706 research outputs found
Suppositional Reasoning and Perceptual Justification
James Van Cleve raises some objections to my attempt to solve the bootstrapping problem for what I call âbasic justification theories.â I argue that given 1 the inference rules endorsed by basic justification theorists, we are a priori (propositionally) justified in believing that perception is reliable. This blocks the bootstrapping result
Entitlement, epistemic risk and scepticism
Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesnât elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wrightâs contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements donât remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they donât actually enable us to acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wrightâs responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzziâs argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright cannot answer Moruzziâs challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification
Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian Theater
According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating oneâs beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems diachronically irrational. To avoid this result, the anti-Cartesian must either license an unacceptable epistemic chauvinism, or else claim that merely reflecting on oneâs experiences defeats perceptual justification. This leaves us with a puzzle: Although Cartesianism faces problems, avoiding them brings a new set of problems
Weak Non-Evidentialism
First aim of this paper is to show that Evidentialism, when paired with a Psychologistic ontology of evidence, is unable to account for ordinary cases of inferential justification. As many epistemologists have maintained, however, when it is paired with a Propositionalist ontology of evidence, Evidentialism is unable to explain in a satisfactory way ordinary cases of perceptual justification. So, the Evidentialist is faced with a dilemma. Second aim of this paper is to give an argument in favour of Propositionalism about evidence, and so to motivate the conclusion that perceptual justification must be accounted for in non-evidentialist terms. By this I do not mean to defend a strongly Non-Evidentialist epistemology, according to which there are doxastic attitudes which are unsupported by any justifier. More modestly, I aim to motivate the weakly Non-Evidentialist epistemology according to which a subjectâs perceptual beliefs may be justified by non-evidential justifiers. I conclude the paper by explaining why I believe that Pryor's dogmatism supplies a model for the way in which an internalist who is persuaded by my argument might want to detail her weakly Non-Evidentialist account of perceptual justification
Justification As A Loaded Notion
The problem of skepticism is often understood as a paradox: a valid argument with plausible premises whose conclusion is that we lack justification for perceptual beliefs. Typically, this conclusion is deemed unacceptable, so a theory is offered that posits conditions for justification on which some premise is false. The theory defended here is more general, and explains why the paradox arises in the first place. Like Strawsonâs (Introduction to logical theory, Wiley, New York, 1952) âordinary languageâ approach to induction, the theory posits something built into the very notion of justification: it is loaded with a bias towards the proposition that we are not massively deceived. Beyond the paradox, remaining skeptical problems consist of metaphysical and practical questions: whether we are massively deceived, or why we should use our loaded notion rather than some other. Such challenges have pro- found epistemological significance, but they are not problems that an a priori theory of justification can solve
Perceptual justification in the Bayesian brain: A foundherentist account
Preprint artykuĆu zaakceptowanego do druku w czasopiĆmie SyntheseIn this paper, I use the predictive processing (PP) theory of perception to tackle the
question of how perceptual states can be rationally involved in cognition by justifying other mental states. I put forward two claims regarding the epistemological implications of PP. First, perceptual states can confer justification on other mental states because the perceptual states are themselves rationally acquired. Second, despite being inferentially justified rather than epistemically basic, perceptual states can still be epistemically responsive to the mind-independent world. My main goal is to elucidate the epistemology of perception already implicit in PP. But I also hope to show how it is possible to peacefully combine central tenets of foundationalist and coherentist accounts of the rational powers of perception while avoiding the well-recognized pitfalls of either
Plenty of room left for the Dogmatist
Barnett provides an interesting new challenge for Dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. The challenge is that such accounts, by accepting that a perceptual experience can provide a distinctive kind of boost to oneâs credences, would lead to a form of diachronic irrationality in cases where one has already learnt in advance that one will have such an experience. I show that this challenge rests on a misleading feature of using the 0â1 interval to express probabilities and show that if we switch to using Odds or Log-Odds, the misleading appearance that there is only âa little roomâ for oneâs credences to increase evaporates. Moreover, there are familiar, independent reasons for taking the Log-Odds scale to provide a clearer picture of the confirmatory effect of evidence. Thus the Dogmatist can after all escape the charge of diachronic irrationality
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