Auke Montessori

Preface and Lottery paradoxes have shown that competently deducing a novel conclusion from multiple justified premises does not necessarily result in a justified belief. However, those paradoxes do not arise if only a single premise is used. Yet, in recent years, justification closure for single premise deduction has also been challenged. Schechter has presented a case that, according to him, thwarts any attempt to formulate a general principle that links competent single premise deduction to justification. This paper develops a justification closure principle for single premise deduction that accommodates Schechter’s case, thus showing that his pessimism regarding the possibility of such principles is mistaken. I also argue that an alternative reply to Schechter’s case fails and that safeguarding justification closure constitutes progress for establishing knowledge closure for single premise deduction.

It is commonplace amongst epistemologists to note the importance of grasping or appreciating one’s evidence. The idea seems to be that agents cannot successfully utilize evidence without it. Despite the popularity of this claim, the nature of appreciating or grasping evidence is unclear. This paper develops an account of what it takes to appreciate the epistemic relevance of one’s evidence, such that it can be used for some specific conclusion. I propose a basing account on which appreciating evidence involves being able to correctly base. That is, the agent is disposed to base various conclusions on her evidence that are objectively supported by that evidence. She can also derive correct conclusions if her evidence were slightly different. This account is cognitively undemanding, and explains why appreciation is crucial for the core functions of using evidence, like excluding hypotheses and probabilistic reasoning. I contrast this view with possible rival accounts and argue that the rival accounts add nothing over and above the basing account.

In this paper, I argue that mental types can overlap. That is, one token mental state can be multiple types. In particular, I argue that a perceptual experience can simultaneously be a belief. This does not imply that belief and experience are type-identical, they merely share some of their tokens. When a subject perceives with content _p_, that content is usually accessible to the subject. By endorsing _p_, whether automatically or consciously, the subject comes to believe that _p_. In this instance, the perceptual experience, while retaining its content and phenomenology, becomes a belief. The possibility of this kind of overlap turns out to have epistemic benefits, especially in the face of arguments by Alex Byrne and Kathrin Glüer. I consider several objections to overlap, including the idea that perception and belief have different kinds of content, that beliefs tend to outlast experiences and differences in phenomenology.

Strict finitism is the position that only those natural numbers exist that we can represent in practice. Michael Dummett, in a paper called Wang’s Paradox, famously tried to show that strict finitism is an incoherent position. By using the Sorites paradox, he claimed that certain predicates the strict finitist is committed to are incoherent. More recently, Ofra Magidor objected to Dummett’s claims, arguing that Dummett fails to show the incoherence of strict finitism. In this paper, I shall investigate whether Magidor is successful in preventing Dummett from proving the incoherence of strict finitism. Though not all the counterarguments Magidor presents are successful, she does in the end manages to corner Dummett. There remains a small opportunity for Dummett to insist on the incoherence of strict finitism, but this is a very small opening. The final conclusion of this paper is that Dummett cannot logically prove the incoherence of strict finitism, even though not all hope is lost.