Keith DeRose

Direct Realism often emerges as a solution to a certain type of problem. Hume and, especially, Berkeley, wielding some of the most powerful arguments of 18th Century philosophy, forcefully attacked the notion that there could be good inferences from the occurrence of one’s sensations to the existence of external, mind-independent bodies. Given the success of these attacks, and also given the assumption, made by Berkeley and arguably by Hume as well, that our knowledge of and rational belief in the existence of material objects would depend upon there being such good inferences, a problem arises: We cannot know of or rationally believe in the existence of material objects. Reid’s Direct Realism then emerges as the solution to this problem. Reid admits the success of Berkeley’s and Hume’s attacks against the possibility of successfully grounding our material world beliefs on inferences from our sensations,[1] but claims that our belief in the existence of material objects can be perfectly rationally acceptable, and can amount to knowledge, despite the lack of such inferences. Though he did not use the terminology, it seems to be Reid’s position – and it’s this position that I will be referring to as his “Direct Realism” here – that certain perceptual beliefs whose content is such that they imply the existence of material objects are properly basic: they are rationally held, and if true can amount to knowledge, without having to be based on any other beliefs, including, most notably, beliefs about one’s own sensory experiences.

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose.

fits our evidence.[1] I will propose some potential counter-examples to test this evidentialist thesis. My main intention in presenting the “counter-examples” is to better understand Feldman’s evidentialism, and evidentialism in general. How are we to understand what our evidence is, how it works, and how are we to understand the phrase “epistemically ought to believe” such that evidentialism might make sense as a plausible thesis in light of the examples? Of course, we may decide that there’s no such way to understand evidentialism -- that it just isn’t a plausible thesis. I must admit that my suspicions lean in that direction. But the potential counter-examples are put forward, not in a refutational spirit (though I have nothing against good refutations in philosophy), but as an invitation to evidentialists and potential evidentialists to refine and/or explain their thesis in light of the at least apparent problems that the examples highlight.