Jeremy Fantl

Lady Mary Shepherd’s critique of Hume’s account of causation, his worries about knowledge of matters of fact, and the contention that it is possible for the course of nature to spontaneously change relies primarily on three premises, two of which – that objects are merely bundles of qualities and that the qualities of an object are individuated by the causal powers contributed by those qualities – anticipate contemporary metaphysical views in ways that she should be getting credit for. The remaining premise – that it is impossible for an object to begin to exist uncaused – seems more old fashioned. I argue that Shepherd can do without her old-fashioned premise and that she provides the materials for arguing that her remaining premises demonstrate a stronger anti-Humeanism than is maintained even by the contemporary representatives of those views, even though she may have to concede more to Humeanism than she would like.

While it is often undesirable and difficult to introduce highly complex arguments in large introductory philosophy classes, it is important to do so at least once in the semester as it challenges students, shows how philosophical debates often go beyond one’s initial intuitions, and illustrates how meaningful answers often turn on close attention to logical minutiae. This paper provides an example of an advanced debate on the free-will response to the problem of evil that can be used in introductory courses in the philosophy of religion. The paper provides a skeleton of two lectures that the author has used (suitable for two fifty-minute lectures and one fifty-minute discussion section) and discusses two common difficulties students face when learning this material.

Shifty epistemologists allow that the truth value of “knowledge”-ascriptions can vary not merely because of such differences, but because of factors not traditionally deemed to matter to whether someone knows, like salience of error possibilities and practical stakes. Thus, contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are both examples. This paper examines two strategies for arguing for shifty epistemology: the argument-from-instances strategy, which attempts to show that the truth-value of knowledge-ascriptions can vary by proposing cases in which they vary (e.g., the bank cases, the airport case), and the argument-from-principles strategy, which attempts to specify general features of knowledge or ‘knowledge’ which guarantee the existence of cases of truth-value variation. This paper urges shifty epistemologists to consider the merits of emphasizing the latter strategy over the former.

I present and defend a unified, non-reductive analysis of the a priori and a posteriori. It is a mistake to remove all epistemic conditions from the analysis of the a priori (as, for example, Alvin Goldman has recently suggested doing). We can keep epistemic conditions (like unrevisability) in the analysis as long as we insist that a priori and a posteriori justification admit of degrees. I recommend making the degree to which a belief’s justification is a priori or a posteriori solely dependent on the revisability relations that obtain among the faculties that deliver the belief and all other faculties

In Sect. 1 of this chapter, Matthew McGrath examines Sosa's work on the nature of truth. Sosa's chief purpose is to determine what sort of theory of truth is appropriate for truth-centered epistemology -- an epistemology that takes truth to be the goal of inquiry and which explains key epistemic notions in terms of truth. While Sosa refutes arguments from Putnam and Davidson against the correspondence theory, he is hesitant to endorse it because he doubts we have a clear enough grasp of what correspondence amounts to and what the correspondents are. A truth-centered epistemologist, however, is free to work with minimalism about truth and Moorean primitivism. Part of Sosa's case for primitivism, and against minimalism, involves a comparison with Moore's account of goodness. Here McGrath notes an important dissimilarity between the two (i.e., susceptibility to open-question arguments) and suggests that this may be reason to prefer minimalism to primitivism. In Sect. 2, Jeremy Fantl discusses Sosa's work on the role of truth in epistemology. Sosa seems to be motivated by a dilemma facing any account of that role on which true belief is the sole fundamental epistemic value. On the one hand, we want an account of the role of truth in epistemology to explain why we epistemically evaluate beliefs and guide our intellectual lives in the way we do. On the other hand, it should not come out that we have any sort of epistemic obligation to form beliefs about completely boring or trivial matters (e.g., about the first phone number listed on page 356 of the phone book). Sosa's attempt to resolve the dilemma is to, first of all, adopt something like a pluralism about epistemic value and, second of all, move the primary locus of epistemic evaluation from beliefs to faculties. The second part of this chapter investigates the intricacies of these maneuvers.

I argue in favor of the possibility of real a priori justification. Some writers have claimed that, to adequately defend against the naturalist, we should grant that a priori justification can be defeated by further experiential evidence. Such writers generally view a priori faculties as on a par with empirical faculties but with different proper objects. While perceptual objects are the contingently existing things with which we are in causal contact, a priori objects are either necessarily true propositions or necessarily existing abstract objects with which we are not in causal contact. ;Though I admit that there is a weak sense of a priori justification according to which an a priori justified belief can become irrational in the face of experiential evidence, I argue that genuine a priori justification cannot be overridden by further experiential considerations . Allowing that a priori justification admits of degrees, we can be more or less a priori justified in a belief, depending on the extent to which that belief is revisable in the face of experiential evidence. In this way, I argue that the naturalist, in saying that a priori justification can always be defeated by experiential evidence, does not impugn the possibility that some beliefs can have a greater degree of a priori justification than others . I further argue that experiential beliefs derive much of their justification from a large background network of beliefs with a high degree of a priori justification. Some inference rules, I argue, in licensing the revision of empirical beliefs, must be unrevisable in their own right. Thus, if the naturalist is right, and a priori justification does require mysterious, occult processes, then so does experiential justification. If mysterious, occult processes are to be avoided at all costs, naturalism commits us to a rather extreme form of philosophical skepticism

This paper brings together two recent developments in the theory of epistemic justification: practical conditions on justification, and infinitism (the view thatjustification is a matter of having an infinite series of non-repeating reasons). Pragmatic principles can be used to argue that, if we’re looking for an ‘objective’ theory of the structure of justification – a theory that applies to all subjects independently of their practical context – infinitism stands the only chance at being the correct theory.

Evidentialism is the thesis that epistemic justification for belief supervenes on evidential support. However, we claim there are cases in which, even though two subjects have the same evidential support for a proposition, only one of them is justified. What make the difference are pragmatic factors, factors having to do with our cares and concerns. Our argument against evidentialism is not based on intuitions about particular cases. Rather, we aim to provide a theoretical basis for rejecting evidentialism by defending a “pragmatic” necessary condition on epistemic justification. We argue for the following necessary condition for justification: S is justified in believing that p only if S is rational to prefer (and, hence, act) as if p. In light of this necessary condition, the price of evidentialism is skepticism, or something close to it.