Monthly Archives: November 2008

Safety in Fake Barn Country

November 22, 2008 – 12:20 am

I’ve been writing a lot about safety accounts of knowledge recently (here and here). It’s time for more.
My concern is that DuncanPritchard’s Safety Account of Knowledge doesn’t easily avoid Kripke’s Fake Barn Country counterexample to Nozick’s Sensitivity Principle. Pritchard is aware that Jonathan Kvanvig has already raised this worry, but Pritchard’s response to Kvanvig seems [...]

By Andrew Cullison | Posted in epistemology, philosophy | Comments (4)

Forgiveness Without Moral Judgement?

November 18, 2008 – 11:33 pm

I’m working on a revise and resubmit, and there’s an interesting issue that I’m going to have to deal with. So let me begin with a question. Is it possible to forgive someone for an action, but fail to believe that the action was wrong?
I’m inclined to say yes. Here’s three potential motivations.
Moral Skepticism
Suppose someone [...]

By Andrew Cullison | Posted in ethics, philosophy, philosophy of religion | Comments (11)

Safety Accounts of Knowledge and Gettier

November 18, 2008 – 4:09 pm

Last week, I laid out some problems for the naive safety account of knowledge that Pritchard presents early in his book Epistemic Luck.
I wanted to get them out so that we could make sure that, whatever revisions Pritchard made to the safety account, we had a safety view that also avoided those worries.
Pritchard’s revised version [...]

By Andrew Cullison | Posted in epistemology, philosophy | Comments (2)

Testing Twitter Plug-in

November 11, 2008 – 4:46 pm

I just discovered what promises to be a cool plugin for Word Press. It’s called Twitter Updater. If it works, every time I publish a blog post, Word Press will automatically update my Twitter status with something that says “Published a New Post: [Title]“.
This is a test post to see if it works.
UPDATE: It works!

By Andrew Cullison | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Air Waves Free!

November 6, 2008 – 12:16 am

In this post, I wrote about the issue of using the white spaces freed up by the switch to digital TV to enable wide-spread affordable high speed internet (especially in rural areas).
The FCC just voted to do that!
As I noted in the previous post, this is not some issue that only technophiles should care about. [...]

By Andrew Cullison | Posted in open source | Comments (1)

Safety Accounts of Knowledge

November 5, 2008 – 2:55 pm

In the epistemology class I’m teaching, we’ve moved on from Bergmann’s book to Pritchard’s book Epistemic Luck.
Here’s a principle that Pritchard ultimately is going to defend.
Safety Principle
If S knows P, then S believes P in most nearby worlds where P is true
This is not to be confused with the Nozickean/Dretskean tracking/sensitivity type principles (e.g., where [...]

By Andrew Cullison | Posted in epistemology, philosophy | Comments (1)