Benjamin Bayer

The goal of my work as a philosopher is to defend the idea that the purpose of epistemology is to offer normative guidance to the individual knower. This is sometimes identified as the “traditional” approach to epistemology, but when it emerged in the Enlightenment, the guidance conception of epistemology was revolutionary, insofar as it called on people to sweep aside the dogmas of the past and adopt a first-handed approach to knowing. I defend what might be termed a “neo-Enlightenment” epistemology, retaining the elements essential to the guidance conception, but shorn of the errors I take to have lent ammunition to the critics of the Enlightenment. Essential to Descartes’ and Locke’s epistemologies, for instance, were each of the following theses: foundationalism, the view that the justification of our beliefs depends on basic unjustified justifiers; internalism, the view that one’s beliefs are justified by facts of which one is consciously aware and therefore to which one is accountable; voluntarism, the view that the inquirer can responsibly craft his or her own beliefs in such a way that they are subject to evaluation; and evidentialism, the view that beliefs formed on a basis other than the known relevant evidence are unjustified. Common to both Descartes and Locke, however, were assumptions that undercut their defense of these doctrines. (Most prominent among these was the representationalist theory of perception.)