• 9.45-10.00am Tea/coffee and biscuits
• 10.00-10.30am Cameron Boult, 'McGinn and the Threat of Scepticism'

ABSTRACT. Marie McGinn (1989) argues that by properly understanding the starting point of scepticism about our knowledge of the external world, and by articulating how the sceptic mistakenly construes our relationship to what she calls "framework judgments", her 'non-epistemic' anti-sceptical strategy holds the key to a dissolution of the sceptical paradox. I provide a detailed account of McGinn's discussion of scepticism and assess whether her 'non-epistemic' anti-sceptical strategy is satisfying. Drawing on work from Stroud (1984) and Michael Williams (1991), I look at some general difficulties involved in claiming that scepticism arises out of our ordinary conception of knowledge, and draw out their consequences for McGinn. I argue that her construal of our relationship to framework judgements amounts to a revision in our epistemological concepts and, by McGinn's own lights, cannot be part of a satisfying response to scepticism. McGinn's 'non-epistemic' anti-sceptical strategy ultimately amounts to a roundabout vindication of the threat of scepticism. I conclude by briefly discussing how the proceeding criticism of McGinn invites the question of whether scepticism really is the consequence of an ordinary and natural way of thinking about knowledge. I suggest that this is a question worthy of further investigation.

• 10.30-11.00am Christos Kyriacou, 'Constraints on Epistemic Normativity'

ABSTRACT. Assuming that the locus of epistemic normativity is epistemic justification, I delineate some of the open issues a theory of epistemic normativity should come to grips with. Such open issues include: anti-reductionist arguments like a Moorean ‘open question argument’, the multiple realizability of epistemic justification, the underdetermination of justification by evidence, epistemic supervenience, the voluntarism/involuntarism distinction, the internalism/externalism distinction, epistemic responsibility and the ability intuition. I briefly explain what these open issues are and why, one way or another, a theory of epistemic normativity needs to address them.

• 11.00-11.30am Lani Watson, 'The Value of Questions'

ABSTRACT. My research is concerned with the relationship between questioning and understanding. Specifically I am concerned with how the act or process of questioning can lead to the attainment or acquisition of understanding. I approach this question from the perspective of virtue epistemology and situate it within the context of the recent debate surrounding the value of knowledge and the argument for a new or renewed focus on the study of understanding in epistemology (e.g. Zagzebski, 2001; Kvanvig, 2003; Pritchard, 2010). I suggest that questioning should be considered a central epistemic virtue in the study of understanding and outline an interdisciplinary methodology for its characterisation. I will then go on to put forward some ideas on how this characterisation of questioning as an epistemic virtue may contribute to two contemporary epistemological debates.

• 11.30-12.00pm Tea/coffee and biscuits
• 12.00-12.30pm Hasse Hamalainen, 'McDowell's Particularism and the Problem of Moral Knowledge'

ABSTRACT. Most versions of moral particularism (MP) maintain that we need no universal principles to know which features of an action are morally salient (i.e. affect the evaluation of its moral value). The critics of MP have attacked against Jonathan Dancy's MP (Dancy 1993, 2004) by arguing that if there are no such regulating principles, then it would be hardly possible to admit the possibility of moral knowledge (e.g. McKeever & Ridge 2006). John McDowell (McDowell 1998, 2001) seems, however, to be better prepared to face this attack. He has sketched a theory of moral virtue epistemology to defend MP. McDowell's theory maintains that virtuous people know the morally salient features in most situations due to their virtuousness. Since McDowell's theory shows that we need no universal principles, but only virtue in order to have moral knowledge, it may seem that the above attack is ineffective against his MP. I will argue, however, that McDowell's defense does not work. For in order to successfully defend MP against the problem of moral knowledge, a moral virtue epistemological theory has to assume that virtue qua virtue never needs any universal principles to guide it. I hope to show that this closed assumption cannot be as well justified as the contrary, open assumption that virtue qua virtue could need universal principles to guide it. Therefore even McDowell cannot defend MP against the problem of moral knowledge.

• 12.30-1.00pm Selina Sadat, ' Know-How and Know-That: The Chicken and Egg Dilemma of Epistemology'

ABSTRACT. You may know how to draw an elephant, and you may know that an elephant is a mammal. On the face of it, these statements appear to indicate two types of knowledge: know-how and know-that. A recent debate in epistemology has revolved around this distinction, exploring the relationship between these two types of knowledge, and whether it might be possible for one of those two types of knowledge to be collapsed into the other. Intellectualists adhere to the priority of propositional knowledge: that know-how can either be reduced to know-that, or is at least a species of know-that. Anti-Intellectualists, on the other hand, argue that know-that can either be reduced to know-how, or is at least a species of know-how. In this paper, I will give an overview of both positions and, following Jeremy Fantl, argue that the emphasis on the role that ‘ability’ plays in this debate is misleading. I will suggest that one fundamental distinction between knowing that p and knowing how to φ is that where the former does not require that the agent has knowledge by acquaintance about p, the latter necessarily requires that the agent is acquainted with φ-ing; and that the debate would benefit from focusing on the role that knowledge by acquaintance plays in the distinction between the two types of knowledge, exploring the parallel distinction between the two types of normativity and justification that they yield.

