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1. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Patrick Bondy Introduction
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2. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Sharon Ryan In Defense of Moral Evidentialism
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This paper is a defense of moral evidentialism, the view that we have a moral obligation to form the doxastic attitude that is best supported by our evidence. I argue that two popular arguments against moral evidentialism are weak. I also argue that our commitments to the moral evaluation of actions require us to takedoxastic obligations seriously.
3. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Andrew Reisner, Joseph Van Weelden Moral Reasons for Moral Beliefs: A Puzzle for Moral Testimony Pessimism
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According to moral testimony pessimists, the testimony of moral experts does not provide non-experts with normative reasons for belief. Moral testimony optimists hold that it does. We first aim to show that moral testimony optimism is, to the extent such things may be shown, the more natural view about moral testimony. Speaking roughly, the supposed discontinuity between the norms of moral beliefs and the norms of non-moral beliefs, on careful reflection, lacks the intuitive advantage that it is sometimes supposed to have. Our second aim is to highlight the difference in the nature of the pragmatic reasons for belief that support moral testimony optimism and moral testimony pessimism, setting out more clearly the nature and magnitude of the challenge for the pessimist.
4. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Dustin Olson A Case for Epistemic Agency
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This paper attempts to answer two questions: What is epistemic agency? And what are the motivations for having this concept? In response to the first question,it is argued that epistemic agency is the agency one has over one’s belief-forming practices, or doxastic dispositions, which can directly affect the way one forms a belief and indirectly affect the beliefs one forms. In response to the second question, it is suggested that the above conception of epistemic agency is either implicitly endorsed by those theorists sympathetic to epistemic normativity or, at minimum, this conception can make sense of the legitimacy of the normative notions applicable to how and what one should believe. It is further contended that belief formation in some respects is a skill that can be intentionally developed and refined. Accepting this contention and the existence of certain epistemic norms provide inconclusive yet good reasons to endorse this concept. Recent challenges to this concept by Hillary Kornblith and Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij are also considered.
5. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Benjamin Wald Transparency and Reasons for Belief
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Belief has a special connection to truth, a connection not shared by mental states like imagination. One way of capturing this connection is by the claim that belief aims at truth. Normativists argue that we should understand this claim as a normative claim about belief – beliefs ought to be true. A second important connection between belief and truth is revealed by the transparency of belief, i.e. the fact that, when I deliberate about what to believe, I can settle this deliberation only by appeal to considerations I take to show p to be true. It is natural to think that there is a connection between these two features of belief, that the fact that believing for non-evidential considerations would be irrational can help to explain why it is impossible, and Shah and Velleman make exactly this argument. However, as I shall argue, we cannot explain transparency on the basis of a normative requirement on belief. For this explanation to work non-evidential considerations would have to fail to be reasons for belief, and we would have to be able to explain why we are unable to form beliefs on the basis of nonevidentialconsiderations by appealing to the fact that they fail to be reasons for belief. However, while it is plausible that non-evidential considerations are not in fact reasons for belief, the explanatory picture is the other way around. Such considerations only fail to be reasons for belief because we are unable to form beliefs on their basis.
6. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Brian Hedden Believing and Acting: Voluntary Control and the Pragmatic Theory of Belief
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I argue that an attractive theory about the metaphysics of belief – the pragmatic, interpretationist theory endorsed by Stalnaker, Lewis, and Dennett, amongothers – implies that agents have a novel form of voluntary control over their beliefs. According to the pragmatic picture, what it is to have a given belief is in part for that belief to be part of an optimal rationalization of your actions. Since you have voluntary control over your actions, and what actions you perform in part determines what beliefs you count as having, this theory entails that you have some voluntary control over your beliefs. However, the pragmatic picture doesn’t entail that you can believe something as a result of intention to believe it. Nevertheless, I argue that the limited sort of voluntary control implied by the pragmatic picture may be of use in vindicating the deontological conception of epistemic justification.
7. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Notes on the Contributors
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8. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Logos & Episteme: Aims and Scope
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9. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 4
Notes to Contributors
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research articles
10. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Davide Fassio Knowledge and the Importance of Being Right
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Some philosophers have recently argued that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge in a specific circumstance depends on features of the subject’spractical situation that are unrelated to the truth of the subject’s belief, such as the costs for the subject of being wrong about whether the believed proposition is true. One of the best-known arguments used to support this view is that it best explains a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the well-known Bank Case, in which a difference in knowledge occurs in subjects differing exclusively with respect to their practical situation. I suggest an alternative explanation of such cases. My explanation has a disjunctive character: on the one hand, it accounts for cases in which the subject is aware of the costs of being wrong in a given situation in terms of the influence of psychological factors on her mechanisms of belief-formation and revision. On the other hand, it accounts for cases in which the subject is ignorant of the costs of being wrong in her situation by imposing a new condition on knowledge. This condition is that one knows that p only if one does not underestimate the importance of being right about whether p. I argue that my explanation has a number of advantages over other invariantist explanations: it accounts for all the relevant cases preserving the semantic significance of our ordinary intuitions, it is compatible with an intellectualist account of knowledge and it escapes several problems affecting competing views.
11. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Martin Grajner Epistemic Responsibilism and Moorean Dogmatism
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In this paper, I defend Moorean Dogmatism against a novel objection raised by Adam Leite. Leite locates the defectiveness of the Moorean reasoning explicitly not in the failure of the Moorean argument to transmit warrant from its premises to its conclusion but rather in the failure of an epistemic agent to satisfy certain epistemic responsibilities that arise in the course of conscious and deliberate reasoning. I will first show that there exist cases of Moorean reasoning that are not put into jeopardy by the considerations that Leite presents. Second, I will argue that certain commitments of Leite’s concerning the notion of warrant are in tension with his verdict that the Moorean reasoning is defective.
12. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Tristan Haze Two New Counterexamples to the Truth-Tracking Theory of Knowledge
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I present two counterexamples to the recently back-in-favour truthtracking account of knowledge: one involving a true belief resting on a counterfactuallyrobust delusion, one involving a true belief acquired alongside a bunch of false beliefs. These counterexamples carry over to a recent modification of the theory due to Rachael Briggs and Daniel Nolan, and seem invulnerable to a recent defence of the theory against known counterexamples, by Fred Adams and Murray Clarke.
13. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Adrian Ludușan Categoricity, Open-Ended Schemas and Peano Arithmetic
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One of the philosophical uses of Dedekind’s categoricity theorem for Peano Arithmetic is to provide support for semantic realism. To this end, the logical framework in which the proof of the theorem is conducted becomes highly significant. I examine different proposals regarding these logical frameworks and focus on the philosophical benefits of adopting open-ended schemas in contrast to second order logic as the logical medium of the proof. I investigate Pederson and Rossberg’s critique of the ontological advantages of open-ended arithmetic when it comes to establishing the categoricity of Peano Arithmetic and show that the critique is highly problematic. I argue that Pederson and Rossberg’s ontological criterion deliver the bizarre result that certain first order subsystems of Peano Arithmetic have a second order ontology. As a consequence, the application of the ontological criterion proposed by Pederson and Rossberg assigns a certain type of ontology to a theory, and a different, richer, ontology to one of its subtheories.
14. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Kevin Mccain Explanationism: Defended on All Sides
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Explanationists about epistemic justification hold that justification depends upon explanatory considerations. After a bit of a lull, there has recently been aresurgence of defenses of such views. Despite the plausibility of these defenses, explanationism still faces challenges. Recently, T. Ryan Byerly and Kraig Martin have argued that explanationist views fail to provide either necessary or sufficient conditions for epistemic justification. I argue that Byerly and Martin are mistaken on both accounts.
15. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
James Van Cleve Does Suppositional Reasoning Solve the Bootstrapping Problem?
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In a 2002 article Stewart Cohen advances the “bootstrapping problem” for what he calls “basic justification theories,” and in a 2010 followup he offers a solution to the problem, exploiting the idea that suppositional reasoning may be used with defeasible as well as with deductive inference rules. To curtail the form of bootstrapping permitted by basic justification theories, Cohen insists that subjects must know their perceptual faculties are reliable before perception can give them knowledge. But how is such knowledge of reliability to be acquired if not through perception itself? Cohen proposes that such knowledge may be acquired a priori through suppositional reasoning. I argue that his strategy runs afoul of a plausible view about how epistemic principles function; in brief, I argue that one must actually satisfy the antecedent of an epistemic principle, not merely suppose that one does, to acquire any justification by its means – even justification for a merely conditional proposition.
discussion notes/debate
16. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Arturs Logins On Having Evidence: A Reply to Neta
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According to one line of thought only propositions can be part of one’s evidence, since only propositions can serve the central functions of our ordinaryconcept of evidence. Ram Neta has challenged this argument. In this paper I respond to Neta’s challenge.
17. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Mark Schroeder In Defense of the Kantian Account of Knowledge: Reply to Whiting
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In this paper I defend the view that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient from an important objection due to DanielWhiting, in this journal. Whiting argues that this view fails to deal adequately with a familiar sort of counterexample to analyses of knowledge, fake barn cases. I accept Whiting's conclusion that my earlier paper offered an inadequate treatment of fake barn cases, but defend a new account of basic perceptual reasons that is consistent with the account of knowledge and successfully deals with fake barns.
18. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Notes on the Contributors
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19. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Logos and Episteme. Aims and Scope
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20. Logos & Episteme: Volume > 6 > Issue: 3
Notes to Contributors
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