Jeremy Wanderer

On Vice and Confession

Abstract Philosophical writing in the advocatorial mode aims to advance a given position by reasoned argument designed to rationally persuade anyone of its veracity. Philosophical writing in the confessional mode uses theoretical reasoning and critical rigour in the course of arriving at a specific kind of philosophical self-judgment with therapeutic intent. Here I suggest that the best way to read Samantha Vice’s paper (‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’) is to treat it as written in the confessional, and not the advocatorial, mode, and that this way of reading the paper provides an alternate way of reflecting on some of the contentious claims Vice makes.

Anscombe's ‘Teachers’

This article is an investigation into G. E. M. Anscombes suggestion that there can be cases where belief takes a personal object, through an examination of the role that the activity of teaching plays in Anscombes discussion. By contrasting various kinds of ‘teachers’ that feature in her discussion, it is argued that the best way of understanding the idea of believing someone personally is to situate the relevant encounter within the social, conversational framework of ‘engaged reasoning’. Key features of this framework are highlighted, and are used to characterise the distinctive kind of teaching and learning germane to Anscombes suggestion.

Introduction: A Thicker Epistemology?

Abstract The distinction between thick and thin concepts has been a central part of recent discussion in metaethics. Whilst there is a debate regarding how best to characterise the distinction, it is commonly accepted that ethical theorising traditionally focuses on the thin, leading some to contend that moving from considering thin to thick concepts leads to a very different, and preferable, conception of ethics. Not only does a similar distinction between thick and thin concepts suggest itself within epistemology, traditional discussion within epistemology also seems to focus on the thin in a similar manner. The question of a possible parallel beckons: Is there a comparable distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Would a move from thin to thick lead to an alternative and/or preferable epistemology?

Anscombe's ‘Teachers’: Anscombe's ‘Teachers’

This article is an investigation into G. E. M. Anscombes suggestion that there can be cases where belief takes a personal object, through an examination of the role that the activity of teaching plays in Anscombes discussion. By contrasting various kinds of ‘teachers’ that feature in her discussion, it is argued that the best way of understanding the idea of believing someone personally is to situate the relevant encounter within the social, conversational framework of ‘engaged reasoning’. Key features of this framework are highlighted, and are used to characterise the distinctive kind of teaching and learning germane to Anscombes suggestion.

Testimony and the Interpersonal

The past two decades have seen a marked growth in the philosophical literature on the epistemology of testimony. A guiding motivation for this growth, prominent in the earlier contributions to this literature, was a sense of neglect: the widespread dependence on testimony as a source of knowledge failed to cohere with lack of attention accorded to this source in what was then the extant philosophical literature. One influential account traces the source of this neglect to an individualist ideology pervasive in the post-Renaissance West that provoked a theoretical focus on individual cognitive capacities, such as perception and inference, at the expense of a comparable focus on those cognitive capacities whose exercise requires more than one individual (Coady 1992: p. 13). Neglect is a weak motivation for a body of literature; all it demands is increased attention to the neglected area, without placing any limitation on the character of that attention. One strand in more recent work on the epistemology of testimony is less motivated by this generic sense of neglect than by a particular puzzlement: there are certain features taken to be central to the epistemic process of acquiring knowledge via testimony that do not appear to cohere with familiar epistemic principles and norms. One influential account has it that the feature in question involves the role seemingly played by a distinctive kind of interpersonal relationship between testifier and testifiee in our everyday practices of justifying testimonial-based beliefs, a feature that is normally excluded from playing a role in epistemic discussions (Moran 2005). Simply paying attention to testimony alone will not dispel such philosophical puzzlement; it needs to be International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2013 Vol. 21, No. 1, 92–110, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2013.767508

Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief

Epistemic self-reliance (or ‘epistemic egoism’) often operates as a tacit ideal underpinning normative discussions regarding the appropriate practices of belief formation and maintenance. According to an extreme version of the ideal, the mere fact that someone else believes p gives no reason whatsoever for one to believe p oneself. According to a more moderate version, the fact that someone else believes p gives one reason for believing p, provided that the reliability of the source on that occasion is justified via one’s own epistemic faculties of perception, memory and reasoning. A central goal of Linda Zagzebski’s rich defense of the very idea of epistemic authority is to argue that epistemic egoism of either form is an incoherent ideal. What is particularly surprising about Zagzebski’s argument is that the incoherence stems from a purported clash between the ideal of self-reliance and the ideal of autonomy. This is surprising since autonomy, thought of as self-governance – ‘the executive self’s management of itself’ (p. 230) – seems to be little more than another way of expressing the ideal of epistemic self-reliance. What then is it about the ideal of autonomy when properly understood that is supposed to lead us to reject epistemic egoism? The shape of Zagzebski’s book-length answer can be reconstructed as proceeding through five steps: