Results for 'Ellen Wright Clayton'

400 found
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  1. What is Rational Belief?Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2024 - Noûs 58 (2):333-359.
    A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know (...)
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  2. Are There Counterexamples to the Consistency Principle?Clayton Littlejohn - 2023 - Episteme 20 (4):852-869.
    Must rational thinkers have consistent sets of beliefs? I shall argue that it can be rational for a thinker to believe a set of propositions known to be inconsistent. If this is right, an important test for a theory of rational belief is that it allows for the right kinds of inconsistency. One problem we face in trying to resolve disagreements about putative rational requirements is that parties to the disagreement might be working with different conceptions of the relevant attitudes. (...)
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  3. Truth, knowledge, and the standard of proof in criminal law.Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - Synthese 197 (12):5253-5286.
    Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). (...)
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  4. Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality.Littlejohn Clayton - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:257-272.
    In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to (...)
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  5. Justification, knowledge, and normality.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1593-1609.
    There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view (...)
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  6. The Russellian Retreat.Clayton Littlejohn - 2013 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113 (3pt3):293-320.
    Belief does aim at the truth. When our beliefs do not fit the facts, they cannot do what they are supposed to do, because they cannot provide us with reasons. We cannot plausibly deny that a truth norm is among the norms that govern belief. What we should not say is that the truth norm is the fundamental epistemic norm. In this paper, I shall argue that knowledge is the norm of belief and that the truth norm has a derivative (...)
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  7. How and Why Knowledge is First.Clayton Littlejohn - 2017 - In J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon & Benjamin W. Jarvis (eds.), Knowledge First: Approaches in Epistemology and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 19-45.
    A defense of the idea that knowledge is first in the sense that there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts reasons or evidence in your possession. Includes a critical discussion of the idea that perception or perceptual experience might provide reasons and a defense of a knowledge-first approach to justified belief.
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  8. Fake Barns and false dilemmas.Clayton Littlejohn - 2014 - Episteme 11 (4):369-389.
    The central thesis of robust virtue epistemology (RVE) is that the difference between knowledge and mere true belief is that knowledge involves success that is attributable to a subject's abilities. An influential objection to this approach is that RVE delivers the wrong verdicts in cases of environmental luck. Critics of RVE argue that the view needs to be supplemented with modal anti-luck condition. This particular criticism rests on a number of mistakes about the nature of ability that I shall try (...)
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  9. Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance.Clayton Litlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2021 - In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Oxford Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 223–246.
    In this paper, we propose a new theory of rationality defeat. We propose that defeaters are "indicators of ignorance", evidence that we’re not in a position to know some target proposition. When the evidence that we’re not in a position to know is sufficiently strong and the probability that we can know is too low, it is not rational to believe. We think that this account retains all the virtues of the more familiar approaches that characterise defeat in terms of (...)
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  10. Being More Realistic About Reasons: On Rationality and Reasons Perspectivism.Clayton Littlejohn - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):605-627.
    This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the requirements of rationality with the demands of normative reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends upon the agent’s perspective and the other upon features of the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational requirements (...)
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  11. Knowing the facts, alternative and otherwise.Clayton Littlejohn - 2023 - In Rodrigo Borges & Ian Schnee (eds.), Illuminating Errors: New Essays on Knowledge from Non-Knowledge. New York, NY: Routledge.
    While we often assume that we can only know what is so, it's clear that we often speak as if we know things that aren't strictly speaking true. What should we make of this? Some would argue that we should take this talk as evidence that it's possible to know things that are strictly speaking false when, say, false representations are adequate for our purposes. I shall argue that it would be better on the whole to say (a) that knowledge (...)
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  12. The Externalist’s Demon.Clayton Littlejohn - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):399-434.
    In this paper, I defend externalist accounts of justified belief from Cohen's new evil demon objection. While I think that Cohen might be right that the person is justified in believing what she does, I argue that this is because we can defend the person from criticism and that defending a person is a very different thing from defending a person's attitudes or actions. To defend a person's attitudes or actions, we need to show that they met standards or did (...)
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  13. Should we be dogmatically conciliatory?Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1381-1398.
    A familiar complaint about conciliatory approaches to disagreement is that they are self-defeating or incoherent because they ‘call for their own rejection’. This complaint seems to be influential but it isn’t clear whether conciliatory views call for their own rejection or what, if anything, this tells us about the coherence of such views. We shall look at two ways of developing this self-defeat objection and we shall see that conciliatory views emerge unscathed. A simple version of the self-defeat objection leaves (...)
