ABSTRACT: The seminar (and the colloquium talk scheduled for Wednesday of that week) will take up some chapters of a book manuscript in progress.
A main concern of the seminar will be to explore an alternative to familiar philosophical methodologies, whether internalist and evidentialist, or naturalist, or x-phi. A sort of dawning light epistemology conceptually engineers a supportive setting for realist armchair intuitions.
This will be the subject of the first session. The paper for that first session presents a defense of a traditional, intuitions-and-counterexamples methodology still in wide use for work published in contemporary analytic journals. So, the methodology defended in this paper is familiar and widely employed. But the defense of it in the paper is novel, quite unusual, and relies heavily on argued rejection of both internalist foundationalism and aggressive naturalism.
A second main feature of the seminar will be the idea of “default assumptions.” And here are two ways default assumptions acquire philosophical interest: (a) They define and sustain a distinctive and surprising addition to epistemic psychology, that of assumptions/takings. I argue that they warrant attention because of the pervasive presence they have and deserve (though generally unrecognized) in human doxastic performance. (b) Relatedly, they provide a basis for a novel approach to philosophical skepticism.
The paper “Bounded Knowledge and Epistemic Psychology” is a brief introduction to the proposed approach. It will be the basis for the colloquium talk on Wednesday.
In later sessions of the seminar (Thursday and Friday), we will consider “Bounded Knowledge” (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies), a much longer exposition of the approach. Also, time permitting, we will take up some main objections to the virtue epistemology defended in the book in progress.
The papers are all available here:
