Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
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 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 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 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 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 papers on Jul 21st, 2009
Is Imagination A Priori? Draft of 21 July, 2009. Will be subsumed into a longer piece. Sometimes, we come to new knowledge via imaginative processes; plausibly, sometimes, such imagination plays an indispensably warranting role. Is such a role for imagination inconsistent with the apriority of our new knowledge? Stephen Yablo has argued that a certain [...]
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 [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual, (2009) Philosophical Studies, 145(3), September 2009: 435-443. Please refer to published version here. For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy. See also Williamson’s response here. I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Who Needs Intuitions? Two Experimentalist Critiques Version of 9 January, 2011. To appear in Booth and Rowbottom, (eds.) Intuitions, Oxford University Press. A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality [...]
Posted in on Jun 20th, 2009
I’m an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia. In 2011-12, I was a postdoc at UBC; before that, I was a postdoc at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. My Ph.D. is from Rutgers University. My research so far has fallen broadly into three areas of [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 19th, 2009
Experimentalist Pressure Against Traditional Methodology, Version of 11 September. Under review. According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism [...]