Jonathan Ichikawa's Blog
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 2nd, 2010
I’ve long been troubled by failing to understand what ‘fallibilism’ and ‘infallibilism’ are supposed to amount to. Here’s an example of the sort of discussion I find puzzling.
Bohghossian and Peacocke write:
A priori justification is not infallible justification. Just as one may be justified in believing an ordinary empirical proposition that is empirically revealed on empirical [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 25th, 2010
The idea that knowledge entails certainty is a very intuitive one. It’s easy to forget this, because most of us have it drilled into us, early in our epistemological careers, that embracing a certainty requirement on knowledge leads to skepticism, and we’re rightly convinced that skepticsm is crazy, so we start getting used to the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 23rd, 2010
What should a contextualist who likes normative principles involving ‘knows’ say? Signing up to the knowledge norms means embracing something typically expressed by sentences fitting something like this schema:
(N) Iff S knows p, then S is permitted to phi
Some candidates for phi: S believe p; S rely on p in practical reasoning; S assert p. [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 18th, 2010
I know that there is snow outside; this knowledge is based in part on my visual experience. When I look out the window, I have experiences that partially constitute seeing snow. I also know that squares have four sides. Arguably, this knowledge is independent of experience, depending only on my conceptual competence, or rational capacities, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 10th, 2010
A priori justification or knowledge is meant to be independent from experience in some sense. But it’s a bit tricky to explain just what that sense is. It’s usually allowed that there are some roles for experience that are merely enabling in a way that is consistent with apriority. For example, maybe you think particular [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jan 27th, 2010
Fantl and McGrath argue that the combination of the following two views is problematic:
(JJ) If you are justified in believing that p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in phi-ing, for any phi. (Quoted from p. 99)
(Moderate Externalism about Justification) Justification does not supervene on the subject’s internal states. In particular, external properties [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Dec 27th, 2009
I’m reading Fantl and McGrath’s new knowledge book. An important thesis of the book is that of Impurism. Impurism is defined in chapter one as the denial of Purism, given thus:
(Purism about Knowledge) For any subjects S1 and S2, if S1 and S2 are just alike in their strength of epistemic position with respect to p, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Dec 7th, 2009
Here is a draft of a review of Keith DeRose’s new book. Comments welcome.
Posted in Philosophy on Dec 1st, 2009
I’ve just written up an abstract for a paper I’m thinking about writing on the bearing of x-phi on the alleged apriority of philosophy. Short answer: there is none—even if the x-phi critics are right about the need for philosophers to be doing more science. I’ve posted it on the Arché Methodology Blog; I’d welcome [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 24th, 2009
It’s a little bit natural to think that ‘knows’ contextualism and the shifty kind of invariantist that’s sometimes called an ‘SSI theorist’ or an ‘IRI theorist’ come to a bit of an intuitive draw considering two kinds of third-person knowledge attributions. High Howie has whatever features you think makes it harder to know, or makes [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 23rd, 2009
Keith DeRose accepts something like the knowledge norm of assertion — although as a contextualist, he can’t have it entirely straightforwardly. He at least thinks this much: the assertability conditions for S for ‘p’ are the same as the truth conditions for ‘I know p’ in S’s mouth. He takes it to be obvious that [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 19th, 2009
This week I’m thinking about Laurence Bonjour’s In Defense of Pure Reason. In §4.4, Bonjour offers what he takes to be a very straightforward argument against the infallibility of rational insight: just look, he says, at all the examples of alleged cases of rational insight that are false — some have been empirically refuted, and [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 16th, 2009
Timothy Williamson has famously defended these two claims:
(1) Knowledge cannot be analyzed
(2) Knowledge can play lots of important explanatory roles all over the place
These two claims, if true, give us reason to think about the role of knowledge very differently; use it to explain things, instead, of as something we’re trying to explain. Call this [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 26th, 2009
Elusive There. Try to go there, and straightaway it disappears. That is how walking destroys there.