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  14. Reasons and Theoretical Rationality.Clayton Littlejohn - 2018 - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
    A discussion of epistemic reasons, theoretical rationality, and the relationship between them. Discusses the ontology of reasons and evidence, the relationship between reasons (motivating, normative, possessed, apparent, genuine, etc.) and rationality, the relationship between epistemic reasons and evidence, the relationship between rationality, justification, and knowledge, and many other related topics.
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  15. Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness.Philip Clayton - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press UK.
    Strong claims have been made for emergence as a new paradigm for understanding science, consciousness, and religion. Tracing the past history and current definitions of the concept, Clayton assesses the case for emergent phenomena in the natural world and their significance for philosophy and theology. Complex emergent phenomena require irreducible levels of explanation in physics, chemistry and biology. This pattern of emergence suggests a new approach to the problem of consciousness, which is neither reducible to brain states nor proof (...)
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  16. A Plea for Epistemic Excuses.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Julien Dutant Fabian Dorsch (ed.), The New Evil Demon Problem. Oxford University Press.
    The typical epistemology course begins with a discussion of the distinction between justification and knowledge and ends without any discussion of the distinction between justification and excuse. This is unfortunate. If we had a better understanding of the justification-excuse distinction, we would have a better understanding of the intuitions that shape the internalism-externalism debate. My aims in this paper are these. First, I will explain how the kinds of excuses that should interest epistemologists exculpate. Second, I will explain why the (...)
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  17. Justified Belief and Just Conviction.Clayton Littlejohn - 2021 - In Jon Robson & Zachary Hoskins (eds.), The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials. Routledge.
    Abstract: When do we meet the standard of proof in a criminal trial? Some have argued that it is when the guilt of the defendant is sufficiently probable on the evidence. Some have argued that it is a matter of normic support. While the first view provides us with a nice account of how we ought to manage risk, the second explains why we shouldn’t convict on the basis of naked statistical evidence alone. Unfortunately, this second view doesn’t help us (...)
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  18. The unity of reason.Clayton Littlejohn - 2013 - In Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Cases of reasonable, mistaken belief figure prominently in discussions of the knowledge norm of assertion and practical reason as putative counterexamples to these norms. These cases are supposed to show that the knowledge norm is too demanding and that some weaker norm ought to put in its place. These cases don't show what they're intended to. When you assert something false or treat some falsehood as if it's a reason for action, you might deserve an excuse. You often don't deserve (...)
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  19. Knowledge and Prizes.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - forthcoming - In Artūrs Logins & Jacques Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality must be like. (...)
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  20. A justification for excuses: Brown’s discussion of the knowledge view of justification and the excuse manoeuvre.Clayton Littlejohn - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (8):2683-2696.
    In Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown identifies a number of problems for the so-called knowledge view of justification. According to this view, we cannot justifiably believe what we do not know. Most epistemologists reject this view on the grounds that false beliefs can be justified if, say, supported by the evidence or produced by reliable processes. We think this is a mistake and that many epistemologists are classifying beliefs as justified because they have properties that indicate that something should (...)
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  21. Disagreement and Defeat.Clayton Littlejohn - 2012 - In Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Disagreement and skepticism. New York: Routledge.
    The equal weight view says that if you discover that you disagree with a peer, you should decrease your confidence that you are in the right. Since peer disagreement seems to be quite prevalent, the equal weight view seems to tell us that we cannot reasonably believe many of the interesting things we believe because we can always count on a peer to contest the interesting things that we believe. While the equal weight view seems to have skeptical implications, few (...)
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  22. Who Cares What You Accurately Believe?Clayton Littlejohn - 2015 - Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1):217-248.
    This is a critical discussion of the accuracy-first approach to epistemic norms. If you think of accuracy (gradational or categorical) as the fundamental epistemic good and think of epistemic goods as things that call for promotion, you might think that we should use broadly consequentialist reasoning to determine which norms govern partial and full belief. After presenting consequentialist arguments for probabilism and the normative Lockean view, I shall argue that the consequentialist framework isn't nearly as promising as it might first (...)
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  23. (1 other version)Learning from Learning from our Mistakes.Clayton Littlejohn - 2016 - In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Epistemic Norms, Epistemic Goals. De Gruyter. pp. 51-70.
