Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in publications on Jul 23rd, 2011
I’ve never been at all sure what to make of ‘evidentialism’ in epistemology. Following is a fairly naive response to Conee and Feldman; I suspect there’s some discussion of these or closely related issues; I’d be happy to be pointed to them. Conee and Feldman think that the doxastic attitude I’m justified in having toward [...]
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 Sep 19th, 2010
This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I’m looking primarily at chapter five — the modal epistemology chapter — of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the [...]
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 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 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 [...]