December 2, 2008 – 2:47 pm
Here are two quotes from the first few pages in the new reader Experimental Philosophy edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols.
Of course, the most salient difference is just the fact that experimental philosophers conduct experiments and conceptual analysts do not. Thus, the conceptual analyst might write, “In this case, one would surely say…,” while [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
October 2, 2008 – 12:29 pm
“Moral Perception” has just been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Philosophy. As Clayton once so eloquently put it - Huzzah!
I have to make some stylistic changes. When I do that I’ll post a draft of the paper. For now, I’ll give you a draft of the new version of the abstract.
Moral Perception [...]
September 9, 2008 – 11:14 pm
I’m teaching special topics course in epistemology this year. We’re going through Michael Bergmann’s new book Justification Without Awareness. I thought it would be fun to post quick summaries of the chapters here, and critically discuss them along the way. Here’s a quick summary of chapter one.
Chapter One
In this chapter, Bergmann develops and defends a [...]
September 5, 2008 – 11:27 pm
We’re going to start going through Michael Bergmann’s book Justification Without Awareness in my special topics seminar. I had a lot of fun with our Knowledge of God reading group over at Prosblogion, and I thought it would be good to do something similar for each chapter in Bergmann’s book. So starting next week I’ll [...]
September 5, 2008 – 2:38 pm
Nick Treanor was here last week for our Young Philosophers Lecture Series. I’ll be posting those talks over at Young Philosophers sometime within the next week.
In his introductory level talk, he presented a view about emotions, according to which emotions could be rational or irrational. That talk was the inspiration for this argument.
Warm-Up
Treanor’s talk led [...]
August 28, 2008 – 10:36 am
Consider the following theses.
(A) For any person P, P exists iff P is alive.
(B) For any person P, P is alive iff P is not dead.
(C) Whether or not some person is dead is vague.
(D) Whether or not someone exists is not vague.
On the face of it, these four theses seem to be incompatible. If [...]