The epistemic approach to argument evaluation: Virtues, beliefs, commitments

This paper will have two parts. In the first, it will point out the agreement between lists of paradigm epistemic and argumentative virtues, and it will take that agreement as prima facie support for the epistemic approach to argument evaluation. Second, it will consider the disagreement over whether successful argument resolution requires change of belief or whether it only requires change of commitment. It turns out that the epistemic approach is neutral on that question

When Reasons Don’t Work

The aim of this paper is to extend Miranda Fricker’s conception of testimonial injustice to what I call “argumentative injustice”: those cases where an arguer’s social identity brings listeners to place too little or too much credibility in an argument. My recommendation is to put in place a type of indirect “affirmative action” plan for argument evaluation. I also situate my proposal in Johnson (2000)’s framework of argumentation as an exercise in manifest rationality

Commentary on Lumer, A Theory of Philosophical Arguments

Commentary on Christoph Lumer, A Theory of Philosophical Argument, for OSSA 12. Lumer offers a general theory of philosophical argument. This commentary discusses four related topics: Pascal arguments; the problem of the criterion; the status of intuitions in philosophy; and the status of arguments that do not fit into the four ideal argument types that Lumer sets out

Bias in Legitimate Ad Hominem Arguments

This paper is about bias and ad hominem arguments. It will begin by rehearsing some reasons for thinking that there are both legitimate and illegitimate ad hominems, as well as reasons for thinking that biases can be both justified and unjustified. It will explain that justified biases about people with certain social identities can give rise to both legitimate and illegitimate ad hominem attacks, while unjustified biases only give rise to illegitimate ad hominems. The paper will then describe Audrey Yap’s view that even when an unjustified bias is made explicit and shown to be unjustified, it can still make certain fallacious ad hominem arguments seem persuasive. Finally, it will set out the opposite sort of problem: just as unjustified biases can make fallacious ad hominems seem persuasive even when the bias is made explicit, so too can unjustified biases make legitimate ad hominem arguments seem unpersuasive, even when the bias is made explicit

Against epistemic circularity

One finds a surprising number of defenses of the legitimacy of some kinds of question-begging (circular) arguments or beliefs in the literature. Without wanting to deny the importance of dialec-tical analyses of begging the question, what I do here is explore the epistemic side of the issue. In particu-lar, I want to explore the legitimacy of “epistemically circular” arguments and beliefs. My tentative conclu-sion is that epistemically circular arguments and beliefs are never legitimate

Well-Founded Belief: An Introduction

This is the Editor's Introduction to "Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation" (Routledge, 2020)

The Superstitious Lawyer's Inference

In Lehrer’s case of the superstitious lawyer, a lawyer possesses conclusive evidence for his client’s innocence, and he appreciates that the evidence is conclusive, but the evidence is causally inert with respect to his belief in his client’s innocence. This case has divided epistemologists ever since Lehrer originally proposed it in his argument against causal analyses of knowledge. Some have taken the claim that the lawyer bases his belief on the evidence as a data point for our theories to accommodate, while others have denied that the lawyer has knowledge, or that he bases his belief on the evidence. In this paper, we move the dialectic forward by way of arguing that the superstitious lawyer genuinely infers his client’s innocence from the evidence. To show that the lawyer’s inference is genuine, we argue in defense of a version of a doxastic construal of the ‘taking’ condition on inference. We also provide a pared-down superstitious lawyer-style case, which displays the key features of the original case without including its complicated and distracting features. But interestingly, although we argue that the lawyer’s belief is based on his good evidence, and is also plausibly doxastically justified, we do not argue that the lawyer knows that his client is innocent

The basing relation and the impossibility of the debasing demon

Descartes’ demon is a deceiver: the demon makes things appear to you other than as they really are. However, as Descartes famously pointed out in the Second Meditation, not all knowledge is imperilled by this kind of deception. You still know you are a thinking thing. Perhaps, though, there is a more virulent demon in epistemic hell, one from which none of our knowledge is safe. Jonathan Schaffer thinks so. The “Debasing Demon” he imagines threatens knowledge not via the truth condition on knowledge, but via the basing condition. This demon can cause any belief to seem like it’s held on a good basis, when it’s really held on a bad basis. Several recent critics, Conee, Ballantyne & Evans ) grant Schaffer the possibility of such a debasing demon, and argue that the skeptical conclusion doesn’t follow. By contrast, we argue that on any plausible account of the epistemic basing relation, the “debasing demon” is impossible. Our argument for why this is so gestures, more generally, to the importance of avoiding common traps by embracing mistaken assumptions about what it takes for a belief to be based on a reason