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  1. Easy Practical Knowledge.Timothy Kearl & J. Adam Carter - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy.
    We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is "easy" in the sense that, by manifesting one's skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about intentional action and knowledge: first, because agents sometimes act intentionally in epistemically hazardous (...)
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  • Hyperintensionality and Overfitting.Francesco Berto - 2024 - Synthese 1 (4):1-21.
    A hyperintensional epistemic logic would take the contents which can be known or believed as more fine-grained than sets of possible worlds. I consider one objection to the idea: Williamson’s Objection from Overfitting. I propose a hyperintensional account of propositions as sets of worlds enriched with topics: what those propositions, and so the attitudes having them as contents, are about. I show that the account captures the conditions under which sentences express the same content; that it can be pervasively applied (...)
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  • Bootstrapping and Persuasive Argumentation.Guido Melchior - 2024 - Argumentation 38 (2).
    That bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning fail to instantiate persuasive argumentation is an often informally presented but not systematically developed view. In this paper, I will argue that this unpersuasiveness is not determined by principles of justification transmission but by two straightforward principles of rationality, understood as a concept of internal coherence. First, it is rational for S to believe the conclusion of an argument because of the argument, only if S believes sufficiently many premises of the argument. Second, if S (...)
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  • Perceptual justification and the demands of effective agency.Griffin Klemick - 2024 - Synthese 203 (34):1-20.
    Pragmatist responses to skepticism about empirical justification have mostly been underwhelming, either presupposing implausible theses like relativism or anti-realism, or else showing our basic empirical beliefs to be merely psychologically inevitable rather than rationally warranted. In this paper I defend a better one: a modified version of an argument by Wilfrid Sellars that we are pragmatically warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true, since their likely truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our goal of (...)
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  • The Hard Problem of Access for Epistemological Disjunctivism.Grad Paweł - forthcoming - Episteme:1-20.
    In this paper, I identify the hard problem of access for epistemological disjunctivism (ED): given that perceptual experience E is opaque with respect to its own epistemic properties, subject S is not in a position to know epistemic proposition (i) (that E is factive with respect to empirical proposition p) just by having E and/or reflecting on E. This is the case even if (i) is true. I first motivate the hard problem of access (Section 2) and then reconstruct and (...)
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  • The epistemic insignificance of phenomenal force.Lu Teng - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):55-76.
    Does phenomenal force, the distinctive phenomenology attributed to perceptual experience, really form an integral part of the latter? If not, what implications does it have for perceptual justification? In this paper, I first argue for a metacognitive account, according to which phenomenal force constitutes a separate, metacognitive state. This account opens up a previously unexplored path for challenging phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, which has been a prominent theory of perceptual justification over the past two decades. Moreover, I investigate several alternative (...)
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  • Pragmatic accounts of justification, epistemic analyticity, and other routes to easy knowledge of abstracta.Brett Topey - forthcoming - In Xavier de Donato-Rodríguez, José Falguera & Concha Martínez-Vidal (eds.), Deflationist Conceptions of Abstract Objects. Springer.
    One common attitude toward abstract objects is a kind of platonism: a view on which those objects are mind-independent and causally inert. But there's an epistemological problem here: given any naturalistically respectable understanding of how our minds work, we can't be in any sort of contact with mind-independent, causally inert objects. So platonists, in order to avoid skepticism, tend to endorse epistemological theories on which knowledge is easy, in the sense that it requires no such contact—appeals to Boghossian’s notion of (...)
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  • Replies to the Critics of Knowing and Checking: an Epistemological Investigation.Guido Melchior - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):95-131.
    This paper replies to the comments made in Acta Analytica by Peter Baumann, Kelly Becker, Marian David, Nenad Miščević, Wes Siscoe, and Danilo Šuster on my Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation (Routledge 2019), hereinafter abbreviated as KC. These papers resulted from a workshop organized by the department of philosophy of the University of Maribor. I am very thankful to the organizers of the workshop and to the authors for their comments.
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  • Dynamic Introspection.Michael Cohen - 2021 - Dissertation, Stanford University
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  • A Metacognitive Account of Phenomenal Force.Lu Teng - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (4):1081-1101.
    According to phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, perceptual experiences can give us immediate justification for beliefs about the external world in virtue of having a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely phenomenal force. I present three cases to show that phenomenal force is neither pervasive among nor exclusive to perceptual experiences. The plausibility of such cases calls out for explanation. I argue that contrary to a long-held assumption, phenomenal force is a separate, non-perceptual state generated by some metacognitive mechanisms that monitor one’s (...)
