Woot! I just heard from Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. They just accepted a paper I co-authored with Neil Feit titled “When Does Falsehood Preclude Knowledge”.
Here’s the abstract. I’ll post a penultimate version of the paper when I can.
ABSTRACT
Falsehood can preclude knowledge in many ways. A false proposition cannot be known. A false ground can prevent knowledge of a true proposition, or so we argue, but not every false ground deprives its subject of knowledge. A falsehood that is not a ground for belief can also prevent knowledge of a true proposition. This paper aims to provide a systematic account of just when falsehood precludes knowledge, and hence just when it does not. The paper is presented in large part as an approach to the Gettier problem and a search for an adequate theory of knowledge, but we ultimately arrive at a relatively simple theory that has virtues closely connected with many issues at the heart of contemporary epistemology
p.s. We had a really good experience with PPQ, and we had two great referees. Both gave us great feedback. If you’re one of those two referees and you stumble upon this post - Thank You!
My application to attend the Purdue Summer Seminar on moral and religious epistemology was just accepted! It’s a summer seminar directed by Michael Bergmann and sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation. The email says they selected 14 other applicants. Sitting around for two weeks talking about moral and religious epistemology with 15 philosophers this summer is going to be awesome.
A reader sent me an email this morning asking if I would share their positive experience with a philosophy journal. This person submitted something to Dialectica and received this PDF. Since this person’s paper is still under consideration, they didn’t want to out themselves during the blind review process. Here’s what this person wrote to me:
Dear Andy,
I recently submitted a paper to Dialectica. In their email back to me acknowledging submission, they included the attached PDF which includes lots of interesting information. Not only are they aiming at transparancy regarding the process, but the submission statistics for the past few years are quite interesting. I think it would be good for this to be held up as a model for other journals to follow. Given that the part of Wide Scope that deals with journals already has a wide audience, and given that I currently have a paper under review at the journal, I’m wondering if you’d be willing to post this pdf on your blog?
We see so many journal horror stories, it’s nice to see journals getting praised. Editing and refereeing for journals can be a pretty thankless job. If you have some positive experiences to report, feel free to do that here.
UPDATE: Moving to the top for the start of the new semester
Here’s something cool you can do with Google Docs. I’ve created a couple of short self-diagnostic quizzes so that students can practice distinguishing between valid and invalid arguments.
Feel free to embed these in your own course webpages.
Some of you may already be aware of Logos and Episteme - a new, open-access epistemology journal.
I think this is exciting, and I really hope it sticks. So far things are looking great. They have an impressive advisory board including Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, Susan Haack, Duncan Prichard, and Jonathan Kvanvig. You can check out their entire team in the sidebar of the current issue.
They also have some pretty interesting looking articles in the second issue. Carl Ginet has a paper on self-evidence.
There is also a paper called “Getting Gettier’d on Testimony” that looks interesting. Lauren J. Leydon-Hardy says she will show that we can cook up interesting Gettier cases when we think about ways in which there could have been differences in what our words mean. I’m guessing these cases will involve lucky to have justified true beliefs, because of some kind of luck involved in what our words semantically express.
I urge epistemologists to help ensure that this thing thrives. Please, please, please consider submitting your next epistemology paper to this journal.
I hereby swear that my next epistemology paper will be submitted to this journal.
I have an awesome idea. I give my students argument extraction exercises so they can master presenting arguments in numbered-premise form. It’s tough because I like to rotate them out so that students who have had me for four years don’t see the same set of exercises.
How about we pool our resources and create a massive database of argument extraction exercises? If every philosopher who had their students do argument extraction exercises contributed 3 passages (2-10 sentences long) that each contain an argument along with the extracted argument for each passage, we would all have plenty of different arguments for students to practice extracting.
If 20+ philosophers post in the comments that they would contribute 3 - I’ll get the ball rolling and set up a submission form.
Please spread the word. I know we can get 20+ philosophers who (a) give argument extraction exercises and (b) would contribute 3 of them in order to get a huge database of them.
I’ve posted a bit about the Nook eReader, and I also posted that I recently picked up a Samsung Galaxy Tab. While playing around with it, I discovered that with a couple of apps you can turn it into a pretty powerful research tool.
I thought it would be a good idea to put together a short demo video of the free Attendance app we have on the Android market, so you can see how the integration with Google Docs works. Here it is.
