A brief (10,000 word) introduction to James's philosophy with particular focus on the relation between James's naturalism and his account of various normative notions like rationality, goodness and truth.

What can we know? How should we live? What is there? Philosophers famously diverge in the answers they give to these and other philosophical questions. It is widely presumed that a lack of convergence on these questions suggests that philosophy is not progressing at all, is not progressing fast enough, or is not progressing as fast as other disciplines, such as the natural sciences. Call the view that ideal philosophical progress is marked by at least some degree of convergence on (...) the core philosophical questions the pro-convergence thesis. I will argue that there is reason to reject the pro-convergence thesis in favor of the anti-convergence thesis, the view that significant viewpoint convergence is at odds with the aims of a philosophically ideal community. The argument centers on a thought experiment about two different philosophical communities. (shrink)

The following books have been received and many of them are still available for review. Interested reviewers please contact the reviews editor: [email protected], B., Deleuze and Guattari’s A...

Recent years have seen increasing attacks on the "deontological" conception (or as we call it, the guidance conception) of epistemic justification, the view that epistemology offers advice to knowers in forming beliefs responsibly. Critics challenge an important presupposition of the guidance conception: doxastic voluntarism, the view that we choose our beliefs. We assume that epistemic guidance is indispensable, and seek to answer objections to doxastic voluntarism, most prominently William Alston's. We contend that Alston falsely assumes that choice of belief requires (...) the assent to a specific propositional content. We argue that beliefs can be chosen under descriptions which do not specify their propositional content, but instead specify the mental actions by which they are formed and maintained. We argue that these actions partially constitute the beliefs and that is it in virtue of resulting from and being partially constituted by such actions that the beliefs are subject to epistemic appraisal,. (shrink)

Call the norms of inquiry zetetic norms. How are zetetic norms related to epistemic norms? At first glance, they seem quite closely connected. Aren't epistemic norms norms that bind inquirers qua inquirers? And isn't epistemology the place to look for a normative theory of inquiry? While much of this thought seems right, this paper argues that the relationship between the epistemic and the zetetic is not as harmonious as one might have thought and liked. In particular, this paper argues that (...) some familiar contemporary epistemic norms are in tension with, and even in conflict with, central zetetic norms. (shrink)

Abstracting away from its various particular versions, contemporary externalism about knowledge can be broadly characterized as the rejection of two central ideas: that knowledge is incompatible with reflective awareness of the possibility of error, and that knowledge is necessarily tied to the resources that are available from within the first-person perspective. In this brief introduction, I outline five distinctly externalist accounts of knowledge, and two distinctly externalist methodological approaches to knowledge, all fitting this general description.

David Chalmers thinks his iPhone exemplifies the extended mind thesis by meeting the criteria ‎that he and Andy Clark established in their well-known 1998 paper. Andy Clark agrees. We take ‎this proposal seriously, evaluating the case of the GPS-enabled smartphone as a potential mind ‎extender. We argue that the “trust and glue” criteria enumerated by Clark and Chalmers are ‎incompatible with both the epistemic responsibilities that accompany everyday activities and the ‎practices of trust that enable users to discharge them. Prospects (...) for revision of the original ‎criteria are dim. We therefore call for a rejection of the trust criterion and a reevaluation of the ‎extended mind thesis.‎. (shrink)

Many contextualist accounts in epistemology appeal to ordinary language and everyday practice as grounds for positing a low-standards knowledge (knowledgeL) that contrasts with high-standards prevalent in epistemology (knowledgeH). We compare these arguments to arguments from the height of “ordinary language” philosophy in the mid 20th century and find that all such arguments face great difficulties. We find a powerful argument for the legitimacy and necessity of knowledgeL (but not of knowledgeH). These appeals to practice leave us with reasons to accept (...) knowledgeL in the face of radical doubts raised by skeptics. We conclude by arguing that by relegating knowledgeH to isolated contexts, the contextualist fails to deal with the skeptical challenge head-on. KnowledgeH and knowledgeL represent competing, incompatible intuitions about knowledge, and we must choose between them. A fallibilist conception of knowledge, formed with proper attention to radical doubts, can address the skeptical challenge without illicit appeal to everyday usage. (shrink)

Posthumous paper of Rein Vihalemm prepared to be presented at the 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 3–8 August, Helsinki, Finland.

