Andrew Cullison

I like evidentialism. (EJ) S is justified in believing P iff P is best supported by S’s total evidence. I also like phenomenal conservatism. (PC) If it seems to S that P and S has no defeaters for P, then S is justified believing P. I take it that seemings (absent defeaters) are a kind [...]

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My first review for Philosopher’s Digest was posted today. Here’s the link. It’s on Jonathan Vogel’s paper “Epistemic Bootstrapping” in The Journal of Philosophy (September 2008)

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I think knowledge entails truth, but I like to keep an eye out for uses of ‘knows’ and its cognates that suggest otherwise. This one just poppped up on Digg today. First sentence of the article: “Contrary to what was known, all octopuses are venomous, a new study finds.”

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Continuum Press contacted me a few months ago and asked if I would edit a Companion to Epistemology. I accepted, but I didn’t blog about it because I still had to go through their standard proposal process. Now I can blog about it.

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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…,” [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Chapters 3 and 4 are sort of slow-going. The good stuff really comes in at chapter 5. I’m going to quickly lay out brief summaries of chapters 3 and 4. But I’ll warn you now - this will be quick and I won’t have anything substantive to say in this post in the way of [...]

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In the previous post on Justification Without Awareness - I laid out Bergmann’s dilemma for the internalist. The next two chapters explore ways to avoid the dilemma. In this chapter, Bergmann critically discusses two philosophers’ views that grab the weak awareness horn and two philosophers’ views that grab the strong awareness horn. Richard Fumerton Bergmann [...]

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