Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on May 7th, 2012
I was very pleased to have my short discussion on evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning appear in the inaugural issue of Thought. Unfortunately, I’ve just noticed that there are two errors near the end of the published version of the paper. One, which is entirely my fault, is that I misspelled Mikkel Gerken’s [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 3rd, 2012
There’s a philosophy of mind reading group at UBC, reading Dretske’s (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information this spring. I’ve never made a proper study of Dretske’s work before, so I’m finding it extremely useful and interesting. In yesterday’s reading group, I had an idea that I’d like to explore a bit further; consider this [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 29th, 2012
Sanford Goldberg has an interesting new argument against mentalist internalism about justification in Analysis. I’m working on committing myself to an internalist approach to justification at the moment; Goldberg’s new paper isn’t enough to force me to reconsider. The master argument of the paper, which Goldberg lays out quite succinctly, is this, which I quote: [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 13th, 2012
Knowledge shows up in theories a lot lately. Or should I say that ‘knowledge’ shows up in statements of theories? One question I’m hoping to research a fair amount in the near future concerns the status of theoretical claims about knowledge. The knowledge first program, broadly construed, says that knowledge has some kind of priority [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 13th, 2012
I’ve been sitting in on, and enjoying, Carrie Jenkins’s grad seminar in epistemology. Today, one of our grad students, Kousaku Yui, brought up a pretty interesting suggestion in response to Jason Stanley’s stakes-relative approach to knowledge. I didn’t recognize the point as one that I’ve seen discussed before — if there is a literature on it, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 8th, 2012
I’m re-reading Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits for a reading group at UBC. I’m struck by this passage, from the introduction to Chapter 9 on Evidence. [W]e may speculate that standard accounts of justification have failed to deal convincingly with the traditional problem the regress of justifications—what justifies the justifiers?—because they have forbidden themselves to [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 1st, 2012
I haven’t been updating my blog since moving to UBC last fall, partly because I’ve been busy preparing new courses and grant applications and settling into a new city. (My two biggest professional bits of news over the last while, for anyone interested who hasn’t already heard elsewhere, are that The Rules of Thought, my book [...]
Posted in papers, Philosophy on Oct 18th, 2011
I have completed a draft of a new short discussion piece on Michael Blome-Tillmann’s (2009) Mind paper, “Knowledge and Presuppositions”. It is essentially a development of this blog post from a year and a half ago. (I’d forgotten about it, to be honest — I rediscovered it as I finished drafting.) My new paper: Ignorance [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 15th, 2011
I’m starting work on a new project on epistemic justification. I’m trying to begin by laying out various perceived or actual desiderata for theories of epistemic justification. Here’s one, laid out in Alvin Goldman’s classic paper, “What is Justified Belief?”: a theory of justification should give necessary and sufficient conditions in non-epistemic terms. We could [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 15th, 2011
Benjamin Jarvis and I have been working for some time now on a book manuscript on mental content, rationality, and the epistemology of philosophy. I posted a TOC of our first draft last summer. Since then, we’ve received some helpful comments from reviewers, and have revised extensively; we now have a full new draft, which [...]
Posted in Philosophy on May 13th, 2011
Suppose that Katie is sitting out in the sun. Here are two propositions: (1) It is sunny. (2) Jonathan is wearing glasses or Jonathan is not wearing glasses. It’s pretty plausible to develop the case in such a way that each of (1) and (2) would be rational for Katie to believe, and irrational for [...]
Posted in Philosophy on May 11th, 2011
According to David Lewis’s classic paper, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” conversations, like sporting matches, have scores, which characterize the current situation, and rules, which interact with scores to determine what is permissible. The score of a baseball game includes the number of runs scored, an indication of which team is batting, the number of [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Apr 26th, 2011
I spent the last week at the APA Pacific in San Diego. I have several topics inspired there that I’m hoping to write up quick blog posts about, including some philosophical and nonphilosophical ones. In general, I think I’m going to start using this blog for a bit more extraphilosophy content. I’ll start that not-right-now, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Apr 9th, 2011
Suppose somebody has a false intuition about an a priori matter. Is she justified in believing its content? Many plausible answers, of course, will begin with “it depends…”. On what does it depend? Ernie Sosa thinks that among the things upon which it depends is whether the false intuition derives from “some avoidably defective way”; such [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 30th, 2011
I’m thinking about a point that Ernie Sosa has made in response to survey-based experimental philosophy challenges. As we all know, some critics have argued that certain experimental results challenge traditional armchair philosophy. In particular, for example, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich found that there seemed to be a systematic divergence of epistemic intuitions depending upon [...]