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"Alspector-Kelly, Marc"
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Wright Back to Dretske, or Why You Might as Well Deny Knowledge Closure
Fred Dretske notoriously claimed that knowledge closure sometimes fails. Crispin Wright agrees that warrant does not transmit in the relevant cases, but only because the agent must already be warranted in believing the conclusion in order to acquire her warrant for the premise. So the agent ends up being warranted in believing, and so knowing, the conclusion in those cases too: closure is preserved. Wright's argument requires that the conclusion's having to be warranted beforehand explains transmission failure. I argue that it doesn't, and that the correct explanation does not imply that the agent will end up warranted in believing the conclusion when transmission fails. Those who agree that transmission does fail in those cases, therefore, might as well follow Dretske in denying knowledge closure too.
Journal Article
Why safety doesn't save closure
Knowledge closure is, roughly, the following claim: For every agent S and propositions P and Q, if S knows P, knows that P implies Q, and believes Q because it is so implied, then S knows Q. Almost every epistemologist believes that closure is true. Indeed, they often believe that it so obviously true that any theory implying its denial is thereby refuted. Some prominent epistemologists have nevertheless denied it, most famously Fred Dretske and Robert Nozick. There are closure advocates who see other virtues in those accounts, however, and so who introduce revisions of one sort or another in order to preserve closure while maintaining their spirit. One popular approach is to replace the \"sensitivity\" constraint at the heart of both of those accounts with a \"safety\" constraint, as advocated by Timothy Williamson, Duncan Pritchard, Ernest Sosa, Stephen Luper, and others. The purpose of this essay is to show that this approach does not succeed: safety does not save closure. And neither does a popular variation on the safety theme, the safe-basis or safe-indicator account.
Journal Article
Stroud's Camap
In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Camap drew his famous distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap's aim and method. Camap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over entities in his work in semantics violated his commitment to empiricism. He rejected that criticism as presupposing a super‐scientific standpoint from which constraints on the admissible domain of entities of science could be delivered. Carnap wanted to insulate science from the imposition of first‐philosophical metaphysical prejudice, not to defuse scepticism by appeal to verificationism.
Journal Article
Seeing the Unobservable: Van Fraassen and the Limits of Experience
Van Fraassen maintains that the information that we can glean from experience is limited to those entities and processes that are detectable by means of our unaided senses. His challenge to the realist, I suggest, is that the attempt to inferentially transcend those limits amounts to a reversion to rationalism. Under pressure from such examples as microscopic observation, he has recently widened the scope of the phenomena to include object-like experiences without empirical objects of experience. With this change in mind, I argue that van Fraassen needs an account of perception whose consequence is that we can only see what we see with the unaided eye. I then argue that reflection on the epistemically significant aspects of the perceptual process renders van Fraassen's characterization of the limits of experience implausible; technologically enhanced perception brings \"unobservables\" within those limits. An empiricism that is compatible with realism results.
Journal Article
Should the Empiricist Be a Constructive Empiricist?
Van Fraassen does not argue that everyone should be a constructive empiricist. He claims only that constructive empiricism (CE) is a coherent post-positivist alternative to realism, notwithstanding the realist's charge that CE is arbitrary and irrational. He does argue, however, that the empiricist is obliged to limit belief as CE prescribes. Criticism of CE has been largely directed at van Fraassen's claim that CE is a coherent option. Far less attention has been directed at his claim that empiricists should be constructive empiricists. I consider his various attempts to support this claim, conclude that they are unsuccessful, and suggest that the empiricist who repudiates CE does not thereby abandon contemporary empiricism itself.
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The NOAer's Dilemma: Constructive Empiricism and the Natural Ontological Attitude
Faced with interminable combat over some piece of philosophical terrain, someone will inevitably suggest that the contested ground is nothing more than a philosophically manufactured mirage that is therefore not worth fighting for. Arthur Fine has long advocated such a response — the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude,’ or NOA — to the realism debate in the philosophy of science. Notwithstanding the prima facie incompatibility between the realist's and anti-realist's positions, Fine suggests that there is in fact enough common ground for NOA to stand on its own as a minimal alternative, one that enjoys the advantage of being free of the philosophical burdens of its overweight contenders. Notwithstanding Fine's claim to have identified a position that is neither realist nor anti-realist, critics charge that NOA, as Fine describes it, is a realist position. I endorse this criticism below, with attention to the relation between NOA and Bas van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism (CE). I show that Fine's repudiation of the globalism he identifies in realism (and in anti-realism) does not insulate him from that charge.
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Constructive Empiricism and Epistemic Modesty: Response to Van Fraassen and Monton
Bas van Fraassen claims that constructive empiricism strikes a balance between the empiricist's commitments to epistemic modesty -- that one's opinion should extend no further beyond the deliverances of experience than is necessary -- and to the rationality of science. In \"Should the Empiricist be a Constructive Empiricist?\" I argued that if the constructive empiricist follows through on her commitment to epistemic modesty she will find herself adopting a much more extreme position than van Fraassen suggests. Van Fraassen and Bradley Monton have recently responded. My purpose here is to contest their response. The goal is not merely the rebuttal of a rebuttal; there is a lesson to learn concerning the realist/anti-realist dialectic generated by van Fraassen's view.
Journal Article
Stroud's Carnap
In \"Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology\" Carnap drew his famous distinction between 'internal' and 'external' questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap's aim and method. Carnap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over abstract entities in his work in semantics violated his commitment to empiricism. He rejected that criticism as presupposing a super-scientific standpoint from which constraints on the admissible domain of entities of science could be delivered. Carnap wanted to insulate science from the imposition of first-philosophical metaphysical prejudice, not to defuse scepticism by appeal to verificationism.
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