Any attempt to evaluate a naturalistic feminist philosophy of cognition and knowledge must acknowledge that there are two distinct core approaches to naturalism (one more radical and well-interpreted by Quine, while the other more moderate and well-interpreted by Goldman). Classical feminist naturalizations of epistemology have drawn inspiration from the Quinean naturalization, they have inherited its defects – the major one: being compelled to renounce doing real epistemology in favor of a merely scientific enterprise.Notwithstanding, the merits of these feminist naturalizations are (...) more than one: they embrace the idea that epistemology needs contributions and help from the sciences, they raise serious doubts about the best science to involve in feminist epistemologies, they contrast (even if implicit) our “local feminist philosophy” (that is, mostly Italian one) not only in its scorn for every science and its technological applications, but also in its conviction that there are essential differences between female/women and male/men about knowledge and cognition.I wish to propose a naturalized feminist epistemology which draws inspiration from the more moderate Goldmanian approach. Much work would be needed in order to combine those feminist approaches which believe in the individualism of the knowing subject with those that are anti–individualist. But, at least, taking inspiration from Goldman and his reliabilism, we may achieve a type of naturalism in feminist epistemologies, in which it would be feasible to understand the reliability of the cognitive faculties of the knowing subject and to understand scientifically whether or not there are differences between female and male faculties – avoiding any essentialist temptations. (shrink)

Nonreductive physicalism faces serious problems regarding causal exclusion, causal heterogeneity, and the nature of realization. In this paper I advance solutions to each of those problems. The proposed solutions all depend crucially on embracing modal counterpart theory. Hence, the paper’s thesis: counterpart theory saves nonreductive physicalism. I take as my inspiration the view that mental tokens are constituted by physical tokens in the same way statues are constituted by lumps of clay. I break from other philosophers who have pursued this (...) line, however, in that I hold that constitution is identity. Much of the value of the comparison to statues and lumps is that it calls to mind the resources used to defend constitution-as-identity, most notably that of counterpart theory. Along the way, I discuss the virtues of a trope ontology, modal objections to token identity theories, the prospects of conditional analyses of causal powers, the subset account of realization, and the grounding problem. I also endorse a novel, empirical argument in favor of counterpart theory. (shrink)

Some think that recent empirical research has shown that peoples' moral intuitions vary in a way that is hard to reconcile with the supposition that they are even modestly reliable. This is in turn supposed to generate skeptical conclusions regarding the claims and theories advanced by ethicists because of the crucial role intuitions have in the arguments offered in support of those claims. I begin by trying to articulate the most compelling version of this challenge. On that version, the main (...) problem is the absence of a believable positive account of the reliability of the intuitions . I then consider the response to this challenge that, in my view, holds most promise. It differs from others by invoking substantive moral assumptions. Such a strategy may appear problematically circular, in that the justification of those assumptions seems to presuppose the very thesis that is challenged . However, although I think that objection can be met, I argue that there are other problems with the strategy. On the basis of a set of conditions that a successful defense of the pertinent kind plausibly must satisfy, I argue that the prospects of developing such an account are bleak. (shrink)

The relationship between Rawls’s theory of justice and Quine’s philosophy constitute an almost entirely new topic of discussion. The analysis undertaken in this article aims to show that some fundamental epistemological traits of Rawls’s theory of justice may be causally explained by referring to Quine’s influence on him. Rawls’s assumptions, methods of theory-building and evaluation criteria are addressed and a close nexus between the methods of ethics and natural science is made explicit. In the light of the historical and epistemological (...) analysis presented in this article it may be argued that Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness satisfies scientific requirements of evidence and objectivity within the sphere of ethics to the extent it is constructed and justified in accordance to Quine’s epistemology. (shrink)

