Category Archives: epistemology

Epistemology, Beer, Brats, and Cheese

I just arrived in Madison for the Wisconsin Epistemology Conference. It’s going to be awesome. The line-up of speakers is great.
Kudos to Juan ComesaƱa for organizing this.
I’ve got some ideas that occurred to me on the plane. I’ll post them in a bit, but right now I’m going to go find breakfast.
Stay tuned.

Contrastivism and the Skeptical Paradox

Here’s one standard way to formulate the skeptical paradox.

I know that I have hands.
I don’t know I’m not a brain-in-a-vat.
If I don’t know that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat, then I don’t know that I have hands.

These three sentences cannot all be true, and yet each one seems plausible. Here are the standard replies.
The Standard Replies
Option [...]

Young Philosophers - Joshua Thurow

Joshua Thurow is here for our second set of lectures in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series. He gave a great talk yesterday developing and defending BonJour’s Generality Argument for the conclusion that we have some a priori knowledge.
Today he is giving an introductory level talk titled “Is Morality Real, or Do We Make it Up?” [...]

Intuition Check

I’m hoping readers will oblige me with a little intuition check. Consider the following scenario.
Cross-Check Your Perception with Another Person’s PerceptionYou seem to see a tiger. You’re very surprised to see a tiger. They don’t live around these parts. You ask a friend. Do you seem to see a tiger. Your friend says, “Yes. I [...]

Bringing Gettier into Intro

I’m curious how many people out there discuss the Analysis of Knowledge literature when they teach Epistemology in their general Introduction to Philosophy courses. I suspect there are a lot of people who don’t.
I thought it would be worth saying why I like to include Gettier discussions when I start epistemology in my introduction to [...]

Experiments Involving Perception and Intuition

About a month ago, I posted about an article that presents some interesting experiments involving perception. You don’t have to click that link…here’s the relevant bit.
It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw [...]

Philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy

In the last few hours, I’ve stumbled on quite a few cool bits of philosophy…
1. Mike Almeida has a pretty interesting post on Multiverse responses to a variety of versions of the Problem of Evil here.
2. Carrie Jenkins just suggested that we might be able to handle Kripkenstein Undetermination Worries in a (roughly) analogous way [...]

Scientists Find Believing is Seeing

This is a pretty interesting article that was just posted on Slashdot. It summarizes some pretty cool findings that should be of interest to philosophers interested in issues related to epistemology and perception.
It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. [...]

Begging the Question

This starts off as what purports to be a discussion of the misuse of the expression “begging the question”…
Half way through the article, it stops being serious and gets pretty funny.
But it’s worth noting that before the article goes humorous, the author gives an example of a valid modus tollens as begging the question. [...]

Confirmation of A Betrand Russell Skeptical Scenario?

One possible skeptical scenario is Russell’s 5 minute hypothesis. This is from The Analysis of Mind…

In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not [...]