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  • A Disjunctive Account of Desire.Kael McCormack - 2022 - Dissertation, University of New South Wales
    This thesis motivates a novel account of desire as the best explanation of an intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will immediately, outright know that she has a reason to bring P about. Existing explanations of the intuitive datum cannot simultaneously satisfy two desiderata. We want to explain how desires enable outright knowledge of reasons and also explain the fallibility of desires. Existing views satisfy the first desideratum at the expense of the (...)
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  • Optimizing Individual and Collective Reliability: A Puzzle.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (4):516-531.
    Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. This (...)
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  • Global Evolutionary Arguments: Self-Defeat, Circularity, and Skepticism about Reason.Diego E. Machuca - 2023 - In Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 333–359.
    In this essay, I consider an evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) that purports to undermine the epistemic justification of the belief in the reliability of our belief-forming processes, and an evolutionary vindicating argument (EVA) that seeks to establish that such a belief is epistemically justified. Whereas the EDA in question seems to fall prey to crippling self-defeat, the EVA under consideration seems to fall prey to vicious circularity. My interest in those arguments and the problems they face lies in what they (...)
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  • Goodness, availability, and argument structure.Anna-Sara Malmgren - 2021 - Synthese 198:10395-10427.
    According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...)
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  • The ‘Conditional Position Problem’ for epistemic externalism.Miguel Ángel Fernández Vargas - 2018 - Synthese 197 (12):5203-5224.
    In this paper, I develop a problem I call the “Conditional Position Problem” that arises for Ernest Sosa’s externalist epistemology. The problem is that, due to a phenomenon of epistemic circularity, one is unable to attain the reflective knowledge that one is justified in believing that perception is reliable, and is confined to the merely conditional position that one is so justified if perception is reliable. The problem is similar but different from a problem that Barry Stroud has tried to (...)
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  • Does Skepticism Presuppose Explanationism?James R. Beebe - 2017 - In Kevin McCain & Ted Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 173-187.
    A common response to radical skeptical challenges to our knowledge of the external world has been that there are explanatory reasons (e.g., simplicity, coherence, explanatory power, conservatism) for favoring commonsense explanations of our sensory experiences over skeptical explanations. Despite the degree of visibility this class of response has enjoyed, it has often been viewed with skepticism [sic] by the epistemological community because of concerns about the epistemic merits of explanatory reasoning. I argue that skeptical challenges that employ skeptical hypotheses presuppose (...)
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  • Antiscepticism and Easy Justification.Luca Moretti - 2020 - In Seemings and Epistemic Justification: how appearances justify beliefs. Cham: Springer.
    In this chapter I investigate epistemological consequences of the fact that seeming-based justification is elusive, in the sense that the subject can lose this justification simply by reflecting on her seemings. I argue that since seeming-based justification is elusive, the antisceptical bite of phenomenal conservatism is importantly limited. I also contend that since seeming-based justification has this feature, phenomenal conservatism isn’t actually afflicted by easy justification problems.
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  • (1 other version)Phenomenal Conservatism.Luca Moretti - 2020 - In Seemings and Epistemic Justification: how appearances justify beliefs. Cham: Springer.
    In this chapter I introduce and analyse the tenets of phenomenal conservatism, and discuss the problem of the nature of appearances. After that, I review the asserted epistemic merits phenomenal conservatism and the principal arguments adduced in support of it. Finally, I survey objections to phenomenal conservatism and responses by its advocates. Some of these objections will be scrutinised and appraised in the next chapters.
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  • The Disappearance of Ignorance. [REVIEW]Robin McKenna - 2020 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (1):4-20.
    Keith DeRose’s new book The Appearance of Ignorance is a welcome companion volume to his 2009 book The Case for Contextualism. Where latter focused on contextualism as a view in the philosophy of language, the former focuses on how contextualism contributes to our understanding of some perennial epistemological problems, with the skeptical problem being the main focus of six of the seven chapters. DeRose’s view is that a solution to the skeptical problem must do two things. First, it must explain (...)
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  • Bad bootstrapping: the problem with third-factor replies to the Darwinian Dilemma for moral realism.Michelle M. Dyke - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2115-2128.
    Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” is a well-known epistemological objection to moral realism. In this paper, I argue that “third-factor” replies to this argument on behalf of the moral realist, as popularized by Enoch :413–438, 2010, Taking morality seriously: a defense of robust realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011), Skarsaune :229–243, 2011) and Wielenberg :441–464, 2010, Robust ethics: the metaphysics and epistemology of godless normative realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), cannot succeed. This is because they are instances of the illegitimate form (...)