Scientific Realism (SR) has three crucial aspects: 1) the centrality of the concept of truth, 2) the idea that success is a reliable indicator of truth, and 3) the idea that the Inference to the Best Explanation is a reliable inference rule. It will be outlined how some realists try to overcome the difficulties which arise in justifying such crucial aspects relying on an adaptationist view of evolutionism, and why such attempts are inadequate. Finally, we will briefly sketch some of (...) the main difficulties the realist has to face in defending those crucial aspects, and how such difficulties are deeply related: they derive from the inability of SR to satisfyingly avoid the sceptical challenge of the criterion of truth. Indeed, SR seems not to be able to fill the so-called ‘epistemic gap’ (Sankey 2008). In fact, the epistemic gap cannot be filled in no way other than obtaining a criterion of truth, but such a criterion cannot be obtained if the epistemic gap obtains. (shrink)

In an attempt to address some long-standing issues of epistemology, Hilary Kornblith proposes that knowledge is a natural kind the identification of which is the unique responsibility of one particular science: cognitive ethology. As Kornblith sees it, the natural kind thus picked out is knowledge as construed by reliabilism. Yet the claim that cognitive ethology has this special role has not convinced all critics. The present article argues that knowledge plays a causal and explanatory role within many of our more (...) fruitful current theories, diverging from the reliabilist conception even in disciplines that are closely related to cognitive ethology, and thus still dealing with knowledge as a natural as opposed to a social phenomenon, where special attention will be given to cognitive neuroscience. However, rather than discarding the natural kind approach altogether, it is argued that many of Kornblith’s insights can in fact be preserved within a framework that is both naturalist and pluralist. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMiranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the e...

In his book, On Reflection, Hilary Kornblith criticizes what he regards as a chronic tendency in philosophy towards inflating the significance of reflection in ways that manifest a combination of philosophical naiveté and scientific ignorance about how reflection actually works. In these comments, I respond to Kornblith's challenge by sketching an account of the philosophical significance of reflection in the theory of epistemic justification.

Many theories of rational action are predicated on the idea that what it is rational to do in a given situation depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe in that situation. In short: they treat epistemic rationality as explanatorily prior to practical rationality. If they are right in doing so, it follows, on pain of explanatory circularity, that epistemic rationality cannot itself be a form of practical rationality. Yet, many epistemologists have defended just such a view of (...) epistemic rationality. According to them, there is no such thing as a distinctively epistemic form of rationality which could be explanatorily prior to practical rationality. Rather, they maintain, there is just one form of rationality—practical rationality—of which epistemic rationality is a species. What to make of this conflict? The aim of this paper is to motivate a view about the relationship between epistemic and practical rationality which resolves the conflict in a way that should be attractive to both sides. The central idea is to ground both epistemic and practical rationality in an independently motivated notion of evidential probability which is itself to be understood in non-normative terms. Doing so, I argue, allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in a way that does justice to the idea that what it is rational to do depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe; and to do so in a way that avoids explanatory circularity. (shrink)

According to many, to have epistemic justification to believe P is just for it to be epistemically permissible to believe P. Others think it is for believing P to be epistemically good. Yet others think it has to do with being epistemically blameless in believing P. All such views of justification encounter problems. Here, a new view of justification is proposed according to which justification is a kind of composite normative status. The result is a view of justification that offers (...) hope of solving some longstanding epistemological problems. (shrink)

Although it is now commonplace to take emotions to be the sort of phenomena for which there are reasons, the question of how to cash out the reason- responsiveness of emotions remains to a large extent unanswered. I highlight two main ways of thinking about reason-responsiveness, one that takes agential capacities to engage in norm-guided deliberation to underlie reason-responsiveness, and another which instead takes there to be a basic reason-relation between facts and attitudes. I argue that the latter approach should (...) be preferred. Not only does a reasons-basic approach promise to fare better in accounting for cases that its opponent struggles to accommodate, but it promises also to uncover a sui generis relation between emotions and their reasons which is at best obscured and at worst denied by its opponent. (shrink)

