University of Barcelona, 18 – 19 May, 2023
Programme
Thursday, 18 May
10:00 – 11:30 Maria Lasonen Aarnio (University of Helsinki), ‘Feasibilist Epistemology: An Overview’
11:40 – 13:10 Daniel Waxman (University of Singapore), ‘If You’re Happy, Clap Your Hands!’
15:30 – 17:00 Julien Dutant (King’s College London), ‘Safety, Closure and Counter-closure’
Friday, 19 May
10:00 – 11:30 Jack Lyons (University of Glasgow), ‘Showing and Telling in Epistemology’
11:40 – 13:10 Peter Graham (University of California, Riverside), ‘The New Evil Demon Problem at 40’
Venue: Seminari de Filosofia, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona
Registration (mandatory): https://forms.gle/w6XkfafGRAZXnG7X6
Abstracts
Maria Lasonen Aarnio, ‘Feasibilist Epistemology: An Overview’
This talk provides an overview of my new book, which develops a feasibilist normative framework and applies it to a range of puzzles and issues in epistemology. My favoured epistemic implementation of the framework understands a standard of reasonable belief in terms of manifesting the most knowledge-conducive feasible dispositions. But the framework is broader. Across different normative domains we need standards that depend to a greater extent solely on what goes on within a subject than do various successes like knowledge or morally right action. I contrast feasibilism with an influential perspectivist approach to a more “subjective” kind of normativity. I will focus on explaining the feasibility framework as well as its motivations, and on how dispositions play the role of methods in its epistemic implementations.
Daniel Waxman, ‘If You’re Happy, Clap Your Hands!’
A traditional argument for internalist norms in epistemology, ethics, and decision theory involves the idea that they alone are capable of being first-personally followable or action-guiding. Recently, however, this traditional argument has been powerfully criticized on the grounds that it relies on the discredited assumption that our own internal mental states are luminous or transparent to us. In this talk, I’ll argue that both sides of the debate have been working with a faulty picture of the way in which knowledge figures in norm-following behaviour. I’ll offer an alternative picture and show how it supports a novel argument, without any assumption of luminosity or the like, that only internalist norms can be action-guiding.
Jack Lyons, ‘Showing and Telling in Epistemology’
Someone who follows a proof is thereby epistemically better off, at least in some respect, than someone who merely has it on good authority that the proof is sound. This is because to follow a proof is to “see” that the conclusion follows from the premises. Seeing (in this metaphorical sense) is epistemically better than trusting; being shown is better than being told. Descartes called this state perceptio, and it is an important element of the idealized knowledge that’s occupied much of the history of epistemology, but epistemologists haven’t attended to it much lately. I want to try to better understand perceptio, to say what’s good about it and how it differs from similar phenomena, like first-person authority and metacognitive reassurance.
Peter Graham, ‘The New Evil Demon Problem at 40’
Reliabilists face the new evil demon problem, a possibility where perceptual belief forming process are entirely unreliable in the circumstances, but the perceptual beliefs so formed intuitively enjoy justification. Stew Cohen announced the problem in 1983/1984. One option—the heroic option—is to deny that warrant/justification persists. The standard option among reliabilists is to restrict the kind of reliability that grounds justification to reliability in a special set of circumstances. Goldman proposed nonmanipulated environments, normal worlds, and the actual world. Sosa makes the actual world maneuver as well. Burge proposes normal circumstances, where those are formative circumstances. But making this restriction is not enough. One must still explain why warrant/justification persists outside of the special set of circumstances. You can say that it does, but that doesn’t explain why. I sketch my account of perceptual warrant that turns on the etiological function of the belief-forming process. I distinguish grades of warrant. One grade persists in demon world scenarios. I explain why that grade should persist, in terms of the normative status of normal functioning, which persists outside of demon worlds. I conclude on why we should expect the demon world problem after the collapse of traditional foundationalism in the middle of the last century.and so does not avoid the paucity of evidence argument.
