• Workshop overview
• Presentations

Workshop overview

This small informal graduate workshop on Epistemology will be held on Saturday 24th October 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

• Tony Bolos (Edinburgh)

  'Justification Without Evidence: An Overview of Reformed Epistemology'

ABSTRACT. Within religious epistemology, there is the view "it is entirely right, rational, reasonable, and proper to believe in God without any evidence or argument at all." The idea that evidence is not a necessary condition for justification hinges on a parity argument which makes the case that in the same way that perceptual experiences are justified, religious experiences—through the divine sense—are also justified and should thus enjoy the same epistemic status as ordinary perceptual experiences. Advocates of this view have been called reformed epistemologists with perhaps their most well known advocate being Alvin Plantinga. In this talk I will present an overview of the argument and discuss a well known objection, namely The Great Pumpkin Objection. I will argue that while the GPO fails to challenge the central claims made by the reformed epistemologist, a related arguement, The Son of the Great Pumpkin, is potentially more devastating.

• Dirk Kindermann (St Andrews)
  'Relativism, Semantic Blindness, and Skeptical Paradox'

ABSTRACT. Contextualists and invariantists are prone to deal with recalcitrant data from ordinary speakers' use of `know' by attributing semantic blindness to speakers. Some authors have recently advocated a relativist semantics for `know' for the very reason that it predicts all the data correctly and thus requires no attribution of semantic blindness. As Montminy (2009) has shown, however, relativism suffers its very own semantic blindness objection. I argue that while there are replies available to the relativist that do not commit her to positing semantic blindness, there is a simpler and more forceful semantic blindness objection from skeptical paradoxes.

• Julia Langkau (St Andrews)
  'Intuitions and Evidence. Against Undermining the Experimentalists' Challenge'

ABSTRACT. The practice of referring to intuitions as evidence has been criticised by so called experimental philosophers. Some ‘traditional’ philosophers have defended intuitions as a trustworthy kind of evidence. Others claim that we can do and in fact do very well without intuitions in philosophy and that referring to intuitions as evidence is a bad practice. According to the latter, experimental philosophy does not pose a challenge to traditional philosophy. I argue against their attempt to undermine the experimentalists’ challenge. I defend a cumulative account of evidence, according to which facts about the world as well as facts about our intuitions are evidence, and referring to both pieces of evidence is fine. According to a cumulative account of evidence, the experimentalists’ challenge is a challenge only to some pieces of the evidence available in the relevant cases.

• Will Newsome (University of Edinburgh)
  'Cultural Models in Adaptation and Argumentation'

ABSTRACT: A cultural model is an intersubjectively shared understanding of a particular ordered system, arrangement, plan, or theory in the form of an outline or model. They are frameworks that underlie the ability of speech, and more specifically argumentation, to "paint a picture" or "path" to a desired outcome. These models are not static, but can "adapt" given drastic changes in the domain they pertain to. One such drastic change is the change of the master-apprentice model, given a drastic change in its target domain (namely, from two people working together on a craft, to many people working together via a website). Raises questions in epistemology concerning the importance of socio-cultural contributions to argumentation and rational speech in general.

• Matthew Mullins (Northwestern)

  'Defending the Indefensible'

ABSTRACT. Recently Lackey and Pritchard have used testimonial cases to defend the knowledge credit thesis. In this paper I articulate the credit thesis and the proposed challenge. I then argue that while the credit thesis may be false, it hasn't been shown false by Lackey and Pritchard.

 

Last updated: October 21st 2009 by Duncan Pritchard.