Edmund Gettier is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This short piece, published in 1963, seemed to many decisively to refute an otherwise attractive analysis of knowledge. It stimulated a renewed effort, still ongoing, to clarify exactly what knowledge comprises.

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of justified belief. What I have in mind is an explanatory theory, one that explains in a general way why certain beliefs are counted as justified and others as unjustified. Unlike some traditional approaches, I do not try to prescribe standards for justification that differ from, or improve upon, our ordinary standards. I merely try to explicate the ordinary standards, which are, I believe, quite different from those of many classical, (...) e. g., ‘Cartesian’, accounts. (shrink)

I argue that its appearing to you that P does not provide justification for believing that P unless you have independent justification for the denial of skeptical alternatives – hypotheses incompatible with P but such that if they were true, it would still appear to you that P. Thus I challenge the popular view of ‘dogmatism,’ according to which for some contents P, you need only lack reason to suspect that skeptical alternatives are true, in order for an experience as (...) of P to justify belief that P. I pursue three lines of objection to dogmatism, having to do with probabilistic reasoning, considerations of future or hypothetically available justification, and epistemic circularity. I briefly sketch a fall-back position which avoids the problems raised. (shrink)

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms (...) to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don't deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don't seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are either physical or supervene on the physical. (shrink)

I. The Mind-Body Problem after Kripke This essay will explore an approach to the mind-body problem that is distinct both from dualism and from the sort of conceptual reduction of the mental to the physical that proceeds via causal behaviorist or functionalist analysis of mental concepts. The essential element of the approach is that it takes the subjective phenomenological features of conscious experience to be perfectly real and not reducible to anything else--but nevertheless holds that their systematic relations to neurophysiology (...) are not contingent but necessary. (shrink)

Role of the entrepreneur in a distinct role of profit.

Dogmatism is sometimes thought to be incompatible with Bayesian models of rational learning. I show that the best model for updating imprecise credences is compatible with dogmatism.

This paper justifies the inference of probabilities from symmetries. I supply some examples of important and correct inferences of this variety. Two explanations of such inferences -- an explanation based on the Principle of Indifference and a proposal due to Poincaré and Reichenbach -- are considered and rejected. I conclude with my own account, in which the inferences in question are shown to be warranted a posteriori, provided that they are based on symmetries in the mechanisms of chance setups.

: It is generally accepted that skeptical scenarios must be possible to raise legitimate skeptical doubt. I argue that if the possibility in question is supposed to be genuine metaphysical possibility, the skeptic's reasoning does not straightforwardly succeed. I first motivate the metaphysical possibility requirement on skeptical scenarios : it's a plausible position that several authors accept and that a family of prominent views—sensitivity, safety, relevant alternatives—are committed to. I argue that plausible constraints in modal epistemology show that justification for (...) believing that certain global skeptical scenarios are metaphysically possible rests on some justified beliefs about the external world, and that this undermines the skeptical argument. While there may still be local skeptical challenges, skeptics cannot appeal to the metaphysical possibility of skeptical scenarios to generate global external world skepticism. (shrink)

Recreative Minds develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. The authors offer a lucid exploration of a fascinating subject.

<Hylas> It is indeed something unusual; but my thoughts were so taken up with a subject I was discoursing of last night, that finding I could not sleep, ...

Kripke, argued like this: it seems possible that E; the appearance can't be explained away as really pertaining to a "presentation" of E; so, pending a different explanation, it is possible that E. Textbook Kripkeans see in the contrast between E and its presentation intimations of a quite general distinction between two sorts of meaning. E's secondary or a posteriori meaning is the set of all worlds w which E, as employed here, truly describes. Its primary or a priori meaning (...) is the set of all w such that if w is actual, then E is true. "Conceivability error" occurs when a primary possibility is mistaken for a secondary one. Textbook Kripkeanism is rejected on the grounds that it makes meaning too modal and modality too much a matter of meaning. (shrink)

….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the MeditationsSubstance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and bodies (...) per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies. (shrink)

….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the MeditationsSubstance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and bodies (...) per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies. (shrink)

