It is still a live question in epistemology and philosophy of science as to what exactly evidence is. In my view, evidence consists in experiences called “seemings.” This view is a version of the phenomenal conception of evidence, the position that evidence consists in nonfactive mental states with propositional content. This conception is opposed by sense-data theorists, disjunctivists, and those who think evidence consists in physical objects or publicly observable states of affairs—call it the courtroom conception of evidence. Thomas Kelly (...) has recently argued that the phenomenal conception cannot play all the roles evidence plays and is thus inadequate. Having first explained the nature of seemings, in this essay I utilize Kelly’s own understanding of the four major roles of evidence and argue that the phenomenal conception can play each one. Experience is a good candidate for evidence. (shrink)

In this chapter, Gage and McAllister respond to various objections to the phenomenal conservative position in religious epistemology. In particular, they respond to the objections that seemings are the ultimate source of justification, that PC makes epistemic justification too easy, that PC involves conceptual circularity, and that PC lacks an objective connection to truth.

A brief introduction to a diverse and interesting group of papers in contemporary epistemology.

In this chapter, Logan Paul Gage examines the only real attempt to disprove God’s existence by a New Atheist: Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747 Gambit.” Central to Dawkins’s argument is the claim that God is more complex than what he is invoked to explain. Gage evaluates this claim using the main extant notions of simplicity in the literature. Gage concludes that on no reading does this claim survive scrutiny. Along the way, Dawkins claims that there are (...) no good positive arguments for God’s existence. Gage attempts to show that Dawkins’s argument depends upon distinctively philosophical assumptions that do not appear to withstand scrutiny. (shrink)

For some years now, Michael Bergmann has urged a dilemma against internalist theories of epistemic justification. For reasons I explain below, some epistemologists have thought that Michael Huemer’s principle of Phenomenal Conservatism can split the horns of Bergmann’s dilemma. Bergmann has recently argued, however, that PC must inevitably, like all other internalist views, fall prey to his dilemma. In this paper, I explain the nature of Bergmann’s dilemma and his reasons for thinking that PC cannot escape it before arguing that (...) he is mistaken: PC can indeed split its horns. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the life and work of William Paley, including a discussion of the structure of his famous design argument.

In this chapter, we argue for a phenomenal conservative perspective on religious epistemology and attempt to answer some common criticisms of this perspective.

The role of certitude in our mental lives is, to put it mildly, controversial. Many current epistemologists (including epistemologists of religion) eschew certitude altogether. Given his emphasis on certitude, some have maintained that John Henry Newman was an infallibilist about knowledge. In this paper, we argue that a careful examination of his thought (especially as seen in the Grammar of Assent) reveals that he was an epistemic fallibilist. We first clarify what we mean by fallibilism and infallibilism. Second, we explain (...) why some have read Newman as an infallibilist. Third, we offer two arguments that Newman is at least a fallibilist in a weak sense. In particular, the paradox he seeks to resolve in the Grammar and his dispute with John Locke both indicate that he is at least a weak fallibilist. We close with a consideration of whether Newman is a fallibilist in a much stronger sense as well. (shrink)

This essay shows how John Henry Newman reconciled the certitude of faith with a fallibilist epistemology. While Newman holds that many of our beliefs are held with certitude, he does not conceive of all certitude as Cartesian, apodictic certitude. In this way, he walks a middle road between rationalism and fideism.

A discussion of several tensions between Thomistic philosophy and modern Darwinian theory as well as several recent Thomistic criticisms of intelligent design.

Recent authors, emphasizing Newman’s distaste for natural theology—especially William Paley’s design argument—have urged us to follow Newman’s lead and reject design arguments. But I argue that Newman’s own argument for God’s existence (his argument from conscience) fails without a supplementary design argument or similar reason to think our faculties are truth-oriented. In other words, Newman appears to need the kind of argument he explicitly rejects. Finding Newman’s rejection of natural theology to stem primarily from factors other than worries about cogency, (...) however, I further argue that there is little reason not to pursue design arguments in order to save the argument from conscience. (shrink)

A brief review of John Polkinghorne's 2011 book Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (Yale University Press).

In this essay, I describe my journey to Catholicism and explain one of the many reasons I became Catholic--namely, an argument from the canon of Scripture.

A brief introduction to the life and key work of Rudolf Carnap with special attention to his work on inductive logic.

