A Série Investigação Filosófica é uma série de livros de traduções de verbetes da Enciclopédia de Filosofia da Stanford (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) e de outras plataformas internacionalmente reconhecidas, que intenciona servir tanto como material didático para os professores das diferentes sub-áreas e níveis da Filosofia quanto como material de estudo para a pesquisa e para concursos da área. Nós, professores, sabemos o quão difícil é encontrar bom material em português para indicarmos. E há uma certa deficiência na graduação brasileira (...) de filosofia, principalmente em localizações menos favorecidas, com relação ao conhecimento de outras línguas, como o inglês e o francês. Tentamos, então, suprir essa deficiência, ao introduzirmos essas traduções ao público de língua portuguesa, sem nenhuma finalidade comercial e meramente pela glória da filosofia. (shrink)

The Sellarsian dilemma is a famous argument that attempts to show that nondoxastic experiential states cannot confer justification on basic beliefs. The usual conclusion of the Sellarsian dilemma is a coherentist epistemology, and the usual response to the dilemma is to find it quite unconvincing. By distinguishing between two importantly different justification relations (evidential and nonevidential), I hope to show that the Sellarsian dilemma, or something like it, does offer a powerful argument against standard nondoxastic foundationalist theories. But this reconceived (...) version of the argument does not support coherentism. Instead, I use it to argue for a strongly externalist epistemology. (shrink)

One important strand of Sellars’s attack on classical foundationalism from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is his thesis about the priority of is-talk over looks-talk. This thesis has been criticized extensively in recent years, and classical foundationalism has found several contemporary defenders. I revisit Sellars’s thesis and argue that is-talk is epistemically prior to looks-talk in a way that undermines classical foundationalism. The classical foundationalist claims that epistemic foundations are constituted by the agent’s set of looks-judgments. However, I argue (...) that only a subset of these looks-judgments are even candidates to serve as foundations for the agent’s empirical knowledge, and membership in this subset is determined by the agent’s theory of how the world is. Thus, the epistemic force of the looks-judgments in this subset is dependent on the agent’s theory of how the world is. This means that these looks-judgments aren’t foundational at all, as the agent’s theory of how the world is is epistemically is prior to the epistemic status of these looks-judgments. This is the sense in which judgments about how the world is are epistemically prior to judgments about how things look. This conclusion allows concrete elaboration of another of Sellars’s well-know claims: “I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former”. (shrink)

La epistemología contemporánea sostiene la imagen de Descartes como un fundamentalista epistemológico clásico, apelando, para ello, a las certezas metafísicas y a la presunta deducción del resto de conocimiento a partir de dichos principios. Con todo, un examen más detallado del proyecto epistemológico cartesiano pone en cuestión esta interpretación. El presente artículo analiza el papel de la deducción y la certeza moral a fin de redefinir el fundamentalismo de Descartes en términos moderados.

A perennial epistemological question is whether things can be known just as they are in the absence of any awareness of them. This epistemological question is posterior to ontological considerations and more specific ones pertaining to mind. In light of such considerations, the author propounds a naïve realist, foundationalist account of knowledge of things in themselves, one that makes crucial use of the work of Brentano. After introducing the resources provided by Brentano’s study of mind, the author reveals the ontological (...) framework in which it takes place. Doing so is instrumental to illuminating acquaintance, the state that enables the direct engagement of a mind and some other thing. The author discusses this state and shows how it has the epistemic heft, with a Brentanian account of judgment, to provide the foundations of one’s knowledge of the world. A naïve realist, foundationalist account of knowledge is open to a compelling objection; the author presents this objection with the means of undermining it. In conclusion, the author recurs to the opening theme of the primacy of ontology and suggests that familiar misgivings about knowing things in themselves are all based on questionable—and ultimately untenable—ontological presuppositions. (shrink)

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? (...) Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. This article will provide a systematic overview of the problems that the questions above raise and focus in some depth on issues relating to the structure and the limits of knowledge and justification. (shrink)

In this paper we set out a view on which internalist proper basicality is secured by sensory experience.

Our beliefs utilize various sources: perception, memory, induction, etc. We trust these sources to provide reliable information about the world around us. My dissertation investigates how this trust could be justified. Chapter one introduces background material. I argue that justification rather than knowledge is of primary epistemological importance, discuss the internalism/externalism debate, and introduce an evidentialist thesis that provides a starting point/framework for epistemological theorizing. Chapter two introduces a puzzle concerning justification. Can a belief source provide justification absent prior justification (...) for believing it's reliable? Any answer appears to either make justifying the reliability of a source intellectually unsatisfying or all together impossible. Chapter three considers and rejects a plethora of proposed solutions to our puzzle. Investigating these solutions illustrates the need to further investigate evidence, evidence possession, and evidential support. Chapter four discusses the metaphysics of evidence. I argue that evidence always consists of a set of facts and that fact-proposition pairs stand in confirmation relations isomorphic to those holding between pairs of propositions. Chapter five argues that justification requires what I call actually connected possession of supporting evidence: a subject must be aware of supporting evidence and of the support relation itself. Chapter six argues that the relation constitutive of a set of facts being justificatory evidence is a sui generis and irreducible relation that is knowable a priori. Chapter seven begins by showing how Richard Fumerton's acquaintance theory meets the constraints on a theory of justification laid down in previous chapters. I modify the theory so as to: make room for fallible foundational justification, and allow inferential justification absent higher-order beliefs about evidential connections. Chapter eight applies the developed theory of justification to our initial puzzle. I show how my modified acquaintance theory is in a unique position to vindicate the idea that necessarily a source provides a person with justification only if she is aware of evidence for the reliability of that source. However, this awareness of evidence for a source's reliability falls short of a justified belief and thereby avoids impalement from our dilemma's skeptical horn. (shrink)

