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Knowledge

Oxford: Clarendon Press (1974)

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  1. What Else Justification Could Be1.Martin Smith - 2010 - Noûs 44 (1):10-31.
    According to a captivating picture, epistemic justification is essentially a matter of epistemic or evidential likelihood. While certain problems for this view are well known, it is motivated by a very natural thought—if justification can fall short of epistemic certainty, then what else could it possibly be? In this paper I shall develop an alternative way of thinking about epistemic justification. On this conception, the difference between justification and likelihood turns out to be akin to the more widely recognised difference (...)
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  • Explanatory coherence (plus commentary).Paul Thagard - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):435-467.
    This target article presents a new computational theory of explanatory coherence that applies to the acceptance and rejection of scientific hypotheses as well as to reasoning in everyday life, The theory consists of seven principles that establish relations of local coherence between a hypothesis and other propositions. A hypothesis coheres with propositions that it explains, or that explain it, or that participate with it in explaining other propositions, or that offer analogous explanations. Propositions are incoherent with each other if they (...)
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  • Assertion, knowledge, and rational credibility.Igor Douven - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (4):449-485.
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  • Belief through Thick and Thin.Wesley Buckwalter, David Rose & John Turri - 2015 - Noûs 49 (4):748-775.
    We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that the (...)
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  • Knowledge entails dispositional belief.David Rose & Jonathan Schaffer - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (S1):19-50.
    Knowledge is widely thought to entail belief. But Radford has claimed to offer a counterexample: the case of the unconfident examinee. And Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel have claimed empirical vindication of Radford. We argue, in defense of orthodoxy, that the unconfident examinee does indeed have belief, in the epistemically relevant sense of dispositional belief. We buttress this with empirical results showing that when the dispositional conception of belief is specifically elicited, people’s intuitions then conform with the view that knowledge entails (dispositional) (...)
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  • Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge.Joachim Horvath & Alex Wiegmann - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (10):2701-2726.
    Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...)
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  • The interventionist account of causation and the basing relation.Kevin McCain - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 159 (3):357-382.
    It is commonplace to distinguish between propositional justification (having good reasons for believing p) and doxastic justification (believing p on the basis of those good reasons).One necessary requirement for bridging the gap between S’s merely having propositional justification that p and S’s having doxastic justification that p is that S base her belief that p on her reasons (propositional justification).A plausible suggestion for what it takes for S’s belief to be based on her reasons is that her reasons must contribute (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Learning from words.Jennifer Lackey - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):77–101.
    There is a widely accepted family of views in the epistemology of testimony centering around the claim that belief is the central item involved in a testimonial exchange. For instance, in describing the process of learning via testimony, Elizabeth Fricker provides the following: “one language-user has a belief, which gives rise to an utterance by him; as a result of observing this utterance another user of the same language, his audience, comes to share that belief.” In a similar spirit, Alvin (...)
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  • Coherence as Constraint Satisfaction.Paul Thagard & Karsten Verbeurgt - 1998 - Cognitive Science 22 (1):1-24.
    This paper provides a computational characterization of coherence that applies to a wide range of philosophical problems and psychological phenomena. Maximizing coherence is a matter of maximizing satisfaction of a set of positive and negative constraints. After comparing five algorithms for maximizing coherence, we show how our characterization of coherence overcomes traditional philosophical objections about circularity and truth.
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  • Fading Foundations: Probability and the Regress Problem.Jeanne Peijnenburg - 2017 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Edited by Jeanne Peijnenburg.
    This Open Access book addresses the age-old problem of infinite regresses in epistemology. How can we ever come to know something if knowing requires having good reasons, and reasons can only be good if they are backed by good reasons in turn? The problem has puzzled philosophers ever since antiquity, giving rise to what is often called Agrippa's Trilemma. The current volume approaches the old problem in a provocative and thoroughly contemporary way. Taking seriously the idea that good reasons are (...)
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  • Coherentism via Graphs.Selim Berker - 2015 - Philosophical Issues 25 (1):322-352.
    Once upon a time, coherentism was the dominant response to the regress problem in epistemology, but in recent decades the view has fallen into disrepute: now almost everyone is a foundationalist (with a few infinitists sprinkled here and there). In this paper, I sketch a new way of thinking about coherentism, and show how it avoids many of the problems often thought fatal for the view, including the isolation objection, worries over circularity, and concerns that the concept of coherence is (...)
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  • The epistemic virtues of consistency.Sharon Ryan - 1996 - Synthese 109 (2):121-141.
