Archives for category: philosophy

Is Epistemic Contextualism a Theory of Knowledge?

January 25, 2012 //

In his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Epistemic Contextualism, Patrick Rysiew says this:

Likewise, just because EC is a thesis about knowledge-sentences’ truth conditions—namely, that they are context-variable—it is not a thesis about knowledge itself. … So it is misleading too when EC … is described, as it sometimes is, as the view that whether one knows depends upon context …

EC, then, is an epistemological theory because, but only because, it concerns sentences used in attributing (/denying) “knowledge”, as opposed to those employing some non-epistemological term(s); it is not a theory about any such epistemic property/relation itself. (Rysiew, ‘Epistemic Contextualism’, §2)

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Tags context-sensitivity, David Lewis, epistemic contextualism, Kent Bach, knowledge, Mark Heller, Patrick Rysiew

Categories philosophy

Knowledge requires certainty

November 15, 2011 //

Here’s an argument that, for rational agents, knowledge of p entails certainty about p (i.e., having credence 1 in p).

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Tags Bayesian, certainty, conditionalisation, conditionalization, contextualism, epistemic possibility, infallibilism, knowledge, Lewis, Stalnaker, two-dimensionalism, Williamson

Categories philosophy

Is scepticism self-refuting?

November 7, 2011 //

This post inaugurates a new category on the blog, of posts which primarily discuss subjects I’ve found useful in teaching philosophy to undergraduates.

Students and others sometimes worry that scepticism is ‘self-defeating’ in some sense. The thought seems to be something like this:

the sceptic couldn’t consistently be a sceptic if their argument is a good one, since the thesis of scepticism will undermine all knowledge of the external world. But then this will undermine knowledge of the premises of the sceptical argument; and an argument with unknown premises couldn’t be a persuasive argument.

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Tags a priori, contextualism, David Lewis, Douglas Long, Michael Huemer, scepticism, self-refuting, self-undermining, teaching

Categories philosophy, teaching

Endurance and Property Spaces

October 21, 2011 //

I’m a fan of locational conceptions of endurance. As I put it elsewhere, endurance involves the claim that

persisting objects do so by existing entirely at each moment at which they exist. As it is sometimes put, an enduring object is ‘wholly present’ at each moment at which it exists…. The natural way to understand this locution is in terms of [the] notion of wholly located, so that an enduring object is contained within a temporally unextended region at each time at which it exists. An enduring object is such that if it exists at a time, it wholly exists at that time (it is contained in that time). This entails, of course, that enduring objects are temporally multiply located. (‘Location and Perdurance’, OSM 5, p. 57)

(I first thought about endurance in a locational way after hearing a talk by my colleague Oliver Pooley; the articulation I gave it in the paper cited above owed a substantial debt to my soon-to-be colleague Josh Parsons‘ paper ’Theories of Location’, OSM, 3.)

So far, so orthodox. Let me introduce now another idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags Cian Dorr, endurance, Frank Arntzenius, intrinsic properties, Josh Parsons, location, mereology, Oliver Pooley, property spaces, recombination, temporary intrinsics, Theodore Sider

Categories philosophy

Review: Balashov’s Persistence and Spacetime

September 23, 2011 //

One of the only substantive pieces of philosophical writing I got done this summer was a review for NDPR of Yuri Balashov‘s Persistence and Spacetime. I liked the book and found it thought-provoking, though as the review makes clear, I’m not persuaded. But it certainly got me clearer on how I think the relation between persistence and relativity should work. I didn’t get to touch on all of the book, and one thing in particular I’ve been thinking about is his interesting objection to Sider’s argument from vagueness—but’s that’s for another time…

Tags book review, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, persistence, spacetime, Yuri Balashov

Categories philosophy

Is Epistemic Contextualism a Theory of Knowledge?

Knowledge requires certainty

Is scepticism self-refuting?

Endurance and Property Spaces

Review: Balashov’s Persistence and Spacetime

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