Anthony Brueckner

On “Epistemic Permissiveness”

In “Epistemic Permissiveness”, Roger White presents several arguments against Extreme Permissivism, the view that there are possible cases where, given one’s total evidence, it would be rational to either believe P, or to believe ∼P. In this paper, we carefully reconstruct White’s arguments and then argue that they do not succeed.

Anti‐individualism and analyticity

Jessica Brown (1995), following Michael McKinsey (1991), has defended an argument aimed at establishing the incompatibility of anti-individualism and privileged access. The basic idea of the Brown-McKinsey reductio argument is that if anti-individualism is true, then one can come to know some substantive proposition about ones external environment purely by knowing ones own thoughts and reflecting on the consequences of antiindividualism. In Falvey 2000 and McLaughlin & Tye 1998, there are persuasive objections to Browns defence of such an argument. Her subsequent response (Brown 2001) depends upon the following claim:

BonJour's a priori justification of induction

Laurence BonJour has recently attempted to formulate an a priori justification of induction (in In Defense of Pure Reason). He maintains that we can know a priori that the truth of an inductive inferences conclusion constitutes the best explanation of the inferences inductive premise. Though BonJours discussion raises a host of interesting issues, I think that his defense of induction rests upon a number of controversial assumptions.

Reply to Coffman on closure and skepticism

E. J. Coffman defends Peter Klein’s work on epistemic closure against various objections that I raised in an earlier paper. In this paper, I respond to Coffman.