• 1.00-2.00pm Buffet lunch in room 7.01, DSB
• 2.00-2.30pm Eusebio Waweru, 'What’s the Point of Knowledge?'

ABSTRACT. Defending the distinctive value of knowledge by pointing to its stability is no longer as popular as it once was, for it is supposed that to do so is to concede that the extra value knowledge has over true belief is its greater practical utility. I distinguish an interesting variety of epistemic stability, and show why it is reasonable to think that it captures the distinctive value of knowledge.

• 2.30-3.00pm Claudio Salvatore, 'Knowledge and Certainty'

ABSTRACT. In the recent literature on the subject, there is a number of competing readings of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, namely the epistemic reading (Wright, 2002) the contextualist reading (Williams 1991, 2001, 2005), the framework reading (McGinn, 1987), the therapeutic reading (Conant, 1998 ) and the non-epistemic reading (Stroll 1994, Moyal-Sharrock, 2005). In my work I aim to defend and develop the so called ‘non-epistemic” reading as both the more plausible reading of On Certainty and, more important, as a viable anti-skeptical strategy. According to this interpretative line, we should read Wittgenstein’s “solution” of Cartesian skepticism as a sort of diagnosis: rather than offering a direct response against the skeptic, Wittgenstein tries to sidestep his arguments, showing that they are based on a “categorical mistake’ (Moyal-Sharrock, 2005). That is, the skeptic treats our most basic beliefs, such as the existence of the external world, or the fact that we have a body, as hypotheses, that can be either true or false, objects of knowledge or opened to doubt. While these propositions are, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “Hinges”: that is, they just resemble empirical knowledge claim, but in fact they are the “bedrock of our certainties”, the “ungrounded ground” in which all our epistemic practices can take place. Therefore, skeptical worries are only apparently compelling and unavoidable: rather, they should be dismissed as senseless. The anti-skeptical implications of a similar account are, in my opinion, promising, and, if fully developed, they would represent at the same time an improvement and an alternative to the anti-skeptical strategies dominant in the current debate, namely neo Mooreanism, contextualism and the Relevant Alternatives theory. On the ground of these consideration, I want to argue for the non-epistemic reading of On Certainty.

• 3.00-3.30pm Chris Ranalli, 'Radical Scepticism and Understanding Human Knowledge in General'

ABSTRACT. What assumptions are involved in making scepticism about the external world look unavoidable? I discuss here how certain views about sense-perception, namely the view whereby what we perceive to be so is never, considered on it's own at least, equivalent to knowledge of the external world, plays a significant role in making scepticism look plausible. If this suggestion is true, then one way to avoid scepticism would be to resist that view about sense-perception. But in resisting that view, do we thereby submit to other, and indeed less plausible views about sense-perception and how it contributes or even constitutes knowledge of the external world? The alternative suggestion I make consists in the following: we could not perceive that such and such is so in the world without also thinking and so having concepts about what is thought. And in this fashion, perceptual knowledge of the world is possible on the basis of our thinking about and being able to make judgements about the external world. But can this account of our knowledge of the external world amount to 'an understanding of human knowledge in general' (Stroud 1989); one that would explain how knowledge of the world comes to be in general? I argue that this question cannot even arise from within the view of our perceptual-knowledge of the world that I present, and so does not admit of either a positive or negative answer.

• 4.30-5.00pm Robin McKenna, 'Pro-Contextualist Intuitions: Stakes vs Salience of Error'

ABSTRACT. The standard account of our intuitions about bank and airport cases used as evidence for contextualism tells us that in certain high standards contexts we have the intuition that an ascriber A can't truly ascribe knowledge to a subject S that p whereas in certain low standards contexts we have the intuition that A could truly ascribe knowledge that p to S. But this account of our intuitions doesn't by itself tell us much about whether it is the stakes or the salience of error that makes the difference to our intuitions. There are, broadly speaking, three sorts of approaches: stakes only, salience of error only or a combination of the two. I evaluate each approach and give reasons for preferring a stakes only approach.

• 5.00-5.30pm Kyle Scott, 'Alvin Plantinga and Belief in God'

ABSTRACT. Many philosophers regard attempts to prove, or to show that it is likely, that God exists to be a failure. The rational response to this seems to be to adopt a position of atheism or agnosticism. However, reformed epistemologists disagree, claiming instead that it can be rational to belief that God exists even without supporting evidence. I will consider Alvin Plantinga’s defence of this claim, along with some objections to it.

• 5.30pm Workshop end
• 5.30-7.30pm Drinks, venue TBC
• 7.30pm Dinner @ Suruchi, 14 Nicholson Street (0131-5566583)