    What can we learn from cases of knowledge from falsehood? Critics of knowledge-first epistemology have argued that these cases provide us with good reason for rejecting the knowledge accounts of evidence, justification, and the norm of belief. I shall offer a limited defense of the knowledge-first approach to these matters. Knowledge from falsehood cases should undermine our confidence in like-from-like reasoning in epistemology. Just as we should be open to the idea that knowledge can come from non-knowledge, we should be (...)
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  24. The Right in the Good: A Defense of Teleological Non-Consequentialism in Epistemology.Clayton Littlejohn - 2018 - In Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn (eds.), Epistemic Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 23-47.
    There has been considerable discussion recently of consequentialist justifications of epistemic norms. In this paper, I shall argue that these justifications are not justifications. The consequentialist needs a value theory, a theory of the epistemic good. The standard theory treats accuracy as the fundamental epistemic good and assumes that it is a good that calls for promotion. Both claims are mistaken. The fundamental epistemic good involves accuracy, but it involves more than just that. The fundamental epistemic good is knowledge, not (...)
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  25. Pritchard’s Reasons.Clayton Littlejohn - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Research 41:201-219.
    My contribution to the author meets critics discussion of Pritchard's _Epistemological Disjunctivism_. In this paper, I examine some of the possible motivations for epistemological disjunctivism and look at some of the costs associated with the view. While Pritchard's view seems to be that our visual beliefs constitute knowledge because they're based on reasons, I argue that the claim that visual beliefs are based on reasons or evidence hasn't been sufficiently motivated. In the end I suggest that we'll get all the (...)
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  26. Evidence and its Limits.Clayton Littlejohn - 2018 - In Conor McHugh, Jonathan Way & Daniel Whiting (eds.), Normativity: Epistemic and Practical. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    On a standard view about reasons, evidence, and justification, there is justification for you to believe all and only what your evidence supports and the reasons that determine whether there is justification to believe are all just pieces of evidence. This view is mistaken about two things. It is mistaken about the rational role of evidence. It is also mistaken about the rational role of reasons. To show this, I present two basis problems for the standard view and argue that (...)
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  27. Must we act only on what we know?Clayton Littlejohn - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (8):463-473.
    What relation is there between knowledge and action? According to Hawthorne and Stanley, where your choice is p-dependent, it is appropriate to treat the proposition that p as a reason for acting iff you know that p (RKP). In this paper, I shall argue that it is permissible to treat something as a reason for action even if it isn't known to be true and address Hawthorne and Stanley's arguments for RKP.
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  28. Prospects for Panentheism as Research Program.Philip Clayton - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1):1-18.
    Panentheism is best understood as a philosophical research program. Identifying the core of the research program offers a strong response to the demarcation objection. It also helps focus both objections to and defenses of panentheism — and to show why common objections are not actually criticisms of the position we are defending. The paper also addresses two common criticisms: the alleged inadequacy of panentheism’s double “in” specification of the relationship between God and world, and the “double God” objection. Once the (...)
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  29. On what we should believe (and when (and why) we should believe what we know we should not believe).Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - In Scott Stapleford & Kevin McCain (eds.), Epistemic Duties: New Arguments, New Angles. New York: Routledge.
    A theory of what we should believe should include a theory of what we should believe when we are uncertain about what we should believe and/or uncertain about the factors that determine what we should believe. In this paper, I present a novel theory of what we should believe that gives normative externalists a way of responding to a suite of objections having to do with various kinds of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. This theory is inspired by recent work in (...)
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  30. Defeating phenomenal conservatism.Clayton Littlejohn - 2011 - Analytic Philosophy 52 (1):35-48.
    According to the phenomenal conservatives, beliefs are justified by non-doxastic states we might speak of as ‘appearances’ or ‘seemings’. Those who defend the view say that there is something self-defeating about believing that phenomenal conservatism is mistaken. They also claim that the view captures an important internalist insight about justification. I shall argue that phenomenal conservatism is indefensible. The considerations that seem to support the view commit the phenomenal conservatives to condoning morally abhorrent behavior. They can deny that their view (...)
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  31. Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):801-827.
    Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its (...)
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  32. Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for Research Performing Organisations: The Bonn PRINTEGER Statement.Ellen-Marie Forsberg, Frank O. Anthun, Sharon Bailey, Giles Birchley, Henriette Bout, Carlo Casonato, Gloria González Fuster, Bert Heinrichs, Serge Horbach, Ingrid Skjæggestad Jacobsen, Jacques Janssen, Matthias Kaiser, Inge Lerouge, Barend van der Meulen, Sarah de Rijcke, Thomas Saretzki, Margit Sutrop, Marta Tazewell, Krista Varantola, Knut Jørgen Vie, Hub Zwart & Mira Zöller - 2018 - Science and Engineering Ethics 24 (4):1023-1034.