    The lottery paradox has been discussed widely. The standard solution to the lottery paradox is that a ticket holder is justified in believing each ticket will lose but the ticket holder is also justified in believing not all of the tickets will lose. If the standard solution is true, then we get the paradoxical result that it is possible for a person to have a justified set of beliefs that she knows is inconsistent. In this paper, I argue that the (...)
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  • What's wrong with immediate knowledge?William P. Alston - 1983 - Synthese 55 (April):73-96.
    Immediate knowledge is here construed as true belief that does not owe its status as knowledge to support by other knowledge (or justified belief) of the same subject. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a criticism of attempts to show the impossibility of immediate knowledge. I concentrate on attempts by Wilfrid Sellars and Laurence Bonjour to show that putative immediate knowledge really depends on higher-level knowledge or justified belief about the status of the beliefs involved in the putative (...)
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  • Epistemic norms.John L. Pollock - 1987 - Synthese 71 (1):61 - 95.
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  • Epistemic conservatism.Richard Foley - 1983 - Philosophical Studies 43 (2):165 - 182.
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  • The Decision-Theoretic Lockean Thesis.Dustin Troy Locke - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (1):28-54.
    Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis ’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to (...)
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  • Epistemic value.William G. Lycan - 1985 - Synthese 64 (2):137 - 164.
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  • Knowing from testimony.Jennifer Lackey - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (5):432–448.
    Testimony is a vital and ubiquitous source of knowledge. Were we to refrain from accepting the testimony of others, our lives would be impoverished in startling and debilitating ways. Despite the vital role that testimony occupies in our epistemic lives, traditional epistemological theories have focused primarily on other sources, such as sense perception, memory, and reason, with relatively little attention devoted specifically to testimony. In recent years, however, the epistemic significance of testimony has been more fully appreciated. I shall here (...)
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  • The Lottery Paradox and Our Epistemic Goal.Igor Douven - 2008 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2):204-225.
    Many have the intuition that the right response to the Lottery Paradox is to deny that one can justifiably believe of even a single lottery ticket that it will lose. The paper shows that from any theory of justification that solves the paradox in accordance with this intuition, a theory not of that kind can be derived that also solves the paradox but is more conducive to our epistemic goal than the former. It is argued that currently there is no (...)
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  • Epistemic Internalism.Bjc Madison - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (10):840-853.
    The internalism /externalism debate is of interest in epistemology since it addresses one of the most fundamental questions in the discipline: what is the basic nature of knowledge and epistemic justification? It is generally held that if a positive epistemic status obtains, this is not a brute fact. Rather if a belief is, for example, justified, it is justified in virtue of some further condition obtaining. What has been called epistemic internalism holds, as the label suggests, is that all the (...)
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  • Epistemic Injustice in Social Cognition.Wesley Buckwalter - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):294-308.
    ABSTRACTSilencing is a practice that disrupts linguistic and communicative acts, but its relationship to knowledge and justice is not fully understood. Prior models of epistemic injustice tend to c...
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  • The basing relation and the impossibility of the debasing demon.Patrick Bondy & J. Adam Carter - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3):203.
    Descartes’ demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really are. However, as Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, not all knowledge is imperilled by this kind of deception. You still know you are a thinking thing. Perhaps, though, there is a more virulent demon in epistemic hell, one from which none of our knowledge is safe. Jonathan Schaffer thinks so. The “Debasing Demon” he imagines threatens knowledge not via the truth (...)
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  • Fallibilism.Baron Reed - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (9):585-596.
    Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully (...)
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  • Skeptical arguments from underdetermination.Ümit D. Yalçin - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 68 (1):1 - 34.
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  • Coherentism and justified inconsistent beliefs: A solution.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 2012 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):21-41.
    The most pressing difficulty coherentism faces is, I believe, the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs. In a nutshell, there are cases in which our beliefs appear to be both fully rational and justified, and yet the contents of the beliefs are inconsistent, often knowingly so. This fact contradicts the seemingly obvious idea that a minimal requirement for coherence is logical consistency. Here, I present a solution to one version of this problem.
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  • Explanationist rebuttals (coherentism defended again).William G. Lycan - 2012 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):5-20.
    An explanatory coherence theory of justification is sketched and then defended against a number of recent objections: conservatism and relativism; wild and crazy beliefs; reliability; warranted necessary falsehoods; basing; distant, unknown coherences; Sosa's “self- and present-abstracts”; and Bayesian impossibility results.
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  • Keeping Track of the Gettier Problem.Sven Bernecker - 2011 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2):127-152.
    This paper argues that for someone to know proposition p inferentially it is not enough that his belief in p and his justification for believing p covary with the truth of p through a sphere of possibilities. A further condition on inferential knowledge is that p's truth-maker is identical with, or causally related to, the state of affairs the justification is grounded in. This position is dubbed ‘identificationism.’.
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  • A minimal expression of non–reductionism in the epistemology of testimony.Jennifer Lackey - 2003 - Noûs 37 (4):706–723.
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  • Problems for Explanationism on Both Sides.T. Ryan Byerly & Kraig Martin - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (4):773-791.
    This paper continues a recent exchange in this journal concerning explanationist accounts of epistemic justification. In the first paper in this exchange, Byerly argues that explanationist views judge that certain beliefs about the future are unjustified when in fact they are justified. In the second paper, McCain defends a version of explanationism which he argues escapes Byerly’s criticism. Here we contribute to this exchange in two ways. In the first section, we argue that McCain’s defense of explanationism against Byerly’s objection (...)
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  • Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection.Jennifer Lackey - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 126 (2):163-190.
    One of the central problems afflicting reductionism in the epistemology of testimony is the apparent fact that infants and small children are not cognitively capable of having the inductively based positive reasons required by this view. Since non-reductionism does not impose a requirement of this sort, it is thought to avoid this problem and is therefore taken to have a significant advantage over reductionism. In this paper, however, I argue that if this objection undermines reductionism, then a variant of it (...)
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  • The Pathologies of Standard Analytic Epistemology.Michael Bishop & J. D. Trout - 2005 - Noûs 39 (4):696-714.
    Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and contextualism. While proponents of SAE don’t agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can’t work. For the purposes of this paper, we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemology takes as its core, as its starting-point, (...)
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  • Philosophical thought experiments as heuristics for theory discovery.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Sara Kier Praëm - 2015 - Synthese 192 (9):2827-2842.
    The growing literature on philosophical thought experiments has so far focused almost exclusively on the role of thought experiments in confirming or refuting philosophical hypotheses or theories. In this paper we draw attention to an additional and largely ignored role that thought experiments frequently play in our philosophical practice: some thought experiments do not merely serve as means for testing various philosophical hypotheses or theories, but also serve as facilitators for conceiving and articulating new ones. As we will put it, (...)
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  • Epistemic Consequentialism: Its Relation to Ethical Consequentialism and the Truth-Indication Principle.Jochen Briesen - 2016 - In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig, Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 277-306.
    Consequentialist positions in philosophy spell out normative notions by recourse to final aims. Hedonistic versions of ETHICAL consequentialism spell out what is MORALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. Veritistic versions of EPISTEMIC consequentialism spell out what is EPISTEMICALLY right/justified via recourse to the aim of increasing the number of true beliefs and decreasing the number of false ones. Even though these theories are in many respects structurally analogous, there are also interesting disanalogies. For (...)
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  • A coherence interpretation of semi-revision.Erik J. Olsson - 1997 - Theoria 63 (1-2):105-134.
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  • The epistemic efficacy of stupidity.Catherine Z. Elgin - 1988 - Synthese 74 (3):297 - 311.
    I show that it follows from both externalist and internalist theories that stupid people may be in a better position to know than smart ones. This untoward consequence results from taking our epistemic goal to be accepting as many truths as possible and rejecting as many falsehoods as possible, combined with a recognition that the standard for acceptability cannot be set too high, else scepticism will prevail. After showing how causal, reliabilist, and coherentist theories devalue intelligence, I suggest that knowledge, (...)
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  • Knowledge and practical reasoning.Igor Douven - 2008 - Dialectica 62 (1):101–118.
    The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assuming is the right one, and that hence (...)
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  • Conservatism and its virtues.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 1989 - Synthese 79 (1):143 - 163.
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  • Epistemology Factualized: New Contractarian Foundations for Epistemology.Ram Neta - 2006 - Synthese 150 (2):247-280.
    Many epistemologists are interested in offering a positive account of how it is that many of our common sense beliefs enjoy one or another positive epistemological status (e.g., how they are warranted, justified, reasonable, or what have you). A number of philosophers, under the influence of Wittgenstein and/or J. L. Austin, have argued that this enterprise is misconceived. The most effective version of this argument is to be found in Mark Kaplan’s paper “Epistemology on Holiday”. After explaining what this criticism (...)
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  • Foundationalism, epistemic dependence, and defeasibility.Robert Audi - 1983 - Synthese 55 (1):119 - 139.