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  • Error possibility, contextualism, and bias.Wesley Buckwalter - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2413-2426.
    A central theoretical motivation for epistemic contextualism is that it can explain something that invariantism cannot. Specifically, contextualism claims that judgments about “knowledge” are sensitive to the salience of error possibilities and that this is explained by the fact that salience shifts the evidential standard required to truthfully say someone “knows” something when those possibilities are made salient. This paper presents evidence that undermines this theoretical motivation for epistemic contextualism. Specifically, it demonstrates that while error salience does sometimes impact “knowledge” (...)
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  • Circularities In The Contemporary Philosophical Accounts Of The Applicability Of Mathematics In The Physical Universe.Catalin Barboianu - 2015 - Revista de Filosofie 61 (5):517-542.
    Contemporary philosophical accounts of the applicability of mathematics in physical sciences and the empirical world are based on formalized relations between the mathematical structures and the physical systems they are supposed to represent within the models. Such relations were constructed both to ensure an adequate representation and to allow a justification of the validity of the mathematical models as means of scientific inference. This article puts in evidence the various circularities (logical, epistemic, and of definition) that are present in these (...)
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  • Whither Evidentialist Reliabilism?Juan Comesaña - 2018 - In McCain Kevin (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 307-25.
    Evidentialism and Reliabilism are two of the main contemporary theories of epistemic justification. Some authors have thought that the theories are not incompatible with each other, and that a hybrid theory which incorporates elements of both should be taken into account. More recently, other authors have argued that the resulting theory is well- placed to deal with fine-grained doxastic attitudes (credences). In this paper I review the reasons for adopting this kind of hybrid theory, paying attention to the case of (...)
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  • What is Deep Disagreement?Chris Ranalli - 2018 - Topoi 40 (5):983-998.
    What is the nature of deep disagreement? In this paper, I consider two similar albeit seemingly rival answers to this question: the Wittgensteinian theory, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over hinge propositions, and the fundamental epistemic principle theory, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over fundamental epistemic principles. I assess these theories against a set of desiderata for a satisfactory theory of deep disagreement, and argue that while the fundamental epistemic principle theory does better than the Wittgensteinian (...)
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  • Varieties of Inference?Anna-Sara Malmgren - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):221-254.
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  • Knowability Relative to Information.Peter Hawke & Franz Berto - 2021 - Mind 130 (517):1-33.
    We present a formal semantics for epistemic logic, capturing the notion of knowability relative to information (KRI). Like Dretske, we move from the platitude that what an agent can know depends on her (empirical) information. We treat operators of the form K_AB (‘B is knowable on the basis of information A’) as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a topic- or aboutness- preservation constraint. Variable strictness models the non-monotonicity of knowledge acquisition while allowing knowledge to be intrinsically stable. Aboutness-preservation models (...)
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  • Is knowledge of causes sufficient for understanding?Xingming Hu - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (3):291-313.
    ABSTRACT: According to a traditional account, understanding why X occurred is equivalent to knowing that X was caused by Y. This paper defends the account against a major objection, viz., knowing-that is not sufficient for understanding-why, for understanding-why requires a kind of grasp while knowledge-that does not. I discuss two accounts of grasp in recent literature and argue that if either is true, then knowing that X was caused by Y entails at least a rudimentary understanding of why X occurred. (...)
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  • Can probability theory explain why closure is both intuitive and prone to counterexamples?Marcello Di Bello - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (9):2145-2168.
    Epistemic closure under known implication is the principle that knowledge of "p" and knowledge of "p implies q", together, imply knowledge of "q". This principle is intuitive, yet several putative counterexamples have been formulated against it. This paper addresses the question, why is epistemic closure both intuitive and prone to counterexamples? In particular, the paper examines whether probability theory can offer an answer to this question based on four strategies. The first probability-based strategy rests on the accumulation of risks. The (...)
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  • The Evil Demon Inside.Nicholas Silins - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):325-343.
    This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued---we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view (...)
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  • Extended circularity: a new puzzle for extended cognition.Joseph Adam Carter & Jesper Kallestrup - 2018 - In J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Extended Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 42-63.