    This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on (...)
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  33. The Space Between.Ellen Clarke - 2019 - Analyse & Kritik 41 (2):239-258.
    Buchanan and Powell hope to rescue optimism about moral perfectibility from the ’received view’ of human evolution, by tweaking our view of the innate character of morality. I argue that their intervention is hampered by an unnecessary commitment to nativism, by gender bias within the received view, and by liberal presuppositions.
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  34. Moore's Paradox and Assertion.Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - In Goldberg Sanford (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Assertion. Oxford University Press.
    If I were to say, “Agnes does not know that it is raining, but it is,” this seems like a perfectly coherent way of describing Agnes’s epistemic position. If I were to add, “And I don’t know if it is, either,” this seems quite strange. In this chapter, we shall look at some statements that seem, in some sense, contradictory, even though it seems that these statements can express propositions that are contingently true or false. Moore thought it was paradoxical (...)
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  35. Knowledge and Awareness.Clayton Littlejohn - 2015 - Analysis 75 (4):596-603.
    This paper takes a critical look at the idea that knowledge involves reflective access to reasons that provide rational support. After distinguishing between different kinds of awareness, I argue that the kind of awareness involved in awareness of reasons is awareness of something general rather than awareness of something that instances some generality. Such awareness involves the exercise of conceptual capacities and just is knowledge. Since such awareness is knowledge, this kind of awareness cannot play any interesting role in a (...)
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  36. Dividing Away Doxastic Dilemmas.Clayton Littlejohn - 2021 - In Nick Hughes (ed.), Epistemic Dilemmas. Oxford University Press.
    It seems that different epistemic norms can come into conflict and so we might wonder what happens when they do impose incompatible requirements upon us. According to the dilemmic view, they might sometimes generate sets of requirements that cannot be satisfied, ensuring that there is no rationally acceptable way for a thinker to deal with the predicament she’s in. After reviewing the case for the dilemmic view, I introduce an alternative framework that accounts for the appearance of dilemma-like conflicts without (...)
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  37. Don’t Know, Don’t Believe: Reply to Kroedel.Clayton Littlejohn - 2013 - Logos and Episteme 4 (2):231-38.
    In recent work, Thomas Kroedel has proposed a novel solution to the lottery paradox. As he sees it, we are permitted/justified in believing some lottery propositions, but we are not permitted/justified in believing them all. I criticize this proposal on two fronts. First, I think that if we had the right to add some lottery beliefs to our belief set, we would not have any decisive reason to stop adding more. Suggestions to the contrary run into the wrong kind of (...)
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  38. Moore's paradox and epistemic norms.Clayton Littlejohn - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (1):79 – 100.
    We shall evaluate two strategies for motivating the view that knowledge is the norm of belief. The first draws on observations concerning belief's aim and the parallels between belief and assertion. The second appeals to observations concerning Moore's Paradox. Neither of these strategies gives us good reason to accept the knowledge account. The considerations offered in support of this account motivate only the weaker account on which truth is the fundamental norm of belief.
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  39. Do Reasons and Evidence Share the Same Residence.Clayton Littlejohn - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3):720-727.
    This is part of an authors meets critics session on Daniel Star's wonderful book, Knowing Better. I discuss a potential problem with Kearns and Star's Reasons as Evidence thesis. The issue has to do with the difficulties we face is we treat normative reasons as evidence and impose no possession conditions on evidence. On such a view, it's hard to see how practical reasoning could be a non-monotonic process. One way out of the difficulty would be to allow for (potent) (...)
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  40. La Verdad en el Gnosticismo.Clayton Littlejohn - 2016 - Análisis. Revista de Investigación Filosófica 3:217-241.
    Hay dos supuestos sobre el valor epistémico que guían las discusiones más recientes sobre éste. El primero es que hay algo bueno con respecto a la creencia verdadera. El segundo supuesto es que es posible que dos creencias difieran en su valor incluso si ambas creencias son igualmente correctas. El veritista tiene fácil explicar el primer supuesto, pero tiene más difícil explicar el segundo. Para explicarlo, el veritista tiene que mostrar que las creencias verdaderas pueden diferir en su valor porque (...)
