Entitlement and Evidence

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):735-753 (2013)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Entitlement is conceived as a kind of positive epistemic status, attaching to certain propositions, that involves no cognitive or intellectual accomplishment on the part of the beneficiary — a status that is in place by default. In this paper I will argue that the notion of entitlement — or something very like it — falls out of an idea that may at first blush seem rather disparate: that the evidential support relation can be understood as a kind of variably strict conditional (in the sense of Lewis 1973). Lewis provided a general recipe for deriving what he termed inner modalities from any variably strict conditional governed by a logic meeting certain constraints. On my proposal, entitlement need be nothing more exotic than the inner necessity associated with evidential support. Understanding entitlement in this way helps to answer some common concerns — in particular, the concern that entitlement could only be a pragmatic, and not genuinely epistemic, status.

Similar books and articles

The concept of entitlement and its epistemic relevance.Hamid Vahid - 2011 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (3):380-399.
On Epistemic Entitlement.Crispin Wright & Martin Davies - 2004 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78:167-245.
What is entitlement?Albert Casullo - 2007 - Acta Analytica 22 (4):267 - 279.
Perceptual Justification and Warrant by Default.Chris Tucker - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87: 445-63 87 (3):445-63.
Perceptual entitlement.Tyler Burge - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (3):503-48.
The word of others.Steffen Borge - 2003 - Journal of Applied Logic 1 (1-2):107-118.
Burge on Perceptual Entitlement.Hamid Vahid - 2012 - Metaphilosophy 43 (3):187-203.
Epistemic Entitlement.Jon Altschul - 2011 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Mere faith and entitlement.Yuval Avnur - 2012 - Synthese 189 (2):297-315.

Analytics

Added to PP
2012-11-06

Downloads
825 (#16,505)

6 months
93 (#38,886)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Martin Smith
University of Edinburgh

Citations of this work

Degrees of Assertability.Sam Carter - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):19-49.
Recent Work on Epistemic Entitlement.Peter Graham & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2):193-214.
Full Blooded Entitlement.Martin Smith - 2019 - In Nikolaj Pedersen & Peter Graham (eds.), Epistemic Entitlement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Solving the Moorean Puzzle.Michael Blome-Tillmann - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (2):493-514.

View all 6 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Counterfactuals.David K. Lewis - 1973 - Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
On Certainty (ed. Anscombe and von Wright).Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1969 - San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright & Mel Bochner.
Knowledge and its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):200-201.

View all 51 references / Add more references