Jonathan Ichikawa's Blog
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 p, [...]
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 kind [...]
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 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 explains [...]
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 fragility [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Who Needs Intuitions? Version of 7 September, 2008. Under review.
“Intuitions play critical evidential roles in philosophy.” This statement has air of truism about it; it is widely assumed, and occasionally explicitly argued, to be correct. It forms the basis of an influential series of challenges to traditional philosophical methodology; among these are a reliability challenge—’how [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2009
I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. I’m working on the AHRC-funded ‘Intuitions and Methodology‘ project.
My Ph.D. was at Rutgers University.
My research so far has fallen broadly into three areas of focus (with vague boundaries and overlap): (i) questions in epistemology about knowledge, ‘knows’, safety [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 19th, 2009
The Audacity of Hopeful Philosophical Appeals to Intuition, Version of 8 July, 2009. 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 [...]