Catherine Elgin

In “Useful False Beliefs,” Peter Klein argues that the justification required for knowledge can contain a false belief essentially. When this happens, the agent arrives at her conclusion via a chain of inference that includes a false belief. He illustrates his argument with cases that depend on apparent memory, testimony, recorded empirical evidence, and observation-based calculation. If the agent’s inferential path is close enough to a route that contains only truths, Klein maintains, her conclusion is justified. Still, he intimates, reliance on a falsehood is an epistemic defect, even if not a fatal one. All things considered, it is preferable to take the epistemic high road and rely only on truths. I will argue, however, that sometimes inferring via a falsehood is an epistemic strength. Reliance on a falsehood enables the agent to marshal epistemic resources by excluding from her reasoning irrelevant complications that would blind her to the relation between her evidence and her conclusion.

En posant avec clarté des questions de philosophie de l’esprit, d’ontologie et d’épistémologie, ce livre témoigne à la fois de l’intérêt réel de la danse comme objet philosophique et du rôle unique que peut jouer la philosophie dans une meilleure compréhension de cet art. Qu’est-ce que danser ? Que nous apprend le mouvement dansé sur la nature humaine et la relation entre le corps et l’esprit ? À quelles conditions une œuvre est-elle correctement interprétée par les danseurs et bien identifiée par les spectateurs ?

Although our theories are not precisely true, scientific realists contend that we should admit their objects into our ontology. One justification--offered by Sellars and Putnam--is that current theories belong to series that converge to ideally adequate theories. I consider the way the commitment to convergence reflects on the interpretation of lawlike claims. I argue that the distinction between lawlike and accidental generalizations depends on our cognitive interests and reflects our commitment to the direction of scientific progress. If the sciences disagree about the lawlikeness of some generalization(s), as an argument of Davidson's suggests, it follows from the interest relatively of lawlikeness that the laws of a science do not determine the essences of their objects. I conclude that this form of scientific realism provides no metaphysical support for essentialism

Davidson's token-Token identity theory is based on the indeterminacy of translation. I argue that psychological theories, Like other theories, Are underdetermined by the evidence, And that their reduction, Like other reductions, Is subject to the indeterminacy of translation. This does not invalidate reduction, But it does raise epistemic difficulties. Accepting a claim as law-Like involves uncertainty and risk. There are ideological reasons for thinking that psychophysical reduction involves risks we should not take

Knowing how to ride a bicycle, prove a theorem, tie a necktie, or play chess is, at least in part, an epistemic accomplishment. It is some sort of knowing. Abel (2012) argues that knowing how is irreducible to knowing that. No collection of knowings-that, however extensive, enables a person to play chess. I agree. He concludes that knowing how is therefore inscrutable. I argue that knowing how is akin to Aristotelian virtue - a matter of having a propensity to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. The norm of the practice has been internalized, becoming second nature. I argue that rather than conforming to expressly stated rules, we model our behavior on exemplars - publicly available instances that manifest the features we seek to emulate. Since the exemplars are public, knowing-how is scrutable.

Descartes’ demon is a crafty little devil. Despite centuries of effort by exceedingly clever thinkers, he continues to elude our clutches. Skepticism endures. The reason, Richard Foley thinks, is not hard to discover. It is simply impossible to break through the Cartesian circle. Our only means of vindicating a claim to knowledge or rational belief is to show that it is produced or sustained by our best epistemic methods, that it satisfies the best standards we can devise for rational belief. That it does so is clearly better than the alternative. But the standards and methods themselves are vulnerable. How do we know that they are reliable? The point, as we all realized in Philosophy 101, is that there is no ironclad guarantee. Even if Descartes had managed to generate an unexceptionable proof that God exists and is not a deceiver, the question would arise: What insures that what we consider an unexceptionable proof actually demonstrates the truth of the conclusion? Raising our standards or improving our methods of proof will not get us out of our predicament. For no matter how high we raise our standards, the question recurs. We cannot prove that our perceptions, memories, inferences or opinions are reliable. The Cartesian circle is the epistemic circle.

A challenger of traditions and boundaries A pivotal figure in 20th-century philosophy, Nelson Goodman has made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language, with surprising connections that cut across traditional boundaries. In the early 1950s, Goodman, Quine, and White published a series of papers that threatened to torpedo fundamental assumptions of traditional philosophy. They advocated repudiating analyticity, necessity, and prior assumptions. Some philosophers, realizing the seismic effects repudiation would cause, argued that philosophy should retain the familiar framework. Others considered the arguments compelling, but despaired of doing philosophy without the framework. Goodman disagreed with both factions. Rather than regretting the loss of structure, he capitalized on the opportunities that arise when the strictures of tradition are loosened. Available individually by volume 1. Nominalism, Constructivism, and Relativism in the Work of Nelson Goodman (0-8153-2609-2) 296 pages 2. Nelson Goodman's New Riddle of Induction (0-8153-2610-6) 312 pages 3. Nelson Goodman's Philosophy of Art (0-8153-2611-4) 284 pages 4. Nelson Goodman's Theory of Symbols and its Applications (0-8153-2612-2) 344 pages.

Truth is standardly considered a requirement on epistemic acceptability. But science and philosophy deploy models, idealizations and thought experiments that prescind from truth to achieve other cognitive ends. I argue that such felicitous falsehoods function as cognitively useful fictions. They are cognitively useful because they exemplify and afford epistemic access to features they share with the relevant facts. They are falsehoods in that they diverge from the facts. Nonetheless, they are true enough to serve their epistemic purposes. Theories that contain them have testable consequences, hence are factually defeasible.