    Mainstream epistemology has typically taken for granted a traditional picture of the metaphysics of mind, according to which cognitive processes (e.g. memory storage and retrieval) play out entirely within the bounds of the skull and skin. But this simple ‘intracranial’ picture is falling in- creasingly out of step with contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Likewise, though, proponents of active exter- nalist approaches to the mind—e.g. the hypothesis of extended cognitition (HEC)—have proceeded by and large without (...)
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  • Seeing White and Wrong: Reid on the Role of Sensations in Perception, with a Focus on Color Perception.Lucas Thorpe - 2015 - In Thomas Reid on Mind, Knowledge, and Value (Mind Association Occasional Series). Oxford University Press. pp. 100-123.
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  • Method Coherence and Epistemic Circularity.Will Fleisher - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (2):455-480.
    Reliabilism is an intuitive and attractive view about epistemic justification. However, it has many well-known problems. I offer a novel condition on reliabilist theories of justification. This method coherence condition requires that a method be appropriately tested by appeal to a subject’s other belief-forming methods. Adding this condition to reliabilism provides a solution to epistemic circularity worries, including the bootstrapping problem.
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  • How to solve Hume's problem of induction.Alexander Jackson - 2019 - Episteme 16 (2):157-174.
    This paper explains what’s wrong with a Hume-inspired argument for skepticism about induction. Hume’s argument takes as a premise that inductive reasoning presupposes that the future will resemble the past. I explain why that claim is not plausible. The most plausible premise in the vicinity is that inductive reasoning from E to H presupposes that if E then H. I formulate and then refute a skeptical argument based on that premise. Central to my response is a psychological explanation for how (...)
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  • The philosophy of memory technologies: Metaphysics, knowledge, and values.Heersmink Richard & Carter J. Adam - 2020 - Memory Studies 13 (4):416-433.
    Memory technologies are cultural artifacts that scaffold, transform, and are interwoven with human biological memory systems. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and integrative survey of their philosophical dimensions, including their metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dimensions, drawing together debates across the humanities, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. Metaphysical dimensions of memory technologies include their function, the nature of their informational properties, ways of classifying them, and their ontological status. Epistemological dimensions include the truth-conduciveness of external memory, (...)
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  • Must Good Reasoning Satisfy Cumulative Transitivity?Shyam Nair - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1):123-146.
    There is consensus among computer scientists, logicians, and philosophers that good reasoning with qualitative beliefs must have the structural property of cumulative transitivity or, for short, cut. This consensus is typically explicitly argued for partially on the basis of practical and mathematical considerations. But the consensus is also implicit in the approach philosophers take to almost every puzzle about reasoning that involves multiple steps: philosophers typically assume that if each step in reasoning is acceptable considered on its own, the whole (...)
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  • Strange-but-true: a (quick) new argument for contextualism about ‘know’.Paul Dimmock - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (8):2005-2015.
    A powerful objection to subject-sensitive invariantism concerns various ‘strange-but-true’ conditionals. One popular response to this objection is to argue that strange-but-true conditionals pose a problem for non-sceptical epistemological theories in general. In the present paper, it is argued that strange-but-true conditionals are not a problem for contextualism about ‘know’. This observation undercuts the proposed defence of SSI, and supplies a surprising new argument for contextualism.
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  • What to believe about your belief that you're in the good case.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 6:206-233.
    Going about our daily lives in an orderly manner requires us, once we are aware of them, to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted “anti-skeptical assumptions”. What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of these beliefs? For various reasons, it can seem that we do not have evidence for such (...)
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  • The Problem with Uniform Solutions to Peer Disagreement.Amir Konigsberg - 2013 - Theoria 79 (2):96-126.
    Contributors to the recent disagreement debate have sought to provide a uniform response to cases in which epistemic peers disagree about the epistemic import of a shared body of evidence, no matter what kind of evidence they are disagreeing about. The varied cases addressed in the literature have included examples of disagreement about restaurant bills, court verdicts, weather forecasting, chess, morality, religious beliefs, and even disagreements about philosophical disagreements. The equal treatment of these varied cases has motivated the search for (...)
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  • The Externalist’s Guide to Fishing for Compliments.Bernhard Salow - 2018 - Mind 127 (507):691-728.
    Suppose you’d like to believe that p, whether or not it’s true. What can you do to help? A natural initial thought is that you could engage in Intentionally Biased Inquiry : you could look into whether p, but do so in a way that you expect to predominantly yield evidence in favour of p. This paper hopes to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is (...)
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  • Does Suppositional Reasoning Solve the Bootstrapping Problem?James Van Cleve - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (3): 351-363.
