• Workshop overview
• Presentations

Workshop overview

This small informal graduate workshop on Epistemology will be held on Sunday December 13th 2009, in room 1.01 Dugald Stewart Building. Everyone is welcome and there is no registration fee. The workshop will start at 12pm and end at 5pm. Note that those who don't have out-of-hours access to this building can meet at 11.45am outside the front door, and should take a note of this phone number: 07835 287 791.

Any questions about this event should be directed to Georgi Gardiner at epistemologyworkshops@googlemail.com. This event is part of the Epistemology research group at Edinburgh, and is supported by The Leverhulme Trust.

Presentations

• Adam Carter (University of Edinburgh/University of Geneva)

  'TBC'

ABSTRACT. To follow.

ABSTRACT. Robust Virtue Epistemology (RVE) holds that knowledge is true belief that is formed through cognitive ability. No distinct anti-luck condition is required to understand the nature of knowledge. In contrast Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE) holds that knowledge is true belief that fulfils both an anti-luck condition (such as Safety) and a separate virtue-theoretic condition. RVE offers a diagnostic about why knowledge has this structure (viz. it is a kind of cognitive achievement). Thus there is pressure on rival theory ALVE to offer a similar diagnostic. Pritchard (2010) offers just such a diagnostic. He turns to Craig’s (1990) genealogical account of the structure of knowledge, which argues that the concept of ‘knowledge’ is conceptually linked to the concept of a ‘good informant’. Pritchard argues that the concept of a ‘good informant’ is ambiguous between an informant who has a reliable cognitive ability and an informant on which we can rely. He argues that we should expect that the concept of ‘knowledge’ will inherit these two senses, and that therefore Craig’s account lends support to the bipartite structure of knowledge posited by ALVE. In this paper I will firstly outline Craig’s genealogical account, and then rehearse Pritchard’s diagnostic for ALVE’s bipartite structure of knowledge. I will not only argue that he fails to establish that Craig’s account favours ALVE, but also give some reason to think that it actually favours RVE.

ABSTRACT. It is contentious to claim that truth is a necessary condition of objectual understanding. Zagzebski (2001), for example, has aruged that no such link need obtain at all, and yet others, most notably Kvanvig (2003), have claimed that beliefs possessed by the agent regarding the relevant subject matter must be true without exception. In line with Kvanvig's later account, I will adopt a more moderate position than either of those just described--specifically, I want to support that we can still attain understanding of a subject matter in the presence of false beliefs about that subject matter, provided such false beliefs (i) do not outnumber the true beliefs, and (ii) are not central to the subject matter. It is primarily owing to misunderstandings of this second condition on the type and presence of false beliefs that it can seem straightforward to make a case for the further weakening of a moderate factivity constraint on objectual understanding (e.g. Riggs, forthcoming). In light of that, one of my fundamental tasks will be to fully explicate precisely what (ii) demands.

• Ian M. Church (University of St Andrews)

'Degrees of Luck and Gettier Problems'

ABSTRACT. Thanks by and large to Duncan Pritchard’s seminal work, Epistemic Luck, a great deal of literature has been developed recently concerning the nature of luck and anti-luck epistemology. The literature, however, has yet to account for the very intuitive idea that luck comes in degrees. In this talk I argue two points: 1) that Pritchard’s modal account of luck (the most complete theory of luck to date) should be modified to suit degrees of luck; 2) that such a modification threatens the success of Pritchard’s safety theory because of Gettier problems.

 

 

Last updated: December 10th 2009 by Duncan Pritchard.