A blindspot is a consistent but inaccessible proposition. For instance, I cannot know 'The test is on Friday but I do not know it'. No contradiction follows from the supposition that you know my blindspot. But could you know my blindspot if we are epistemic peers? Epistemic peers have the same evidence and reasoning ability. So either both peers know a proposition or both are ignorant. Since I cannot know my blindspot, neither can my peer. Thus the formal ignorance associated (...) with blindspots spreads to my peers. This contagion is used to improve a solution to the blindspot solution to the surprise test paradox. (shrink)

Amanda works in a library, and a patron asks for her help in learning about duty-to- rescue laws in China. She throws herself into the task, spending hours on retrieving documents from governmental and non-governmental sources, getting electronic translations, looking for literature on Scandinavian duty-to-rescue laws that mention Chinese laws for comparison, and so on. Why? She likes to gain this sort of general knowledge of the world; perhaps the reason she works so hard is that she is learning fascinating (...) facts in doing so. She is also a proud librarian; perhaps the reason she works so hard is that a patron needs her assistance. She is a library employee; perhaps her reason for working so hard is that this sort of effort is noted by her employer and gives her career a boost, or perhaps it is just that doing this sort of work is the condition of her continued employment. Perhaps the reason is that the patron is charming. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new argument for the view that language has a cognitive role. I suggest that humans exhibit two distinct kinds of belief state, one passively formed, the other actively formed. I argue that actively formed beliefs (_virtual beliefs_, as I call them) can be identified with _premising policies_, and that forming them typically involves certain linguistic operations. I conclude that natural language has at least a limited cognitive role in the formation and manipulation of virtual beliefs.

Many contemporary philosophers are committed – either implicitly or explicitly – to Propositionalism about thought-experimental intuitions. According to this view, thought-experimental intuitions are phenomenally conscious, spontaneous, and non-theoretical; most importantly, Propositionalists claim that intuitions bear consciously accessible propositional content. The negative project of this essay is a critique of, the rejection of which is tantamount to rejecting Propositionalism. In addition, I propose an alternative position – namely, Interpretationalism. According to Interpretationalism, intuitions possess the features ascribed in -; however, they do (...) not bear consciously accessible propositional content. Instead, intuitions acquire cognitive significance by virtue of being interpreted in light of a subject’s background beliefs. (shrink)

This is a position paper concerning the role of empirical studies of human default reasoning in the formalization of AI theories of default reasoning. We note that AI motivates its theoretical enterprise by reference to human skill at default reasoning, but that the actual research does not make any use of this sort of information and instead relies on intuitions of individual investigators. We discuss two reasons theorists might not consider human performance relevant to formalizing default reasoning: (a) that intuitions (...) are sufficient to describe a model, and (b) that human performance in this arena is irrelevant to a competence model of the phenomenon. We provide arguments against both these reasons. We then bring forward three further considerations against the use of intuitions in this arena: (a) it leads to an unawareness of predicate ambiguity, (b) it presumes an understanding of ordinary language statements of typicality, and (c) it is similar to discredited views in other fields. We advocate empirical investigation of the range of human phenomena that intuitively embody default reasoning. Gathering such information would provide data with which to generate formal default theories and against which to test the claims of proposed theories. Our position is that such data are the very phenomena that default theories are supposed to explain. (shrink)

A lengthy reply to 13 critical discussions of _Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study_ collected in an e-book and reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy of Life_. The contributors are from a variety of philosophical traditions, including the Anglo-American, Continental and East Asian (especially Buddhist and Japanese) ones.

We are fallible, and knowledge of our fallibility has normative implications. But these normative implications appear to conflict with other compelling epistemic norms. We therefore appear to face a choice: reject fallibility-based norms or reject these other epistemic norms. I argue that there is a plausible third option: reconcile these two sets of norms. Once we properly understand the nature of each of these norms, we aren’t forced to reject either.

In this dissertation I consider the problem of external world skepticism and attempts at providing an argument to the best explanation against it. In chapter one I consider several different ways of formulating the crucial skeptical argument, settling on an argument that centers on the question of whether we're justified in believing propositions about the external world. I then consider and reject several options for getting around this issue which I take to be inadequate. I finally conclude that the best (...) option available to us at the moment is to argue that the antiskeptical view is the best explanation of our ordinary experiences In chapter two I argue that, if we hope to ground what counts as defending antiskepticism in common sense, there is an argument against the possibility of ever knowing one has succeeded in defending antiskepticism. After showing that common sense is no place to look in setting a goal for our antiskeptical project, I present the view that what will be crucial to settling on our antiskeptical goal is coming to a successful analysis of the nature of physical objects. I suggest some minimal criteria that must be met by a view in order to be antiskeptical based on our intuitions about core skeptical cases, but acknowledge that a fully successful response to external world skepticism will require the antiskeptic to engage in some much more difficult analysis. In chapter three I consider various views of the nature of explanation and conclude, tentatively, that explanation as it interests the antiskeptic is fundamentally causal. In chapter four I consider and reject some of the core views on which best explanation facts are so fundamental that a project of attempting to vindicate probabilistically the virtues which make explanations epistemically good. In this chapter I show that views which analyze justification in terms of best explanation factors fail. In chapter five I attempt to vindicate the various explanatory virtues probabilistically. In doing so I attempt to express or translate the various explanatory virtues in terms of probabilities in order to show that having those virtues makes a view at least prima facie more probable. In chapters six and seven I explain and evaluate the various arguments to the best explanation against skepticism present in current philosophical literature. I attempt to show that extant arguments fail to appreciate the virtues possessed by classical skeptical scenarios. In chapter eight I briefly consider some options that may be open to the antiskeptic moving forward. All routes forward contain considerable obstacles, but there are some fruitful areas of research to pursue. (shrink)

I will demonstrate that conductive arguments are found in the inference to the best explana-tion as it is used in science. Conductive arguments, I argue, operate on two levels: the first is in the con-struction of hypotheses; the second is through the competition of hypotheses. By constructing arguments based on observations of facts, all possible factors are taken into account and a judgment is made based on our weighing of considerations: conductive argumentation.