Contextualism (the view that ‘knowledge’ and its variants are context-sensitive) has been supported in large part through appeal to intuitions about Keith DeRose’s Bank Cases. Recently, however, the contextualist construal of these cases has come under fire from Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel who question whether the Bank Case subject’s confidence can remain constant in both low- and high-stakes cases. Having explained the Bank Cases and this challenge to them, I argue that DeRose has given a reasonable reply to this (...) initial challenge. However, I proceed to argue that the current stalemate can be broken. Seeking to extend the Bach-Nagel critique, I offer a novel interpretation of the Bank Cases according to which the subject’s evidence changes between low- and high-stakes cases. If I am correct, then, given the amount of support the Bank Cases have been thought to lend contextualism, the case for contextualism is seriously weakened. (shrink)

In a time when conservatives believe that the traditional family is under increasing fire, some think an appeal to Darwinian science may be the answer. I argue that these conservatives are wrong to maintain that Darwinian theory can serve as the intellectual foundation for the traditional conception of the family. Contra Larry Arnhart and James Q. Wilson, a Darwinian philosophy of nature simply lacks the stability the traditional family requires; it cannot support the traditional conception of human nature and the (...) normativity it was thought to contain. If conservatives are to maintain these traditional ideas, the theoretical foundation must lie elsewhere. (shrink)

In recent years, Duncan Pritchard has developed a position in religious epistemology called quasi‐fideism that he claims traces back to John Henry Newman's treatment of the rationality of religious belief. In this paper, we give three reasons to think that Pritchard's reading of Newman as a quasi‐fideist is mistaken. First, Newman's parity argument does not claim that religious and non‐religious beliefs are on a par because both are groundless; instead, for Newman, they are on a par because both often stem (...) from implicit rather than explicit reasoning. Second, pace Pritchard, Newman's distinction between simple and complex assent does not map onto the Wittgensteinian distinction between groundless hinge commitments and beliefs that flow from these hinges. For Newman, simple and complex assent differ in terms of the believer's level of awareness of their grounds. Third, and finally, Newman does not reject Locke's evidentialism in toto. Instead, he argues that certitude is not restricted to beliefs stemming from intuition and demonstration but often rightly includes probabilistically supported (or fallibly evidenced) beliefs. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that John Henry Newman was right to think that our passional nature can play a legitimate epistemic role. First, we unpack the standard objection to Newman’s understanding of the relationship between our passional nature and the evidential basis of faith. Second, we argue that the standard objection to Newman operates with a narrow definition of evidence. After challenging this notion, we then offer a broader and more humane understanding of evidence. Third, we survey recent scholarship (...) arguing that emotions, a key aspect of our passional nature, are cognitive. In this light, they plausibly have a proper epistemic role. Fourth, we defend Newman’s reliance on the passional nature in epistemic matters by showing how reasonable it is in light of this recent work on evidence and the nature of emotions. Newman’s insistence that the formation of a right state of heart and mind is crucial for epistemic success is far from untenable. (shrink)

A review of Robert. B. Stewart's edited volume concerning a discussion between William Dembski and Michael Ruse. Further contributions are included from William Lane Craig and others.

A review of Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God.

A review of Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos.

A review of Jerry Root's book C.S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil.

A brief review of Michael Ruse's 2010 book Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science (Cambridge University Press).

In this article, we examine in detail the New Atheists' most serious argument for the conclusion that God does not exist, namely, Richard Dawkins's Ultimate 747 Gambit. Dawkins relies upon a strong explanatory principle involving simplicity. We systematically inspect the various kinds of simplicity that Dawkins may invoke. Finding his crucial premises false on any common conception of simplicity, we conclude that Dawkins has not given good reason to think God does not exist.

We criticize the classical evidentialist approach to religious epistemology as articulated by John DePoe from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

We criticize the approach of covenantal epistemology to religious epistemology as articulated by Scott Oliphint from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

We critique MacIntyre's traditions-based perspectivalist approach to religious epistemology as articulated by Erik Baldwin from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

We criticize the proper functionalist approach to religious epistemology as articulated by Tyler McNabb from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

With the pretext of analyzing Foucault’s contribution to history, the paper is an essay on the philosophy of history. It is shaped, fundamentally, as an answer to the historian Paul Veyne’s essay, “Foucault Revolutionizes History” (1978) and his assertions on Foucault and historical methodology; Veyne claimed Foucault to have revolutionized the discipline of history thanks to his singular gaze and his profound skepticism. The paper counters Veyne’s assertions on both Foucault and Veyne’s historiography and seeks to provide a concept (...) of his-tory that is more nuanced and conscious of the human sciences’ ontology and duties. To do so, the paper en-gages with a number of historical currents, thinkers, and concepts, which shape historical inquiry. (shrink)