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  41. Is Justification Just in the Head?Clayton Littlejohn - 2024 - In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
    I argue that justification isn't just in the head. The argument is simple. We should be guided by our beliefs. We shouldn't be guided by anything to do what we shouldn't do. So, we shouldn't believe in ways that would guide us to do the things that we shouldn't. Among the various things we should do is discharge our duties (e.g., to fulfil our promissory obligations) and respect the rights of others (e.g., rights not to be harmed or killed by (...)
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  42. Neither/Nor.Clayton Littlejohn - 2019 - In Casey Doyle, Joseph Milburn & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism. New York: Routledge.
    Abstract: On one formulation, epistemological disjunctivism is the view that our perceptual beliefs constitute knowledge when they are based on reasons that provide them with factive support. Some would argue that it is impossible to understand how perceptual knowledge is possible unless we assume that we have such reasons to support our perceptual beliefs. Some would argue that it is impossible to understand how perceptual experience could furnish us with these reasons unless we assume that the traditional view of experience (...)
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  43. A Note Concerning Conciliationism and Self-Defeat: A Reply to Matheson.Clayton Littlejohn - 2014 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.
    This is a reply to Jon Matheson on conciliationism and the self-defeat objection. I argue that the problems that Matheson discusses derive from his evidentialist assumptions, not from conciliationism.
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  44. Origins of Evolutionary Transitions.Ellen Clarke - 2014 - Journal of Biosciences 39 (2):303-317.
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  45. A note concerning justification and access.Clayton Littlejohn - 2013 - Episteme 10 (4):369-386.
    Certain combinations of attitudes are manifestly unreasonable. It is unreasonable to believe that dogs bark, for example, if one concedes that one has no justification to believe this. Why are the irrational combinations irrational? One suggestion is that these are attitudes that a subject cannot have justification to have. If this is right, we can test claims about the structure of propositional justification by relying on our observations about which combinations of attitudes constitute Moorean absurd pairs. In a recent defense (...)
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  46. Are Epistemic Reasons Ever Reasons to Promote?Clayton Littlejohn - 2013 - Logos and Episteme 4 (3):353-360.
    In trying to distinguish the right kinds of reasons from the wrong, epistemologists often appeal to the connection to truth to explain why practical considerations cannot constitute reasons. The view they typically opt for is one on which only evidence can constitute a reason to believe. Talbot has shown that these approaches don’t exclude the possibility that there are non-evidential reasons for belief that can justify a belief without being evidence for that belief. He thinksthat there are indeed such reasons (...)
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  47. Objectivism and Subjectivism in Epistemology.Clayton Littlejohn - 2017 - In Veli Mitova (ed.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    There is a kind of objectivism in epistemology that involves the acceptance of objective epistemic norms. It is generally regarded as harmless. There is another kind of objectivism in epistemology that involves the acceptance of an objectivist account of justification, one that takes the justification of a belief to turn on its accuracy. It is generally regarded as hopeless. It is a strange and unfortunate sociological fact that these attitudes are so prevalent. Objectivism about norms and justification stand or fall (...)
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  48. Knowledge, justification, belief, and suspension.Clayton Littlejohn - 2021 - Philosophical Topics 49 (2):371-384.
    In this paper, I want to discuss a problem that arises when we try to understand the connections between justification, knowledge, and suspension. The problem arises because some prima facie plausible claims about knowledge and the justification for judging and suspending are difficult to reconcile with the possibility of a kind of knowledge or apt belief that a thinker cannot aptly judge to be within her reach. I shall argue that if we try to accommodate the possibility of this kind (...)
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  49. n-1 Guilty Men.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - forthcoming - In Simon Kirchin (ed.), The Future of Normativity. Oxford:
    We argue that there is nothing that can do the work that normative reasons are expected to do. A currently popular view is that in any given situation, a set of normative reasons (understood as a set of facts, typically about the agent’s situation) always determines the ways we prospectively should or should not respond. We discuss an example that we think shows no such collection of facts could have this normative significance. A radical response might be to dispense with (...)
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  50. The Multiple Realizability of Biological Individuals.Ellen Clarke - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy 110 (8):413-435.
    Biological theory demands a clear organism concept, but at present biologists cannot agree on one. They know that counting particular units, and not counting others, allows them to generate explanatory and predictive descriptions of evolutionary processes. Yet they lack a unified theory telling them which units to count. In this paper, I offer a novel account of biological individuality, which reconciles conflicting definitions of ‘organism’ by interpreting them as describing alternative realisers of a common functional role, and then defines individual (...)
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