Scott Sturgeon

David Lewis's approach to objective chance is doubly distinctive. On the one hand, Lewis uses an epistemic principle to disclose the nature of chance. One the other, Lewis conjoins realism about chance with a reductive Humean metaphysics. I aim to undermine both aspects of his view. Specifically, I argue that reductive Humeanism fails across the board, and I use my discussion of chance to explain why. I also argue Lewis's "best-systems" approach to chance fails his own criteria for a metaphysics of chance. (edited)

Consider the frame S believes that—. Fill it with a conditional, say If you eat an Apple, you'll drink a Coke. what makes the result true? More generally, what facts are marked by instances of S believes ? In a sense the answer is obious: beliefs are so marked. Yet that bromide leads directly to competing schools of thought. And the reason is simple. Common-sense thinks of belief two ways. Sometimes it sees it as a three-part affair. When so viewed either you believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgment. This take on belief is coarse-grained . It says belief has three flavours: acceptance, rejection, neither. But it's not the only way common-sense thinks of belief. Sometimes it's more subtle: ‘How strong is your faith?’ can be apposite between believers. That signals an important fact. Ordinary practice also treats belief as a fine-grained affair. It speaks of levels of confidence. It admits degrees of belief . It contains a fine-grained take as well. There are two ways belief is seen in everyday life. One is coarse-grained. The other is fine-grained

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