Metaepistemology and Skepticism

Fumerton, Richard

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-1942-6_5

Cited by 175 publications

(187 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Some of the central discussions of epistemic circularity have been given as objections to reliabilism (Vogel 2000, Fumerton 1995. The idea was that epistemic circularity is a bad thing, and that reliabilism is committed to saying that some epistemically circular arguments are legitimate.…”

Section: Alstonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Circularity, Reliabilism, and Transmission Failure

Bondy¹

2014

Episteme

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Epistemically circular arguments have been receiving quite a bit of attention in the literature for the past decade or so. Often the goal is to determine whether reliabilists (or other foundationalists) are committed to the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments. It is often assumed that epistemic circularity is objectionable, though sometimes reliabilists accept that their position entails the legitimacy of some epistemically circular arguments, and then go on to affirm that such arguments really are good ones. My goal in this paper is to argue against the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments. My strategy is to give an argument against the legitimacy of epistemically circular arguments, which rests on a principle of basis-relative safety, and then to argue that reliabilists do not have the resources to resist the argument. I argue that even if the premises of an epistemically circular argument enjoy reliabilist justification, the argument does not transmit that justification to its conclusion. The main goal of my argument is to show that epistemic circularity is always a bad thing, but it also has the positive consequence that reliabilists are freed from an awkward commitment to the legitimacy of some intuitively bad arguments.

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Section: Alstonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Circularity, Reliabilism, and Transmission Failure

Bondy¹

2014

Episteme

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“…That conclusion is false. Furthermore, while relying on intuition for evidence of its justificatory power is epistemically circular in the sense that it involves relying on a putative source of evidence to justify its own status as evidence, it does not involve any kind of bootstrapping or track record justification of the sort alleged by some to be epistemically objectionable (Alston 1993;Fumerton 1995;Vogel 2000;Cohen 2002). The justifications just outlined do not, unlike bootstrapping arguments, involve justificatory appeal to one's having had any intuitions at all.…”

Section: The Reliability Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical Evidence for Rationalism?

Pust¹

2014

Intuitions

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“…Conee and Feldman 2001, Fumerton 1995, Pollock 1974, 1986. 21 On this view, there is a kind of seeming memory that isn't explained in terms of belief or dispositions to believe, and which may be called memorial 19 The phenomenon of "childhood amnesia," first noticed by Freud, has been taken to cast doubt about young children's capacity for episodic or personal memory but not for factual memory.…”

Section: Non-doxastic Evidentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 The fact of this special connection to the past, unshared by other sorts of beliefs, might encourage the thought that 1 It is notoriously difficult to give an informative characterization of distinctively epistemic positive statuses, whether rationality, justification, responsibility, etc. Among the leading accounts are Feldman's (2001) role-based account (distinctively epistemic 'oughts' are role-oughts, where the relevant role is that of a believer), Fumerton's (1995) probability-based account (distinctively epistemic justification requires that a proposition be probable for a subject), and Foley's (1993Foley's ( , 2001 goal-based account (distinctively epistemic rationality is a matter of how well a belief that p seems from one's perspective to serve the goal of now having an accurate belief on whether p). Whichever of these accounts we adopt, the example given in the text succeeds: I am rational in the distinctively epistemic sense to abandon my belief about lunching with my friend.…”

Section: Preservationismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory and epistemic conservatism

McGrath

2007

Synthese

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IntroductionWe are all conservatives, at least when it comes to belief retention. We are forgetful, of course, but we typically do not abandon our beliefs unless we have special reasons to do so. Our conservativeness might be viewed as a kind of deep self-trust, or less nobly, as simply part of the "inertial" character of belief (Harman 1986, Owens 2000. Whichever view one takes of the psychology, an epistemological question arises: if a subject S believes that p, does the retention of that belief thereby have some positive epistemic status for S, at least prima facie? An epistemic conservative is someone who answers this question in the affirmative. Conservatives may disagree about more specific matters, e.g., about which positive epistemic statuses (justification, blamelessness, rationality, etc.) satisfy a conservative principle or about how broadly to construe the range of defeating conditions associated with the prima facie rider. But the core of the doctrine is the epistemic efficacy of belief.In this paper, I will defend a form of conservatism about rational belief retention. I focus on rationality mainly for two reasons. First, this notion is regularly employed in ordinary epistemic evaluations of belief (arguably unlike justification). Second, rational belief retention does not require that one's belief be true, and so does not require knowledge, truth-tracking, safety, or other truth-entailing externalist statuses. Conservatism with respect to these statuses is a non-starter, at least under any reasonably narrow construal of the range of defeating conditions. 2My argument in favor of conservatism is not a variant of familiar ones based on considerations of cognitive efficiency (see Harman 1986 on "clutter avoidance" and also Lycan 1988) or based on the need to avoid skepticism in general (Chisholm 1989) or the need to cope with the evidential underdetermination of theories (Sklar 1975). Rather, I will argue that epistemic conservatism makes a good epistemology of memory. More particularly, I will argue, first, that the two standard accounts of the rationality of memory belief, preservationism and evidentialism, face insuperable problems, and second, that conservatism, properly honed, avoids those problems and incurs no unacceptable commitments. I make the case against the standard accounts in sections I and II, and defend conservatism against objections in section III. What will emerge is a moderate form of conservatism that is fundamentally an epistemological principle about memory.Before proceeding, certain terminological matters require brief discussion.Epistemologists often ask questions about a subject's rationality (justification, etc.) with respect to the statics of belief (e.g., is S rational to believe that p? Is S rational in believing/having the belief that p?), rather than the dynamics of belief (e.g., is S rational to retain/abandon the belief that p?) However, in ordinary life we regularly use the language of rationality when discussing belief dynamics, and it is clear that the sort of ra...

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Metaepistemology and Skepticism

Cited by 175 publications

References 2 publications

Epistemic Circularity, Reliabilism, and Transmission Failure

Epistemic Circularity, Reliabilism, and Transmission Failure

Empirical Evidence for Rationalism?

Memory and epistemic conservatism

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