This paper disputes the widely held view that one cannot establish the reliability of a belief-forming process with the use of belief's that are obtained by that very process since such self-dependent justification is circular. Harold Brown ([1993]) argued in this journal that some cases of self-dependent justification are legitimate despite their circularity. I argue instead that under appropriate construal many cases of self-dependent justification are not truly circular but are instances of ordinary Bayesian confirmation, and hence they can raise (...) the probability of the hypothesis as legitimately as any such confirmation does. I shall argue in particular that despite its dependence on perception we can use naturalized epistemology to confirm the reliability of a perceptual process without circularity. (shrink)

We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the (...) phenomenology of thought (does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside world. Infallible judgments about ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues for a version of sceptical invariantism about knowledge on which the acceptability of knowledge-attributing sentences varies with the context of assessment.

Robert Richards has presented a detailed defense of evolutionary ethics, a revised version of Darwin's views and a major modification of E. O. Wilson's. He contends that humans have evolved to seek the community welfare by acting altruistically. And since the community welfare is the highest moral good, humans ought to act altruistically. Richards asks us to take his empirical premises on faith and aims to show how they can justify an ethical conclusion. He identifies two necessary conditions for a (...) naturalistic justification of morality (NJ): its premises (1) must be empirical and (2) concerned with morally relevant causal factors. I argue that these two conditions are insufficient. An NJ must also appeal to teleogical or teleonomic laws which identify proper effects and reliable causes of these effects. So I supplement biological faith with an NJ that I believe has a better chance of working since faith without works is dead. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to develop a largely non-empirical case for the compatibility of phenomenology and naturalism. To do so, I will criticise what I take to be the standard construal of the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and naturalism, and defend a ‘minimal’ version of phenomenology that is compatible with liberal naturalism in the ontological register and with weak forms of methodological naturalism, the latter of which is understood as advocating ‘results continuity’, over the long haul, with the relevant (...) empirical sciences. Far from such a trajectory amounting to a Faustian pact in which phenomenology sacrifices its soul, I contend that insofar as phenomenologists care about reigning in the excesses of reductive versions of naturalism, the only viable way for this to be done is via the impure and hybrid account of phenomenology I outline here. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to give a philosophical analysis of the relationship between contingently available technology and the knowledge that it makes possible. My concern is with what specific subjects can know in practice, given their particular conditions, especially available technology, rather than what can be known “in principle” by a hypothetical entity like Laplace’s Demon. The argument has two parts. In the first, I’ll construct a novel account of epistemic possibility that incorporates two pragmatic conditions: responsibility and (...) practicability. For example, whether subjects can gain knowledge depends in some circumstances on whether they have the capability of gathering relevant evidence. In turn, the possibility of undertaking such investigative activities depends in part on factors like ethical constraints, economical realities, and available technology. In the second part of the paper, I’ll introduce “technological possibility” to analyze the set of actions made possible by available technology. To help motivate the problem and later test my proposal, I’ll focus on a specific historical case, one of the earliest uses of digital electronic computers in a scientific investigation. I conclude that the epistemic possibility of gaining access to scientific knowledge about certain subjects depends (in some cases) on the technological possibility for making responsible investigations. (shrink)

This essay begins with an outline of the early Heidegger's distinction between beings and the Being1 of those beings, followed by a discussion of Heideggerian teleology. It then turns to contemporary analytic metaphysics to suggest that analytic metaphysics concerns itself wholly with beings and does not recognize distinct forms of questioning concerning what Heidegger calls Being . This difference having been clarified, studies of identity and individuation in the analytic tradition are examined and it is demonstrated that such inquiries have (...) far more in common with Heidegger than one might initially suspect. Indeed, it turns out that much of what the early Heidegger says about Being is tacitly presupposed by the workings of certain being-centric metaphysical projects in the analytic tradition. The discussion concludes with the suggestion that the central difference between the two projects should be understood as one of emphasis and that Heidegger's discussion of Being and a realist metaphysics in the analytic tradition can complement each other as aspects of a broader, more unified philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a naturalistic account of inference. We posit that the core of inference is constituted by bare inferential transitions, transitions between discursive mental representations guided by rules built into the architecture of cognitive systems. In further developing the concept of BITs, we provide an account of what Boghossian [2014] calls ‘taking’—that is, the appreciation of the rule that guides an inferential transition. We argue that BITs are sufficient for implicit taking, and then, to analyse explicit taking, we posit (...) rich inferential transitions, which are transitions that the subject is disposed to endorse. (shrink)

