A Persistent Interlocutor (PI) is someone who, in argumentative contexts, does not cease to question her opponent’s premises. The epistemic relevance of the PI has been debated throughout the history of philosophy. Pyrrhonians famously claim that our inability to dialectically vindicate our claims against a PI implies scepticism. Adam Leite disagrees (2005). Michael Resorla argues that the debate is based on a false premise (2009). In this paper, I argue that these views all fail to accurately account for the epistemic (...) relevance of the PI. I then briefly present an account that aims to do better in this regard, based on the modal notion of safety. On the account proposed, the PI does not violate epistemic or dialectical norms. Rather, her behaviour tends to be epistemically perverse in the sense that it wastes cognitive resources. Perhaps surprisingly, this defect turns out not to be unique to the PI. (shrink)

Internalists who argue against reliabilism usually construct thought experiments designed to show how reliability is not necessary or sufficient for justification. Defenders of reliabilism have responded with debunking explanations of the intuitions that people are expected to have when considering anti-reliabilist thought experiments. One defender is Jennifer Nagel, who argues that internalist counterexamples to reliabilism play off of a shift between belief-formation processes that are unconscious and those that involve self-reflection on the contents of one’s conscious states. Nagel aims to (...) show how thought experiments commonly appealed to by internalists rest on a mistake by carefully examining some of the most well-known examples in the literature. However, Nagel’s analysis does not apply on certain counterexamples to reliabilism, such as Cohen’s New Evil Demon. In this paper, I will show that when applied to NED-intuitions, Nagel’s analysis fails, so her argument does not extend to all anti-reliabilist counterexamples. (shrink)

I will argue that internalism about justification entails the apparently absurd conclusion that it is possible to know specific facts about the external world—for example, that there is a tree in the quad—on the basis of introspection and a priori reflection. After a brief characterization of internalism (§1), I will set out the problem (§2). I will then discuss three replies: one that denies the form of doxastic voluntarism involved in the problem (§3), one that denies that knowledge of higher-order (...) facts about justification can justify corresponding first-order beliefs (§4), and, finally, one that involves biting the bullet (§5). I will argue that each reply fails. (shrink)