This paper examines the epistemic status of the reflective belief about the content of one’s own conscious mental state, with emphasis on perceptual experience. I propose that the process that gives a special epistemic status to a reflective belief is not observation, inference, or conceptual articulation, but semantic ascent similar to the transition from a sentence in the object language to a sentence in the meta-language that affirms the truth of the original sentence. This account of the process of reflection (...) explains why a reflective belief is (subject to some qualification) infallible. (shrink)

This essay purports to be a “negative” defense of acquaintance foundationalism. It is “negative” in that I do not do much in the way of advancing novel argument for the position, nor do I extend the position very much. Rather, I focus on demonstrating that the position has the resources to overcome objections that have been proposed to it. In particular, I argue that it can overcome the dilemma proposed by Wilfrid Sellars and developed by Laurence BonJour against foundationalism, as (...) well as dilemmas proposed by Jack Lyons and Michael Bergmann targeting internalism. Acquaintance foundationalism is what I will call any theory of justification that is internalist in what may justify us, foundationalist in the structure of justification, and relies on the concept of acquaintance in justifying our basic beliefs. Internalism requires that what justifies us improves the belief from the perspective of the believing subject. Foundationalism states that the justification for all beliefs depends ultimately on basic beliefs. Finally, acquaintance is a relation between a person and other things such that these other things are before the “mind’s eye” of the subject. The general idea behind each of these dilemmas, so I will argue, is to claim that acquaintance foundationalism cannot provide epistemic reasons for basic beliefs, where epistemic reason means something that contributes to justification from the subject’s perspective. Each dilemma will ask whether the alleged justifier has some feature x. However, each dilemma contends that, whether the alleged has the feature x or not, it cannot serve as an epistemic reason. For example, BonJour will ask whether our allegedly basic beliefs are cognitive or not. He argues that if they are cognitive, they need justification, but if they are not cognitive, they cannot provide justification. Thus, no allegedly basic belief can serve as an epistemic reason. I argue that the notion of acquaintance allows us to escape such dilemmas because our states of acquaintance allow us to justify our basic beliefs without requiring justification themselves. I do so by borrowing, in part, Richard Fumerton’s theory of non-inferential justification, plus adding on a few epicycles to allow us to base our basic beliefs on our acquaintances. The first chapter sets up the issues of the dissertation: it gives context to the project, defines acquaintance foundationalism and epistemic reason, and discusses our dilemmas in broad outline. It also summarizes the rest of the essay. I use epistemic reasons in a specialized sense in the dissertation, which necessitates an extended discussion. This is the focus of chapter two. I argue that an epistemic reason is a mental complex that consists of Fumertonian acquaintances. When we have an epistemic reason, we have a mental complex that is related in the appropriate way to a belief. This is just what provides justification for the belief. This chapter explicates this notion. It includes an extended discussion of Richard Fumerton’s theory of non-inferential justification, which I follow in outline but diverge from in detail. This discussion focuses on his notion of acquaintance, and the items with which we may be acquainted. I then move to a discussion of the metaphysics of epistemic reasons, explaining how they consist of these acquaintances. I also discuss the relationship between epistemic reasons and epistemic justification. The third chapter is historical in focus. I examine Sellars’s famous dilemma for foundationalism, and contend that it can be best understood as an attempt to deny the foundationalist epistemic reasons for his beliefs. I also examine Laurence BonJour’s later formulation of the Sellarsian dilemma, and again argue that it is best understood as denying epistemic reasons to foundationalists. I then review the options that an acquaintance foundationalist has to respond to these dilemmas, as these responses will allow us to see where our more recent dilemmas go wrong. Chapter four address Jack Lyons’s dilemma. I consider what Lyons says about his dilemma at some length. I then argue that it is structurally similar to the Sellarsian dilemma, and tries to undermine the internalist’s ability to offer epistemic reasons for his beliefs. I then argue that Lyons’s dilemma only seems persuasive because he misunderstands what is required for experience to provide us with an epistemic reason. When properly understood, his dilemma fails to tell against the acquaintance foundationalism. I also argue that Lyons’s version of externalism is much more radical than it might initially appear, helping to motivate acquaintance foundationalism. The fifth chapter focuses on Michael Bergmann. I give his dilemma an extended discussion, which I follow up by reframing it in terms of epistemic reasons. I argue that his dilemma, while seemingly persuasive, fails to trouble the acquaintance foundationalism. I argue that we may be strongly aware of our epistemic reasons without starting a regress, which vitiates his dilemma. I conclude with some short remarks on possibility of skepticism. (shrink)