Let us focus on what I take it is the paradigm case of testimony—the intentional transfer of a belief from one agent to another, whether in the usual way via a verbal assertion made by the one agent to the other, or by some other means, such as through a note.1 So, for example, John says to Mary that the house is on fire (or, if you like, ‘texts’ her this message on her phone), and Mary, upon hearing this, forms (...) the belief that the house is on fire and consequently exits the building at speed. Clearly, a great deal of our beliefs are gained via testimony, and if the epistemic status of our testimonybased beliefs were to be called into question en masse, then this would present us with quite a predicament. It is thus essential that we have some plausible account of the epistemology of testimony. Our primary focus will be on the justification for our testimony-based beliefs, though along the way we will say a little about other relevant epistemic notions like epistemic entitlement as well. (shrink)

A commonly expressed worry in the contemporary literature on the problem of epistemological scepticism is that there is something deeply intellectually unsatisfying about the dominant anti-sceptical theories. In this paper I outline the main approaches to scepticism and argue that they each fail to capture what is essential to the sceptical challenge because they fail to fully understand the role that the problem of epistemic luck plays in that challenge. I further argue that scepticism is best thought of not as (...) a quandary directed at our possession of knowledge simpliciter, but rather as concerned with a specific kind of knowledge that is epistemically desirable. On this view, the source of scepticism lies in a peculiarly epistemic form of angst. It is always by favour of Nature that one knows something. [Wittgenstein 1969: §505]. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 14 One common problem with anti-skepticism and skepticism alike is their failure to account for our sometimes conflicting epistemic intuitions. In order to address this problem and provide a new direction for solving the skeptical puzzle, I consider a modified version of the puzzle that is based on knowledge claims about appearances and does not result in a paradox. I conclude that combining the elements of both the original and modified puzzle can potentially guide us towards (...) solutions that can fully explain the conflict of epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

According to Realism about Epistemic Value, there is such a thing as epistemic value and it is appropriate to evaluate things—e.g., beliefs—for epistemic value because there is such a thing as epistemic value. Allan Hazlett's A Luxury of the Understanding is a sustained critique of Realism. Hazlett challenges proponent of Realism to answer explanatory questions while not justifiably violating certain constraints, including two proposed naturalistic constraints. Hazlett argues they cannot. Here I defend Realism. I argue that it is easy for (...) proponents of Realism to answer Hazlett's explanatory questions. The interesting issue is whether those answers violate Hazlett's naturalistic constraints. My own view is that epistemic value is irreducible to natural properties; it thus violates Hazlett's proposed constraints. I argue that this is justifiable because Hazlett fails to convincingly motivate his naturalistic constraints and there is reason for thinking epistemic value is irreducible to natural properties anyway. (shrink)

Most epistemologists maintain that true beliefs are of final epistemic value. However, Richard Feldman is a rare philosopher who is skeptical that true beliefs are of final epistemic value. The aim of this paper is to evaluate Feldman’s criticisms. I’ll argue that Feldman’s arguments ultimately turn on a view about the relation between epistemic duties and epistemic value that is implausible and underdeveloped.

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.