These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable therefore (...) to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. (shrink)

In a recent article, Adam Elga outlines a strategy for “Defeating Dr Evil with Self-Locating Belief”. The strategy relies on an indifference principle that is not up to the task. In general, there are two things to dislike about indifference principles: adopting one normally means confusing risk for uncertainty, and they tend to lead to incoherent views in some ‘paradoxical’ situations. I argue that both kinds of objection can be levelled against Elga’s indifference principle. There are also some difficulties with (...) the concept of evidence that Elga uses, and these create further difficulties for the principle. (shrink)

Images of myself being Napoleon can scarcely merely be images of the physical figure of Napoleon.... They will rather be images of, for instance, the desolation at Austerlitz as viewed by me vaguely aware of my short stature and my cockaded hat, my hand in my tunic.

Many important metaphysical arguments validly deduce an actuality from a possibility. For example: Because it is possible for me to exist in the absence of anything material, I am not my body. I argue that there is no reason to suppose that our capacity for modal judgment is equal to the task of determining whether the "possibility" premise of any of these arguments is true. I connect this thesis with Stephen Yablo's recent work on the epistemology of modal statements.

In these challenging pages, Unger argues for the extreme skeptical view that, not only can nothing ever be known, but no one can ever have any reason at all for anything. A consequence of this is that we cannot ever have any emotions about anything: no one can ever be happy or sad about anything. Finally, in this reduction to absurdity of virtually all our supposed thought, he argues that no one can ever believe, or even say, that anything is (...) the case. (shrink)

This book investigates what it means, and whether it is coherent, to say that there is a God.

This is a revised and updated version of Swinburne's controversial treatment of the eternal philosophical problem of the relation between mind and body. He argues that we can only make sense of the interaction between the mental and the physical in terms of the soul, and that there is no scientific explanation of the evolution of the soul.

A phenomenal concept is the concept of a particular type of sensory or perceptual experience, where the notion of experience is understood phenomenologically. A recent and increasingly influential idea in philosophy of mind suggests that reflection on these concepts will play a major role in the debate about conscious experience, and in particular in the defense of physicalism, the thesis that psychological truths supervene on physical truths. According to this idea—I call it the phenomenal concept strategy —phenomenal concepts are importantly (...) different from other concepts, and arguments against physicalism fatally neglect to take this difference into account. This paper divides the phenomenal concept strategy into a number of different versions, and argues that no version of the strategy is successful. The paper ends by contrasting the phenomenal concept strategy with a rival strategy—I call it the missing concept strategy . I suggest that the missing concept strategy presents a more plausible response to the issues about physicalism and experience. (shrink)

Lewis concludes that fallibilism is uncomfortable, though preferable to scepticism. However, he believes that contextualism about knowledge allows us to ‘dodge the choice’ between fallibilism and scepticism. For the contextualist semantics for ‘know’ can explain the oddity of fallibilism, without landing us into scepticism.

Saul Kripke’s discussion of the necessary aposteriori in Naming and Necessity and “Identity and Necessity” -- in which he lays the foundation for distinguishing epistemic from metaphysical possibility, and explaining the relationship between the two – is, in my opinion, one of the outstanding achievements of twentieth century philosophy.1 My aim in this essay is to extract the enduring lessons of his discussion, and disentangle them from certain difficulties which, alas, can also be found there. I will argue that there (...) are, in fact, two Kripkean routes to the necessary aposteriori – one correct and philosophically far-reaching, the other incorrect and philosophically misleading. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that causal relations between objects are represented in visual experience, and contrast my argument and its conclusion with Michotte's results from the 1960's.

According to recent accounts of the imagination, mental mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination‐based inputs (pretense representations) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. That is, such a mechanism should produce similar outputs whether its input is the belief that p or the pretense representation that p. Unfortunately, there seem to be clear counterexamples to this hypothesis, for in many cases, imagining that p and believing that p have quite different psychological (...) consequences. This paper sets out some central problem cases and argues that the cases might be accommodated by adverting to the role of desires concerning real and imaginary situations. (shrink)