David DiDomenico

Much recent philosophical work on inference can be thought of as naturalistic. On the naturalistic approach, inference is a neurocognitive process to be described using the concepts and methods of contemporary cognitive science. In this paper, I develop two arguments against a currently fashionable version of naturalism about inference that I call the “Formal-Syntactic View”, according to which inference is to be explained exclusively in terms of cognitive systems following syntactic rules. These arguments highlight the need to take semantic content and pragmatic context seriously when constructing a theory of inference.

Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities". Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it. This is significant because the principle appears to have robust implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman (2018) has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision. In this paper, we present some new objections to a suitably formulated version of the clutter principle qua norm on belief revision. Moreover, we argue that the clutter principle is best understood as a norm on non-doxastic stages of inquiry. In our view, it is a norm of asking and considering questions rather than a norm of settling on an answer to a question by forming a belief.

Dogmatists and phenomenal conservatives think that if it perceptually seems to you that p, then you thereby have some prima facie justification for believing that p. Increasingly, writers about these views have argued that perceptual seemings are composed of two other states: a sensation followed by a seeming. In this article we critically examine this movement. First we argue that there are no compelling reasons to think of perceptual seemings as so composed. Second we argue that even if they were so composed, this underlying disunity in metaphysical or psychological structure would fall below the threshold of epistemic significance.