Abstract: The colloquium talk is embedded in the PhD course taught this same week. The course and the talk will take up some chapters of a book manuscript in progress. The main new components are in the first seminar session on Tuesday and in the colloquium on Wednesday.
A main concern of the event 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 teaching 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 quite unusual, and relies heavily on argued rejection of both internalist foundationalism and aggressive naturalism.
A second main feature of the course will be the idea of “default assumptions.” And here are two ways default assumptions acquire philosophical interest: (a) They define and sustain a distinctive 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.