    This paper is an examination of modest foundationalism in relation to some important criteria of epistemic dependence. The paper distinguishes between causal and epistemic dependence and indicates how each might be related to reasons. Four kinds of reasons are also distinguished: reasons to believe, reasons one has for believing, reasons for which one believes, and reasons why one believes. In the light of all these distinctions, epistemic dependence is contrasted with defeasibility, and it is argued that modest foundationalism is not (...)
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  • No Justification for Lottery Losers.Christoph Kelp - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (2):205-217.
    Igor Douven has recently developed a challenge for accounts of justification according to which beliefs about lottery losers are never justified. This article argues that champions of such accounts can rise to Douven's challenge and, what's more, that they can turn Douven's argument around in the sense that they can legitimately take it to provide a vindication of their preferred view.
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  • Basic reasons and first philosophy: A coherentist view of reasons.Ted Poston - 2012 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1):75-93.
    This paper develops and defends a coherentist account of reasons. I develop three core ideas for this defense: a distinction between basic reasons and noninferential justification, the plausibility of the neglected argument against first philosophy, and an emergent account of reasons. These three ideas form the backbone for a credible coherentist view of reasons. I work toward this account by formulating and explaining the basic reasons dilemma. This dilemma reveals a wavering attitude that coherentists have had toward basic reasons. More (...)
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  • A defense of epistemic intuitionism.Paul K. Moser - 1984 - Metaphilosophy 15 (3-4):196-209.
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  • Common sense in Thomas Reid.John Greco - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1):142-155.
    This paper explains the nature and role of common sense in Reid and uses the exposition to answer some of Reid's critics. The key to defending Reid is to distinguish between two kinds of priority that common sense beliefs are supposed to enjoy. Common sense beliefs enjoy epistemological priority in that they constitute a foundation for knowledge; i.e. they have evidential status without being grounded in further evidence themselves. Common sense beliefs enjoy methodological priority in that they constrain philosophical theory: (...)
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  • The Theory of Questions, Epistemic Powers, and the Indexical Theory of Knowledge.Hector-Neri Castañeda - 1980 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1):193-238.
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  • What does explanatory coherence explain?Ronald N. Giere - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):475-476.
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  • On cogito propositions.William J. Rapaport - 1976 - Philosophical Studies 29 (1):63-68.
    I argue that George Nakhnikian's analysis of the logic of cogito propositions (roughly, Descartes's 'cogito' and 'sum') is incomplete. The incompleteness is rectified by showing that disjunctions of cogito propositions with contingent, non-cogito propositions satisfy conditions of incorrigibility, self-certifyingness, and pragmatic consistency; hence, they belong to the class of propositions with whose help a complete characterization of cogito propositions is made possible.
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  • On an aristotelian theory of universals.Arnold Cusmariu - 1979 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 57 (1):51 – 58.
    A theory purporting to solve the problem of universals must be able to explain predication, recurrence, and classification. How Platonism does this is well known. Here I take a hard look at an attempt by M.J. Cresswell to give an Aristotelian answer and show it to be a complete and utter failure. The answer does not eliminate commitment to universals and it is only half an answer anyway because it does not cover relational predicates, an omission that Russell noted dooms (...)
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  • Extending explanatory coherence.Paul Thagard - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):490-502.
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  • Explanationist Plasticity and the Problem of the Criterion.Ted Poston - 2011 - Philosophical Papers 40 (3):395-419.
    Abstract This paper develops an explanationist treatment of the problem of the criterion. Explanationism is the view that all justified reasoning is justified in virtue of the explanatory virtues: simplicity, fruitfulness, testability, scope, and conservativeness. A crucial part of the explanationist framework is achieving wide reflective equilibrium. I argue that explanationism offers a plausible solution to the problem of the criterion. Furthermore, I argue that a key feature of explanationism is the plasticity of epistemic judgments and epistemic methods. The explanationist (...)
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  • (1 other version)Unification and Explanation: Explanation as a Prototype Concept. A Reply to Weber and van Dyck, Gijsberg, and de Regt.Gerhard Schurz - 2014 - Theoria 29 (1):57-70.
    __In this paper I investigate unification as a virtue of explanation. I the first part of the paper I give a brief exposition of the unification account of Schurz and Lambert and Schurz. I illustrate the advantages of this account in comparison to the older unification accounts of Friedman and Kitcher. In the second part I discuss several comments and objections to the Schurz-Lambert account that were raised by Weber and van Dyck, Gijsberg and de Regt. In the third and (...)
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