It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared (or joint) moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when we deserve epistemic blame. First, (...) I argue that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation. (shrink)

Reaching understanding is one of our central epistemic goals, dictated by our important motivational epistemic virtue, namely inquisitiveness about the way things hang together. Understanding of humanly important causal dependencies is also the basic factual-theoretic ingredient of wisdom on the anthropocentric view proposed in the article. It appears at two levels. At the first level of immediate, spontaneous wisdom, it is paired with practical knowledge and motivation ( phronesis ), and encompasses understanding of oneself (a distinct level of self-knowledge having (...) to do with one’s dispositions capacities, vulnerabilities, and ways of reacting), of other people, of possibilities of meaningful life, and of relevant courses of events. It is partly resistant to skeptical scenarios, but not completely. On the second and reflective level, understanding helps fuller holistic integration of one’s first order practical and factual-theoretic knowledge and motivation, thus minimizing potential and actual conflicts between all these components. It also participates in the reflective control whose exercise is needed for full reflective wisdom, the crucial epistemic-practical virtue or human excellence. (shrink)

Reliabilism is invoked by a standard causal response to the slow switching argument for incompatibilism about mental content externalism and privileged access. Though the response in question is negative, in that it only establishes that, given such an epistemology, externalism does not rule privileged access out, the appeal to reliabilism involves an assumption about the reliability of introspection, an assumption that in turn grounds a simple argument for the positive conclusion that reliabilism itself implies privileged access. This paper offers a (...) two-part defense of that conclusion: the reliabilist account of privileged access is defended both againstarguments in favor of the rival content inheritance strategy and against an argument turning on empirical considerations concerning the individuation of the belief-producing process of introspection. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualists think that the extension of the expression ‘knows’ depends on and varies with the context of utterance. In the last 15 years or so this view has faced intense criticism. This paper focuses on two sorts of objections. The first are what I call the ‘linguistic objections’, which purport to show that the best available linguistic evidence suggests that ‘knows’ is not context-sensitive. The second is what I call the ‘disagreement problem’, which concerns the behaviour of ‘knows’ in (...) disagreement reports. These may not be the only objections to epistemic contextualism, but they are probably the most influential. I argue that the best current epistemic contextualist response to the linguistic objection is incomplete, and I show how it can be supplemented to deal with the full range of linguistic objections. I also develop a new solution to the disagreement problem. The upshot is that neither sort of objection gives us any reason to reject epistemic contextualism. This conclusion is, in a sense, negative—no new arguments for epistemic contextualism are advanced—but it’s a vital step towards rehabilitating the view. (shrink)

Conceptual structures are commonly likened to scientific theories, yet the content and motivation of the theory analogy are rarely discussed. Gregory Murphy and Douglas Medin's The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence is a notable exception and has become an authoritative exposition of the utility of the theory analogy. For Murphy and Medin, the theory analogy solves what they call the problem of conceptual coherence or the problem of conceptual glue. I argue that they conflate a number of issues under (...) these rubrics and that in each case either the problem to be solved isn't subject to a general solution or the theory analogy is of little use. The issues I consider are: (1) what makes a concept efficient, useful, and informative, (2) what makes a concept refer to what it does, (3) what makes a set of objects form a single category, and (4) what makes concepts combine in one way rather than another. (shrink)

The skeptical puzzle consists of three independently plausible yet jointly inconsistent claims: (A) S knows a certain ordinary proposition op; (B) S does not know the denial of a certain skeptical hypothesis sh; and (C) S knows that op only if S knows that not- sh. The variantist solution (to the skeptical puzzle) claims that (A) and not-(B) are true in the ordinary context, but false in the skeptical one. Epistemic contextualism has offered a standards-variantist solution, which is the most (...) prominent variantist solution on the market. In this paper, I argue that the standards-variantist solution in general (and the contextualist solution in particular) is epistemically uninteresting. Proponents of the variantist solution should opt for the position-variantist solution instead. I will discuss some important implications of my findings. (shrink)

This paper provides a new solution to the epistemic paradox of belief-instability, a problem of rational choice which has recently received considerable attention (versions of the problem have been discussed by — among others — Tyler Burge, Earl Conee, and Roy Sorensen). The problem involves an ideally rational agent who has good reason to believe the truth of something of the form:[Ap] p if and only if it is not the case that I accept or believe p.