts such as objectivity. The second section draws a …

Simon DIERIG ABSTRACT: In this essay, Crispin Wright’s various attempts at solving the so-called McKinsey paradox are reconstructed and criticized. In the first section, I argue against Anthony Brueckner that Wright’s solution does require that there is a failure of warrant transmission in McKinsey’s argument. To this end, a variant of the McKinsey paradox for earned a priori warrant is …

Aaran BURNS ABSTRACT: The sceptic says things like “nobody knows anything at all,” “nobody knows that they have hands,” and “nobody knows that the table exists when they aren’t looking at it.” According to many recent anti-sceptics, the sceptic means to deny ordinary knowledge attributions. Understood this way, the sceptic is open to the charge, made often by Contextualists and …

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 …

Frank HOFMANN ABSTRACT: Quite plausibly, epistemic justification and rationality is tied to possession of evidence. According to Williamson, one’s evidence is what one knows. This is not compatible with non-epistemic perception, however, since non-epistemic perception does not require belief in what one perceives and, thus, does not require knowledge of the evidence – and, standardly, knowledge does require belief. If one …

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 …

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 …

Muralidharan ANANTHARAMAN ABSTRACT: The Uniqueness Thesis (U), according to Richard Feldman and Roger White, says that for a given set of evidence E and a proposition P, only one doxastic attitude about P is rational given E. Luis Rosa has recently provided two counterexamples against U which are supposed to show that even if there is a sense in which choosing …

Michael Shaw PERRY ABSTRACT: In this paper I analyze epistemological externalism and its adequacy as a response to skepticism. Externalism is defined by denial of accessibility: a subject can know if a particular condition beyond truth and belief is satisfied, even if the subject has no reflective access to the satisfaction of the condition. It hence has quick responses to skepticism. …

Rinat M. NUGAYEV ABSTRACT: It is exhibited that maxwellian electrodynamics was created as a result of the old pre-maxwellian programmes reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampere-Weber, the wave theory of Young-Fresnel and Faraday’s programme. The programmes’ meeting led to construction of the whole hierarchy of theoretical objects starting from the genuine crossbreeds (the displacement current) and up to usual mongrels. After the …