I argue for a theory that combines elements of reliabilism and evidentialism.

Humeanism is “the thesis that the whole truth about a world like ours supervenes on the spatiotemporal distribution of local qualities.” (Lewis, 1994, 473) Since the whole truth about our world contains truths about causation, causation must be located in the mosaic of local qualities that the Humean says constitute the whole truth about the world. The most natural ways to do this involve causation being in some sense extrinsic. To take the simplest possible Humean analysis, we might say that (...) c causes e iff throughout the mosaic events of the same type as c are usually followed by events of type e. For short, the causal relation is the constant conjunction relation. Whether this obtains is determined by the mosaic, so this is a Humean theory, but it isn’t determined just by c and e themselves, so whether c causes e is extrinsic to the pair. Now this is obviously a bad theory of causation, but the fact that causation is extrinsic is retained even by good Humean theories of causation. John Hawthorne (2004) objects to this feature of Humeanism. I’m going to argue that his arguments don’t work, but first we need to clear up three preliminaries about causation and intrinsicness. (shrink)

What is the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience? What evidence does experience provide us with? These questions are typically addressed in isolation. In order to make progress in answering both questions, perceptual experience needs to be studied in an integrated manner. I develop a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perceptual experience, by arguing that sensory states provide perceptual evidence due to their metaphysical structure. More specifically, I argue that sensory states are individuated by the perceptual capacities (...) employed and that there is an asymmetric dependence between their employment in perception and their employment in hallucination and illusion. Due to this asymmetric dependence, sensory states provide us with evidence. (shrink)

This paper explores the problems that are raised by a certain traditional sceptical paradox. The conclusion will be that the most challenging problem raised by this paradox does not primarily concern the justification of beliefs; it concerns the justification of belief-forming practices. This conclusion is supported by showing that if we can solve the sceptical problem for belief-forming practices, then it will be a relatively straightforward matter to solve the problem that concerns the justification of beliefs.

Applying good inductive rules inside the scope of suppositions leads to implausible results. I argue it is a mistake to think that inductive rules of inference behave anything like 'inference rules' in natural deduction systems. And this implies that it isn't always true that good arguments can be run 'off-line' to gain a priori knowledge of conditional conclusions.