Dilation occurs when an interval probability estimate of some event E is properly included in the interval probability estimate of E conditional on every event F of some partition, which means that one’s initial estimate of E becomes less precise no matter how an experiment turns out. Critics maintain that dilation is a pathological feature of imprecise probability models, while others have thought the problem is with Bayesian updating. However, two points are often overlooked: (1) knowing that E is stochastically (...) independent of F (for all F in a partition of the underlying state space) is sufficient to avoid dilation, but (2) stochastic independence is not the only independence concept at play within imprecise probability models. In this paper we give a simple characterization of dilation formulated in terms of deviation from stochastic independence, propose a measure of dilation, and distinguish between proper and improper dilation. Through this we revisit the most sensational examples of dilation, which play up independence between dilator and dilatee, and find the sensationalism undermined by either fallacious reasoning with imprecise probabilities or improperly constructed imprecise probability models. (shrink)

Do factive mental states come in degrees? If so, what is their underlying structure, and what is their theoretical significance? Many have observed that ‘knows that’ is not a gradable verb and have taken this to be strong evidence that propositional knowledge does not come in degrees. This paper demonstrates that the adjective ‘aware that’ passes all the standard tests of gradability, and thus strongly motivates the idea that it refers to a factive mental state that comes in degrees. We (...) will explore a range of structural questions that have been overlooked in regard to our awareness of facts, showing that the degreed structure of awareness has significant implications for our understanding of knowledge. (shrink)

People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative than those in which (...) other people lied to or emotionally harmed them. Furthermore, people judge those actions that happened further in the past to be more morally wrong than those that happened more recently. Finally, for periods of the past when they believed that they were very different people than they are now, participants judge their actions to be more morally wrong and more negative than those actions from periods of their pasts when they believed that they were very similar to who they are now. The authors discuss these findings in relation to theories about the function of autobiographical memory and moral cognition in constructing and perceiving the self over time. (shrink)

Formal symptoms of relevance usually concern the propositional variables shared between the antecedent and the consequent of provable conditionals. Among the most famous results about such symptoms are Belnap’s early results showing that for sublogics of the strong relevant logic R, provable conditionals share a signed variable between antecedent and consequent. For logics weaker than R stronger variable sharing results are available. In 1984, Ross Brady gave one well-known example of such a result. As a corollary to the main result (...) of the paper, we give a very simple proof of a related but strictly stronger result. (shrink)

What is the correct metric of distributive justice? Proponents of the capability approach claim that distributive metrics should be articulated in terms of individuals’ effective abilities to achieve important and worthwhile goals. Defenders of resourcism, by contrast, maintain that metrics should instead focus on the distribution of external resources. This debate is now more than three decades old, and it has produced a vast and still growing literature. The present paper aims to provide a fresh perspective on this protracted debate. (...) It does so by defending capability metrics while also criticizing the two most common arguments used to support them, and sympathetically reconstructing the arguments for resourcism. I ultimately argue that while sweeping defenses of the capability approach do not succeed, capability theorists can indeed vindicate the justice-relevance of certain capabilities while still accommodating what is plausible in resourcism. (shrink)

Relevant logics infamously have the property that they only validate a conditional when some propositional variable is shared between its antecedent and consequent. This property has been strengthened in a variety of ways over the last half-century. Two of the more famous of these strengthenings are the strong variable sharing property and the depth relevance property. In this paper I demonstrate that an appropriate class of relevant logics has a property that might naturally be characterized as the supremum of these (...) two properties. I also show how to use this fact to demonstrate that these logics seem to be constructive in previously unknown ways. (shrink)