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 25th, 2009
John Hawthorne gives an argument that contextualists about knowledge face considerable pressure to be contextualists about terms that refer to things widely thought to be linked to knowledge, like ‘is epsitemically permitted to assert’ or ‘relies inappropriately upon in one’s practical reasoning’. I’m inclined to agree. He argues, however, that it’s not at all plausible [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 24th, 2009
I’m on the record as thinking there are tight connections between counterfactuals and knowledge.
Robbie Williams, in his “Defending Conditional Excluded Middle,” denies this. At least, he argues for a strong disconnect between them. Robbie argues, among other things, that there are strong reasons to accept both (A) and (B):
(A) If I were to flip a [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 23rd, 2009
Here’s an insanely simple argument for contextualism about knowledge. I think it’s sound, although I’m not sure I’d expect many people to be persuaded by it. I’d be interested in hearing about how readers might think it best to resist it.
Here’s premise one. Epistemic modals are intimately connected to knowledge in something like the following [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 4th, 2009
In chapter 1 of Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne introduces the knowledge norm of practical reasoning: “At a rough first pass, one ought only to use that which one knows as a premise in one’s deliberations.” (p.30) He then immediately qualifies this principle in two ways with this footnote (fn.77):
Qualification 1: “In a situation where [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 30th, 2009
I’m teaching a contemporary epistemology course with Yuri to Honours students this year. We started with Linda Zagzebski’s “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems”, which, to my mind, helpfully turns attention away from attempts to analyze knowledge on which students may have spent much of their intro epistemology courses. I read it a few years ago, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 25th, 2009
In his 2002 paper “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Keith DeRose gave an argument for contextualism about ‘knows’ that took basically this form: knowledge is the norm of assertion; assertability varies according to context; therefore, knowledge varies according to context.
This was a pretty confused argument — though of course this is much clearer in retrospect, with [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 22nd, 2009
I’m reviewing a book for the first time; do any philosophers have tips on how to plan/organize/read/etc.? This is all new to me, and I’d welcome any advice from veterans on how to proceed. Do you like to take notes along the way? Should I plan on reading cover-to-cover more than once? How do you [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 5th, 2009
According to orthodoxy, what’s true in a fiction goes beyond what’s entailed by the text making up the story. Although fictions are gappy (there’s no fact about whether Hamlet had an even number of hairs), some things are determinately true without being stated, or being entailed by thugs that are stated (Hamlet was not a [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 4th, 2009
Intuitions and Begging the Question is now under review. Check it out if you’re interested in reading what I think about intuitions, and making me wish I’d asked you for comments on it before submitting it.
My next project: making revisions to Explaining Away Intuitions.
Here, incidentally, is where I have all my papers online now.
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 28th, 2009
I’m kicking off the Arché Summer School this year; here are the slides for my talk. (PowerPoint) (pdf)
(This is mostly designed for the attendees, although I guess it’s conceivable that others could find them interesting. I don’t have a handout; instead, I have a URL where interested parties can look at the slides, quotes, references, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 24th, 2009
Something cool happened in our methodology seminar last week. Some people like to remark on real-world Gettier cases they find themselves in. I found myself last week in the presence of a real-life deviant Gettier case.
A deviant Gettier case (what Ben Jarvis and I have also called a ‘bad Gettier case’) is a situation in [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 21st, 2009
Matt Weiner argues that ‘our use of the word “know” is best captured by’ an inconsistent set of inference rules. His setup strikes me as strange. He writes:
These are the Knowledge Principles:
(Disquotational Principle) An utterance of “S knows that p” at time t is true iff at time t S knows-tenseless that p.
(Practical Environment Principle) [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 20th, 2009
Brian recently wondered whether philosophy is deductive or somehow ampliative. I don’t think I believe in ampliative inference. I think that all reasoning is deductive.
By ‘deductive inference,’ I mean inferences where the premises entail the conclusion, and one is led to accept the conclusion on the basis of the believed premises. (I’ll limit this to [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 7th, 2009
Stephen Yablo argues that knowledge of things like shapes, insofar as they depend on visual imagination, cannot be a priori. Here is one of his arguments:
[S]ome imagined reactions are a better guide to real reactions than others. Imagined shape reactions are a good guide, you say, and you are probably right. But it is hard [...]