    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 theories, Cohen insists that subjects must know their perceptual faculties are reliable before perception can give them knowledge. But how is such knowledge of (...)
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  • Destructive defeat and justificational force: the dialectic of dogmatism, conservatism, and meta-evidentialism.Matthias Steup - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):2907-2933.
    Defeaters can prevent a perceptual belief from being justified. For example, when you know that red light is shining at the table before you, you would typically not be justified in believing that the table is red. However, can defeaters also destroy a perceptual experience as a source of justification? If the answer is ‘no’, the red light defeater blocks doxastic justification without destroying propositional justification. You have some-things-considered, but not all-things-considered, justification for believing that the table is red. If (...)
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  • Evidence and the openness of knowledge.Assaf Sharon & Levi Spectre - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):1001-1037.
    The paper argues that knowledge is not closed under logical inference. The argument proceeds from the openness of evidential support and the dependence of empirical knowledge on evidence, to the conclusion that knowledge is open. Without attempting to provide a full-fledged theory of evidence, we show that on the modest assumption that evidence cannot support both a proposition and its negation, or, alternatively, that information that reduces the probability of a proposition cannot constitute evidence for its truth, the relation of (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Composite Nature of Epistemic Justification.Paul Silva - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (1).
    According to many, to have epistemic justification to believe P is just for it to be epistemically permissible to believe P. Others think it is for believing P to be epistemically good. Yet others think it has to do with being epistemically blameless in believing P. All such views of justification encounter problems. Here, a new view of justification is proposed according to which justification is a kind of composite normative status. The result is a view of justification that offers (...)
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  • Why Worry about Epistemic Circularity?Michael P. Lynch & Paul Silva - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Research 41 (9999):33-52.
    Although Alston believed epistemically circular arguments were able to justify their conclusions, he was also disquieted by them. We will argue that Alston was right to be disquieted. We explain Alston’s view of epistemic circularity, the considerations that led him to accept it, and the purposes he thought epistemically circular arguments could serve. We then build on some of Alston’s remarks and introduce further limits to the usefulness of such arguments and introduce a new problem that stems from those limits. (...)
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  • Easy Knowledge, Closure Failure, or Skepticism: A Trilemma.Guido Melchior - 2016 - Metaphilosophy 47 (2):214-232.
    This article aims to provide a structural analysis of the problems related to the easy knowledge problem. The easy knowledge problem is well known. If we accept that we can have basic knowledge via a source without having any prior knowledge about the reliability or accuracy of this source, then we can acquire knowledge about the reliability or accuracy of this source too easily via information delivered by the source. Rejecting any kind of basic knowledge, however, leads into an infinite (...)
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  • Knowing how to put knowledge first in the theory of justification.Paul Silva - 2017 - Episteme 14 (4):393-412.
    I provide a novel knowledge-first account of justification that avoids the pitfalls of existing accounts while preserving the underlying insight of knowledge-first epistemologies: that knowledge comes first. The view I propose is, roughly, this: justification is grounded in our practical knowledge (know-how) concerning the acquisition of propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). I first refine my thesis in response to immediate objections. In subsequent sections I explain the various ways in which this thesis is theoretically superior to existing knowledge-first accounts of justification. The (...)
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  • How to Be a Bayesian Dogmatist.Brian T. Miller - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4):766-780.
    ABSTRACTRational agents have consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this (...)
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  • Transmission Failure Failure.Nicholas Silins - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 126 (1):71-102.
    I set out the standard view about alleged examples of failure of transmission of warrant, respond to two cases for the view, and argue that the view is false. The first argument for the view neglects the distinction between believing a proposition on the basis of a justification and merely having a justification to believe a proposition. The second argument for the view neglects the position that one's justification for believing a conclusion can be one's premise for the conclusion, rather (...)
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  • Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception.Nicholas Silins - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (1):24-42.
    If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views about the nature of cognitive penetration, the epistemological consequences of denying cognitive penetration, and the (...)
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  • Perceptual Fundamentalism and a priori bootstrapping.Magdalena Balcerak Jackson - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (8):2087-2103.
    According to Perceptual Fundamentalism we can have justified perceptual beliefs solely in virtue of having perceptual experiences with corresponding contents. Recently, it has been argued that Perceptual Fundamentalism entails that it is possible to gain an a priori justified belief that perception is reliable by engaging in a suppositional reasoning process of a priori bootstrapping. But I will show that Perceptual Fundamentalists are not committed to a priori bootstrapping being a rational reasoning process. On the most plausible versions of Perceptual (...)
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