What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson's account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson's, avoids naturalistic skepticism.
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One of the deepest ideological divides in contemporary epistemology concerns the relative importance of belief versus credence. A prominent consideration in favor of credence-based epistemology is the ease with which it appears to account for rational action. In contrast, cases with risky payoff structures threaten to break the link between rational belief and rational action. This threat poses a challenge to traditional epistemology, which maintains the theoretical prominence of belief. The core problem, we suggest, is that belief may not be enough to register all aspects of a subject's epistemic position with respect to any given proposition. We claim this problem can be solved by introducing other doxastic attitudes-genuine representations-that differ in strength from belief. The resulting alternative picture, a kind of doxastic states pluralism, retains the central features of traditional epistemology-most saliently, an emphasis on truth as a kind of objective accuracy-while adequately accounting for rational action.
Abstract:The Swamping Argument -highlighted by Kvanvig (2003;2010) -purports to show that the epistemic value of truth will always swamp the epistemic value of any non-factive epistemic properties (e.g. justification) so that these properties can never add any epistemic value to an already-true belief. Consequently (and counter-intuitively), knowledge is never more epistemically valuable than mere true belief. We show that the Swamping Argument fails. Parity of reasoning yields the disastrous conclusion that nonfactive epistemic properties -mostly saliently justification -are never epistemically valuable properties of a belief. We close by diagnosing why philosophers have been mistakenly attracted to the argument. rise to an ex ante constraint on the correct theory of knowledge: whatever conditions it places on knowledge (over and above the possession of true belief), a true belief that satisfies all of those conditions must turn out to be more e-valuable than a true belief that doesn't. 2 The problem is how to accommodate this ex ante constraint.Failing to solve this problem provides the ground for an objection. Typically, this objection is levied against reliabilist theories of knowledge, 3 e.g. one according to which there is only one condition for knowledge over and above the possession of true belief: the condition that (put roughly) the belief must be reliably formed. However, the objection has wider scope. Any theorist who is to maintain the ex ante constraint must have some plausible explanation for why the e-value 1 1 As Kvanvig (2003) notes, the insight that knowledge is to be prized above mere true opinion (even if the former is no practically more useful than the latter) has its roots to Plato's Meno. 3 See here Goldman (1992).
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