Deepfakes are audio, video, or still-image digital artifacts created by the use of artificial intelligence technology, as opposed to traditional means of recording. Because deepfakes can look and sound much like genuine digital recordings, they have entered the popular imagination as sources of serious epistemic problems for us, as we attempt to navigate the increasingly treacherous digital information environment of the internet. In this paper, I attempt to clarify what epistemic problems deepfakes pose and why they pose these problems, by (...) drawing parallels between recordings and our own senses as sources of evidence. I show that deepfakes threaten to undermine the status of digital recordings as evidence. The existence of deepfakes thus encourages a kind of skepticism about digital recordings that bears important similarities to classic philosophical skepticism concerning the senses. However, the skepticism concerning digital recordings that deepfakes motivate is also importantly different from classical skepticism concerning the senses, and I argue that these differences illuminate some possible strategies for solving the epistemic problems posed by deepfakes. (shrink)

Truth is a fundamental philosophical concept that, despite its common and everyday use, has resisted common-sense formulations. At this point, one may legitimately wonder if there even is a common-sense notion of truth or what it could look like. In response, I propose here a common-sense account of truth based on four “truisms” that set a baseline for how to go about building an account of truth. Drawing on both ordinary language philosophy and contemporary pragmatic approaches to truth, I defend (...) a pragmatic, common-sense theory of truth. The result is a theory that focuses the use and function of truth while also emphasizing its “subject-independence.”. (shrink)

The current standard interpretation of Moore’s proof assumes Moore offers a solution to Kant’s famously posed problem of an external world, which Moore quotes at the start of his 1939 lecture “Proof of an External World.” As a solution to Kant’s problem, Moore’s proof fails utterly. Similarly, a second received interpretation imputes an aim of refuting metaphysical idealism that Moore’s proof does not at all achieve. This study departs from the received interpretations to credit Moore’s stated aim for the proof (...) Moore performed in his 1939 lecture that is to impose a counter-example to an explicitly stated presupposition of Kant’s famously posed problem of an external world. The outcome would therefore subvert Kant’s problem. There is not, however, any rival external world problem that Moore commends in place of Kant’s problem. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 198 - 207 The paper discusses and presents an alternative interpretation to Penelope Maddy’s reading of G.E. Moore’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s anti-skeptical strategies as proposed in her book _What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy_. It connects this discussion with the methodological claims Maddy puts forward and offers an alternative to her therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein’s _On Certainty_.

“Conceptual analysis” is a misnomer—it refers, but it does not refer to a method or practice that involves the analysis of concepts. Once this is recognized, many of the main arguments for skepticism about conceptual analysis can be answered, since many of these arguments falsely assume that conceptual analyses target concepts. The present paper defends conceptual analysis from skepticism about its viability and, positively, presents an argument for viewing conceptual analyses as targeting philosophical phenomena, not our concepts of these phenomena.

_ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 208 - 222 Penelope Maddy claims that we can have no evidence that we are not being globally deceived by an evil demon. However, Maddy’s Plain Inquirer holds that she has good evidence for a wide variety of claims about the world and her relation to it. She rejects the broadly Cartesian idea that she can’t be entitled to these claims, or have good evidence for them, or know them, unless she can provide (...) a defense of them that starts from nowhere. She likewise rejects the more limited demand for a defense that makes use only of considerations that do not concern the world outside of her mind. She allows that some considerations about the world can be appealed to perfectly appropriately as fully adequate evidence in favor of other considerations about the world. So why can’t the Plain Inquirer rule out global skeptical hypotheses by producing evidence against them that depends upon other considerations about the world? Is there good reason for singling out global skeptical hypotheses such as _I am not being deceived by an evil demon_ as requiring a different kind of treatment? Considerations about epistemic asymmetry and epistemic circularity, as well as Wittgensteinian considerations about the relation between evidence and the real-world and human background context, all lead to the conclusion that there is not. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 223 - 230 I here offer a discussion of some of Penelope Maddy’s responses to philosophical scepticism in her recent book, _What Do Philosophers Do?_ Among other things, I suggest that philosophers who take an interest in human knowledge are not primarily concerned with _whether_ anyone knows anything about the world, but rather with understanding _how_ we know the things we do in the face of the difficulties that seem naturally to arise in (...) the explanations they come up with. (shrink)