Scott Sturgeon

Robert Stalnaker has recently argued that a pair of natural thoughts are incompatible. One of them is the view that items of non-indexical factual knowledge rule out possibilities. The other is the view that knowing what sensuous experience is like involves non-indexical knowledge of its phenomenal character. I argue against Stalnaker’s take on things, elucidating along the way how our knowledge of what experience is like fits together with the natural idea that items of non-indexical factual knowledge rule out possibilities

The project consists of a defense of the reductivist program generally and an application of the program to the theory of epistemic justification. ;Chapter One sets out the problem of reducing justification to other terms and defends the legitimacy of this problem against attacks by Quine in particular and supervenience theorists generally. Chapter Two is an explication and refutation of all possible theories which reduce justification-facts to facts about the reliability of cognitive processes. All such theories founder due to their insensitivity to the perspectival component of thought. Chapter Three argues that this perspectival component is non-truth-theoretic and hence that the connection between justification and truth is much less important than has been generally supposed. Chapter Four lays out the structure of epistemic justification and proposes a reductive thesis entailing this structure. It is argued that essential elements of both coherence theories of justification and foundations theories of justification are present in rational thought and that this is explicable in terms of the teleology of human cognition. Chapter Five explicates and defends the theory constructed in Chapter Four

Scott Sturgeon has claimed to undermine the principal argument for Physicalism, in his words, the view that ’actuality is exhausted by physical reality’. In noting that actuality is exhausted by physical reality, the Physicalist is not claiming that all that there is in actuality are those things identified by physics. Rather the thought is that actuality is made up of all the things identified by physics and anything which is a compound of these things. So there are tables as well as their microphysical constituents. The argument that Sturgeon has in his sights is the Overdetermination Argument. In what follows, I shall argue that Sturgeon’s criticism of the Overdetermination argument fails. I shall also argue that physicalism can accommodate his claim that causal statements concerning the mental and physical respectively may require diverse patterns of counterfactual activity for their truth.

Some philosophers defend the view that epistemic agents believe by lending credence. Others defend the view that such agents lend credence by believing. It can strongly appear that the disagreement between them is notational, that nothing of substance turns on whether we are agents of one sort or the other. But that is demonstrably not so. Only one of these types of epistemic agent, at most, could manifest a human-like configuration of attitudes; and it turns out that not both types of agent are possible