Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 8th, 2010
I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’ says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 2nd, 2010
We all know that metaphysical possibility isn’t the same thing as physical possibility, or other ‘restricted’ notions. It is sometimes suggested that the modifiers ‘metaphysically’, ‘physically’, ‘epistemically’, etc., in phrases like ‘metaphysically possible’ act as restrictors on the more general, univocal, property of possibility. (Compare: someone can be surprisingly wealthy, unjustly wealthy, or extremely wealthy [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Aug 31st, 2010
As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting here much lately. That’s for a couple of reasons. One is that, as many of you will know, my personal life has lately been very exciting. Carrie Jenkins and I are recently engaged to be married. So that’s pretty awesome. It also means I’m spending a [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Apr 16th, 2010
In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of ‘knows’ contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis’s particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 12th, 2010
I’m going to be discussing an argument that I know Jason Stanley to have given, but I’m away from my copy of his book at the moment, so I can’t cite it properly, or check and see who else has discussed it (or even whether it’s original to Jason). I’ll follow up if citation protocol [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 10th, 2010
Suppose you think that it’s possible to know that p, even though your epistemic position vis-a-vis p is weak enough for ‘it might be that not-p’, in its epistemic reading, to be true. I don’t really see why you’d want to think this myself, but I guess some people think that (a) this is a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]