Paweł Grad

[Under contract for Cambridge Elements in Epistemology, Cambridge UP.] The central idea of hinge epistemology is that our beliefs are evaluable in terms of evidential justification only against the background of propositions that we take to be certain. Such certainties are claimed to be ‘riverbed’, ‘scaffolding’, ‘bedrock’, ‘hinges’, on which the justification of the whole belief system rests. The received view in hinge epistemology is that hinges are not evaluable in terms of evidential justification and are therefore a-rational. In this Element, I argue against the received view. I propose to reorient the project of hinge epistemology by arguing for the rational evaluability of hinge certainties. My aim is to make hinge epistemology fit the general evidentialist framework, without abandoning the central idea of hinge epistemology. The main motivation for pursuing this aim is that my proposal – hinge evidentialism – seems to be more nuanced and more explanatorily powerful than the received view. The Element starts with a presentation of my proposal (chapter 2), and then addresses the main objections against hinge evidentialism (chapters 3–6). Given that my proposal goes against the received view, my response to these objections is an integral part of my argument. It allows me to introduce many important details into my account of hinge certainties. The concluding chapter (7), building on these responses, advertises the explanatory power of hinge evidentialism.

According to the access internalist core claim, my evidence contributes to my justification because I represent my evidential situation. The representation of the evidential situation is understood as based not on empirical, but rather introspective grounds. The standard formulation of access internalism goes further, grounding access to evidence in reflective knowledge of one’s evidential situation. This paper aims to secure the plausibility of the core claim of access internalism by proposing the alternative to the knowledge view in terms of objectual understanding. In Sect. 2, I separate the core claim of access internalism from its formulation in terms of knowledge. In Sect. 3, I defend the understanding view by explaining the psychological features of understanding that align with the intuition identified in Sect. 2. In Sects. 4 and 5, I refine the proposal by addressing a potential objection concerning sufficiency and necessity of understanding for access, respectively. In Sect. 6, I show how the understanding view avoids the main epistemological difficulty facing the knowledge view. Section 7 concludes.

In this paper, I argue for the Hidden Grounds thesis: in paradigmatic cases of religious hinge commitments, these commitments are rational in virtue of being implicitly based on epistemic grounds. The key intuition behind my argument draws on the work of John Henry Newman. As I understand him, Newman holds that both religious and non-religious hinges are rational because they are grounded in epistemic considerations that are largely implicit and not necessarily accessible to reflection. This, in turn, explains their epistemic stability. I begin by presenting the argument for the Hidden Grounds thesis. The subsequent sections support the premises of this argument. First, I introduce the concept of implicit basing and argue that some doxastic states are rational in virtue of being implicitly based on epistemic grounds. I then present Newman’s view on the implicit grounds of religious hinges and argue for its plausibility. I conclude by addressing several possible objections to my view.

Some hinge epistemologists have identified the constraints of innate and hardwired cognitive capacities with hinge propositions. My point in this paper is that they have focused only on one part of the story offered by developmental psychology. Another part, addressed here, predicts that cognitive constraints have the potential to be conceptually bootstrapped. The claim is that conceptual bootstrapping provides the subject with rational support for hinge propositions, contrary to the mainstream view in hinge epistemology. First, I introduce the basics of conceptual bootstrapping (§2). Next, I argue that conceptual bootstrapping provides the subject with rational support for hinge commitments (§ 3). §§ 4–6 addresses a possible objections to my proposal. §7 concludes.

This paper aims to investigate the prospects of representationalism in accounting for the presentational character of perceptual experience. “Presentational character” refers the unique directness and qualitative richness with which perceptual experience relates us to its objects. My claim is that reductive representationalism is ill-suited to account for presentational character and that phenomenal intentionalism fares much better. Moreover, presentational character is an anchor—an experiential anchor—of our concept of mental representation. §2 elaborates on the concept of “presentational character” to fix the ideas. §3 examines accounts of presentational character available to reductive representationalism. §4 does the same for phenomenal intentionalism. §5 suggests how considerations related to presentational character might be used by phenomenal intentionalists to support their core claim. §6 concludes.

Contra both phenomenalists and anti-phenomenalists, I defend the following thesis in this paper: the epistemic power of perceptual experience is grounded in its presentational property that is (i) uniquely possessed by the experience in the good case and (ii) essentially a phenomenal property. In §2, I set the ground for my argument by elaborating on the phenomenalist account of presentational phenomenology. In §3, I argue (against phenomenalism) for the first part of the phenomenal presentation thesis: (i) perceptual experience’s epistemic power is grounded in instances of a presentational property possessed by perceptual experience in the good, but not in the bad case. In §4, I argue (against anti-phenomenalists) for the second part of the phenomenal presentation thesis: (ii) presentational property is essentially a phenomenal property. In §5, I address some potential objections to the phenomenal presentation thesis. §6 concludes.

In this paper, I identify the hard problem of access for epistemological disjunctivism (ED): given that perceptual experience E is opaque with respect to its own epistemic properties, subject S is not in a position to know epistemic proposition (i) (that E is factive with respect to empirical proposition p) just by having E and/or reflecting on E. This is the case even if (i) is true. I first motivate the hard problem of access (Section 2) and then reconstruct and analyze three of the ways in which EDists have argued for the internal accessibility of the factive character of perceptual experience. These arguments explain internal access in terms of the unity of perceptual and rational capacities (Section 3), favoring support (Section 4), and the outward-looking model of self-knowledge (Section 5). My conclusion (Section 6) is that none of these responses works. I then suggest how ED might be modified to succeed as an access internalist epistemology.

I argue in the paper that the conception of family resemblance discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations is a result of the application of Wittgenstein’s general argument against rule‑following to the pragmatics of all concepts. My argument runs as follows: First, (1) I criticize interpretations of family resemblance as a ‘local’ theory, applicable only to some concepts. Next, (2) I present and criticise a classic argument against the conception of family resemblance. In the following section, (3) I analyse attempts to explicate family resemblance in terms of their possessing a common basic feature. I end my paper (4) by summarizing conclusions drawn from this critical review of literature and I briefly point to a possible solution of the difficulties generated by the concept of family resemblance.