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SHOULD THERE BE A MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY?
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Intuitions as evidence
No full textThis essay addresses the use of intuitions as evidence in contemporary analytic philosophy. Chapter 1 demonstrates that intuitions are currently treated as the primary source of evidence in philosophical investigation. Chapter 2 defends an account of intuition on which an intuition that p involves p's seeming necessarily true. Chapter 3 takes up one broad strand of contemporary skepticism about the evidential value of intuitions. It outlines some contemporary arguments against the use of intuitions in moral philosophy, semantics, modal metaphysics, and epistemology. It concludes with an outline of the general argument form of which the particular arguments presented are instances. Chapter 4 explains why one contemporary attempt to meet this kind of skepticism fails, and then goes on to argue that the skeptical arguments fail because they are unsupported and self-defeating. Chapter 5 turns to a more general ground of skepticism about intuitions: the claim that we have no independent assurance of their reliability. Drawing on the work of Thomas Reid and William Alston, it shows that this fact cannot reasonably ground a skepticism restricted to intuition because the same is true of every one of our basic faculties.This item was digitized from a paper original and/or a microfilm copy. If you need higher-resolution images for any content in this item, please contact us at [email protected] file replaced with corrected file October 2023
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Epistemology in the scientific image
No full textThe leading versions of epistemic naturalism have attempted to make normative accounts of justification and knowledge in part dependent upon scientific psychology. Call this doctrine psychologistic naturalism. Psychologistic naturalism, it is thought, holds the promise of integrating normative questions about the relation between evidence and belief with a physicalist, causal conception of our mental life. In Part One of this essay I argue that psychologistic naturalism fails. My reasons for claiming this differ significantly from those advanced in the contemporary literature by epistemic non-naturalists, however. Non-naturalists have mistakenly accepted the terms of debate set by psychologistic naturalists, and thus they have argued that the empirical results of the science of the mind--as part of a merely descriptive causal account of natural systems--have no important place in epistemology. But psychologistic naturalism does not fail because psychology is causal and descriptive, as the non-naturalist alleges. It fails, instead, because psychology is not wholly or even primarily causal and descriptive. Psychology requires a robust normative account of rational inference in order to offer explanations within a cognitivist framework. The inadequacy of psychologistic naturalism may seem to invite a return to epistemology as first philosophy, where the primary methodology deploys a priori intuitions about cases. In Part Two, I argue that this is not the best response to the instability of psychologistic naturalism. If psychological explanations express an embedded normative component, then the non-naturalist's objections to a liaison between epistemology and psychology are misguided. I pursue an epistemology in the scientific image, where psychological explanations encode a normative epistemic component and where the states of natural cognizers are characterized at a finer resolution than beliefs. Psychological explanation involves an evaluation of the inferential cogency of each step in a cognitive process, and I replace the traditional methodology of epistemology with this more subtle and nuanced version of epistemic appraisal
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Epistemological consequences of a faculty psychology
No full textTraditional epistemology has devoted much attention to the distinctions between perception and inference and between basic and non-basic beliefs. Hot, I develop a different and more general distinction, between what I call "privileged" and "nonprivileged" beliefs; privileged beliefs are justifiable by means of an otherwise substandard argument while nonprivileged beliefs require support by a generally adequate argument for their justification I argue that even coherentists are tacitly committed to this distinction (although they may deny the existence of basic beliefs) and that one of the chief problems for simple reliabilist theories is that they imply that all beliefs are privileged. Any adequate epistemology has to count some beliefs as privileged and some as nonprivileged, and I suggest a way to modify reliabilist theories to accommodate this result. The privileged/nonprivileged belief distinction suggests a framework theory about the structure of epistemic justification, a theory which improves on foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism in certain respects. Yet it raises the question of which beliefs are privileged and which are nonprivileged. I argue that whether or not a belief is privileged is determined by the etiology of that belief, and in particular, by the intrinsic nature and the etiology of the psychological faculty that produced that belief. A belief, therefore, is privileged if and only if it is the output of a certain kind of cognitive faculty, or system. Consequently, the beliefs produced by these faculties are such that it is possible to be justified in holding them even in the absence of a generally adequate argument. This does not mean that all the outputs of all such faculties are justified, for such beliefs might still require (and lack) inferential support or be subject to non-inferential requirements, like reliability And of course, all such beliefs are potentially subject to defeat from other justified beliefs. The kind of cognitive faculties I have in mind includes, but is not restricted to, "modules", in Jerry Fodor's sense. The etiological, faculty-oriented view defended hat argues for distinctive, versions of externalism and naturalism in epistemology and holds some promise of illuminating certain traditional epistemological problems
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Incomparability in epistemology
No full textEpistemologists are interested in what makes beliefs well justified. Even before considering competing theories of epistemic justification, however, we should ask what sort of valuational structure we are trying to explain. If, as far as epistemic justification is concerned, beliefs are like bank accounts, then all beliefs are comparable: just as in any bank account there must be more, less, or as much money as in any other, one belief must be better, worse, or as good as any other. Contemporary epistemologists take for granted the assumption that beliefs are comparable in the same way that bank accounts are comparable: bank accounts have balances, sprinters have personal bests for the 100-meter dash, and beliefs have degrees of justifiedness. Alternatively, we could understand the justificatory status of a belief to be more like the expensiveness of a restaurant. Consider a concept of restaurant expensiveness on which the expensiveness of a restaurant is determined by the range of prices for meals at that restaurant. If meals at Restaurant A are 25 to 50 and meals at B are 10 to 20, then A is more expensive than B. Restaurant C, however (30 to 40), is neither more nor less expensive than A. Nor is it equally expensive, for there are restaurants that are more expensive than C that are not more expensive than A (like D, 45 to 50). Some evaluative concepts, like this concept of restaurant expensiveness, do not reduce values to single numbers. If epistemic justification is like this, then there may be pairs of beliefs such that neither is better justified than the other, but nor are they equally well justified. Such beliefs would be incomparable. While incomparability is familiar in the ethics literature, it has not previously been explored in epistemology. I discuss the implications of allowing for incomparability in epistemology, both for theories of epistemic justification and theories of knowledge
Unbunking arguments: a case study in metaphysics and cognitive science
Get PDFThis chapter develops a style of argument that realists can use to defend the methodological propriety of appealing to a given range of intuitions. Unbunking arguments are an epistemically positive analogue of debunking arguments, and they revolve around the claim that the processes dominantly responsible for beliefs about a given domain are reliable. However, processes cannot always be assessed for accuracy with respect to the relevant domain, so this chapter also develops the cross-domain strategy, which involves arguing that processes known to be reliable in one domain are similarly reliable with respect to a different domain. The chapter ends by unbunking our metaphysical intuitions about mutual supervenience by way of a cross-domain strategy that draws on cognitive scientific research into our ability to track correlations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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