14 research outputs found
"The Bayesian Objection" - Ch 4 of Seemings and Epistemic Justification
In this chapter I analyse an objection to phenomenal conservatism to the effect that phenomenal conservatism is unacceptable because it is incompatible with Bayesianism. I consider a few responses to it and dismiss them as misled or problematic. Then, I argue that this objection doesnât go through because it rests on an implausible formalization of the notion of seeming-based justification. In the final part of the chapter, I investigate how seeming-based justification and justification based on oneâs reflective belief that one has a seeming interact with one another
Conceivability and possibility : some dilemmas for Humeans
This research is published within the Project âThe Logic of Conceivabilityâ, funded by the European Research Council (ERC CoG), Grant Number 681404.The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language. If the conceivability of P amounts to the pictorial imaginability of a situation verifying P, then the question is whether the imagination at issue works purely qualitatively, that is, only by phenomenological resemblance with the imagined scenario. If so, the range of situations imaginable in this way is too limited to have a significant role in modal epistemology. If not, imagination will involve some arbitrary labeling component, which turns out to be sufficient for imagining the impossible. And if the relevant imagination is neither linguistic nor pictorial, Humeans will appear to resort to some representational magic, until they come up with a theory of a âthird codeâ for mental representations.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Reasoning as a source of justification
In this essay we argue that reasoning can sometimes generate epistemic justification, rather than merely transmitting justification that the subject already possesses to new beliefs. We also suggest a way to account for it in terms of the relationship between epistemic normative requirements, justification and cognitive capacities
Defusing easy arguments for numbers
Pairs of sentences like the following pose a problem for ontology: (1) Jupiter has four moons. (2) The number of moons of Jupiter is four. (2) is intuitively a trivial paraphrase of (1). And yet while (1) seems ontologically innocent, (2) appears to imply the existence of numbers. Thomas Hofweber proposes that we can resolve the puzzle by recognizing that sentence (2) is syntactically derived from, and has the same meaning as, sentence (1). Despite appearances, the expressions âthe number of moons of Jupiterâ and âfourâ do not function semantically as singular terms in (2). Hofweberâs primary evidence for this proposal concerns differences in the focus-related communicative functions of (1) and (2). In this paper I raise several serious problems for Hofweberâs proposal, and for his attempt to support it by appeal to focus-related phenomena. I conclude by offering independent evidence for an alternative, purely pragmatic resolution of the ontological puzzle