This three-part paper presents Gordon Pask’s conversation theory (CT) and interaction of actors theory (IA) and outlines ways to apply these cybernetic approaches to designing technologies and scenarios for both formal and informal learning. The first part of the paper covers concepts central to CT and IA, explaining the relationship between conceptual and mechanical operators, and machines mediating informal and formal learning. The second part of the paper applies visual representations of CT and IA to understanding the use of Pask’s (...) course assembly systems (CASTE and THOUGHTSTICKER), created between the late 1960s and the 1980s, and the ThoughtShuffler search interface, created in the 2010s. The third part proposes two pathways for design based on CT and IA: firstly, the potential for designers and observers to reformulate the qualities of tools and learning scenarios to augment human thinking and collective action; and secondly, the possibility to create tools with malleable interfaces that allow users to become intermediaries rather than consumers of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues that societal duties of health promotion are underwritten (at least in large part) by a principle of beneficence. Further, this principle generates duties of justice that correlate with rights, not merely “imperfect” duties of charity or generosity. To support this argument, I draw on a useful distinction from bioethics and on a somewhat neglected approach to social obligation from political philosophy. The distinction is that between general and specific beneficence; and the approach from political philosophy has at (...) times been called equality of concern. After clarifying the distinction and setting out the basis of the equality of concern view, I argue that the result is a justice-based principle of “specific” beneficence that should be reflected in a society’s health policy. I then draw on this account to criticize, refine, and extend some prominent health care policy proposals from the bioethics literature. (shrink)

The existence of God is once again the focus of vivid philosophical discussion. From the point of view of analytic theology, however, people often talk past each other when they debate about the putative existence or nonexistence of God. In the worst case, for instance, atheists deny the existence of a God, which no theists ever claimed to exist. In order to avoid confusions like this we need to be clear about the function of the term 'God' in its different (...) contexts of use. In what follows, I distinguish between the functions of 'God' in philosophical contexts on the one hand and in theological contexts on the other in order to provide a schema, which helps to avoid confusion in the debate on the existence or non-existence of God. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a novel way of building arithmetics whose background logic is R. The purpose of doing this is to point in the direction of a novel family of systems that could be candidates for being the infamous R#1/2 that Meyer suggested we look for.

Contrary to popular belief, population-wide preventive measures are rarely cost-reducing. Yet they can still be cost-effective, and indeed more cost-effective than treatment. This is often true of preventive measures that work by slightly reducing the already low risks of death faced by many people. This raises a difficult moral question: when we must choose between life-saving treatment, on the one hand, and preventive measures that avert even more deaths, on the other, is the case for prevention weakened when it works (...) by reducing many healthy people’s already low risks by a further tiny amount? I argue the answer is no. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze Rawad El Skaf’s (2017 & 2021) account of thought experiments (TEs) in physics. I will argue that El Skaf’s account is strengthened by taking on Amy Kind’s (2016 & 2018) constraints-based approach to the imagination, which highlights the epistemic significance of imaginative processes. First, I will present El Skaf’s step-by-step structure of TEs wherein he discusses their form, content, and epistemic function. Second, I will explain a canonical TE in physics known as the clock-in-the-box. (...) In turn, I will lay out El Skaf’s analysis of the clock-in-the-box TE. Then, I will present Amy Kind’s constraints-based approach to the imagination. I will then offer three critiques of El Skaf’s account and suggest that each critique is resolved by applying a constraints-based approach to his view. Once the hybrid view is laid out, I will discuss incompatible constraints on the imagination, which I call the home and away constraints. I will argue that a thought experimenter (TEer) may overcome this incompatibility by transforming away constraints into home constraints via metaphor. Lastly, I will argue that physics TEs are special since it is an essential feature of theirs that they ask the TEer to consider incompatible constraints on the imagination. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models have undoubtedly become useful tools in science. In general, scientists and ML developers are optimistic – perhaps rightfully so – about the potential that these models have in facilitating scientific progress. The philosophy of AI literature carries a different mood. The attention of philosophers remains on potential epistemological issues that stem from the so-called “black box” features of ML models. For instance, Eamon Duede (2023) argues that opacity in deep learning models (DLMs) (...) is epistemically problematic in the context of justification, though not in the context of discovery. -/- In this paper, I aim to show that a similar epistemological concern is echoed in the epistemology of imagination literature. It is traditionally held that, given its black box features, reliance on the imagination is epistemically problematic in the context of justification, though not in the context of discovery. The constraints-based approach to the imagination answers the epistemological concern by providing an account of how we can rely on the imagination in the context of justification by way of constraints. I argue by analogy that a similar approach can be applied to the opaque DLM case. Ultimately, my goal is to explore just how far this analogy extends, and whether a constraints-based approach to opaque DLMs can answer the epistemological concern surrounding their black box features in the context of justification. -/- (Note that this paper is IN PROGRESS and UNPUBLISHED). (shrink)