Baron Reed

How to Think about Fallibilism

Almost every contemporary theory of knowledge is a version of fallibilism, yet an adequate statement of fallibilism has not yet been provided. Standard definitions cannot account for fallibilistic knowledge of necessary truths. I consider and reject several attempts to resolve this difficulty before arguing that a belief is an instance of fallibilistic knowledge when it could have failed to be knowledge. This is a fully general account of fallibilism that applies to knowledge of necessary truths. Moreover, it reveals, not only the connection between fallibility and error, but the connection between fallibility and accidental truth as well.

Shelter for the Cognitively Homeless

One of the main strands of the Cartesian tradition is the view that the mental realm is cognitively accessible to us in a special way: whenever one is in a mental state of a certain sort, one can know it just by considering the matter. In that sense, the mental realm is thought to be a cognitive home for us, and the mental states it comprises are luminous. Recently, however, Timothy Williamson has argued that we are cognitively homeless: no mental state is in fact luminous. But his argument depends on an excessively strong account of luminosity. I formulate a weaker conception of luminosity that is unaffected by Williamson’s argument and yet is substantial enough to satisfy those who wish to retain this part of the Cartesian tradition.

How to Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge, by Stephen Hetherington

he proves would hold even if the rules were finitistic.) Garson’s book contains a lot of other interesting material. He applies his methods not only to classical and intuitionist logic, but also, to some extent, to modal logic, to predicate logic, and to some less usual systems, such as the logic of vagueness and his own logic of ‘open futures’. On the whole, his book presents an admirable self-contained theory. Thus, he succeeds in showing us, in detail, how to ‘read off a [modeltheoretic] semantics from the . . . rules’; and this, in my opinion, is certainly no minor achievement.

Historical reflections: Sosa’s perspective on the epistemological tradition

Ernest Sosa’s work in epistemology has frequently progressed through careful examination of key moments in the history of philosophy. Here I examine some of the most important cases in which this is so, including his introduction of virtues into epistemology and his reason for adding the subject’s perspective to externalism. I especially focus on the way Sosa adapts the structure of Descartes’s epistemology for his own externalist, virtue theoretic answer to skepticism.

Knowledge, doubt, and circularity

Ernest Sosa’s virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes’s project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa’s epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual stability Descartes wanted. I then argue that this leaves Sosa’s epistemology vulnerable to an important kind of skepticism.