What’s the matter with epistemic circularity?

Barnett, David

doi:10.1007/s11098-013-0261-0

Cited by 8 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…I discuss the Existence thesis in more detail in Barnett 2014. Richard Feldman (2005 appeals to a 15 similar principle in his discussion of forgotten evidence cases of memory, though I think the principle's application to these cases is less straightforward than Feldman makes it out to be.…”

Section: Testimony From Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Memory Merely Testimony from One's Former Self?

Barnett

2015

The Philosophical Review

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A natural view of testimony holds that a source's statements provide one with evidence about what the source believes, which in turn provides one with evidence about what is true. But some theorists have gone further and developed a broadly analogous view of memory. According to this view, which this essay calls the “diary model,” one's memory ordinarily serves as a means for one's present self to gain evidence about one's past judgments, and in turn about the truth. This essay rejects the diary model's analogy between memory and testimony from one's former self, arguing first that memory and a diary differ with respect to their psychological roles, and second that this psychological difference underwrites important downstream epistemic differences. The resulting view stands opposed to prominent discussions of memory and testimony, which either, like the diary model, treat memory by analogy to what we naively wish to say about testimony, or which instead attempt to extend to testimony the epistemically preservative role of memory.

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Section: Testimony From Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Memory Merely Testimony from One's Former Self?

Barnett

2015

The Philosophical Review

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“…On Avnur's view, it is possible for our ordinary beliefs to rationally require beliefs in the negations of skeptical hypotheses without thereby justifying those beliefs. See the discussion of the Existence thesis in (Barnett, 2014) for more. 12 I take this, in outline, to be Silins' (2012) strategy, although on his view it is the judgement that p, rather than the belief that p, that justifies the belief that one believes that p. Although Silins characterizes his view as an elaboration of the slogan that the question whether you believe that p is transparent to the question whether p, on his construal the slogan is consistent with a wide variety of theories about belief-self ascription, including an inner sense theory.…”

Section: Reasons and Reliable Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For comparison, a Closure-denier might say that you are unjustified in rejecting that you are a brain in a vat with no hands, but still allow that you are justified in rejecting that you have no hands. 46 For more, see the discussion of the Existence thesis in (Barnett, 2014). 47 For a recent survey of attempts to reject Closure, see (Avnur, 2012).…”

Section: Reasons and Reliable Inferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inferential Justification and the Transparency of Belief

Barnett

2015

Nous

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Abstract. This paper critically examines currently influential transparency accounts of our knowledge of our own beliefs that say that self-ascriptions of belief typically are arrived at by "looking outward" onto the world. For example, one version of the transparency account says that one selfascribes beliefs via an inference from a premise to the conclusion that one believes that premise. This rule of inference reliably yields accurate selfascriptions because you cannot infer a conclusion from a premise without believing the premise, and so you cannot infer from a premise that you believe the premise unless you do believe it. I argue that this procedure cannot be a source of justification, however, because one can be justified in inferring from p that q only if p amounts to strong evidence that q is true. This is incompatible with the transparency account because p often is not very strong evidence that you believe that p. For example, unless you are a weather expert, the fact that it will rain is not very strong evidence that you believe it will rain. After showing how this intuitive problem can be made precise, I conclude with a broader lesson about the nature of inferential justification: that inferential transitions between beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by evidential relationships between the facts or propositions which those beliefs represent.

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“… For further discussion of the nature of bootstrapping problems and of who they might be problems for, see Cohen (2000), White (), Weisberg (), or Barnett (). …”

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confidence: 99%

The Evil Demon Inside

Silins

2018

Philos Phenomenol Research

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This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of introspection need to talk—each has much to learn from each other.

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What’s the matter with epistemic circularity?

Cited by 8 publications

References 25 publications

Is Memory Merely Testimony from One's Former Self?

Is Memory Merely Testimony from One's Former Self?

Inferential Justification and the Transparency of Belief

The Evil Demon Inside

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