Luca Moretti

Wright, Okasha and Chandler on transmission failure

Crispin Wright has given an explanation of how a first time warrant can fall short of transmitting across a known entailment. Formal epistemologists have struggled to turn Wright’s informal explanation into cogent Bayesian reasoning. In this paper, I analyse two Bayesian models of Wright’s account respectively proposed by Samir Okasha and Jake Chandler. I argue that both formalizations are unsatisfactory for different reasons, and I lay down a third Bayesian model that appears to me to capture the valid kernel of Wright’s explanation. After this, I consider a recent development in Wright’s account of transmission failure. Wright suggests that his condition sufficient for transmission failure of first time warrant also suffices for transmission failure of supplementary warrant. I propose an interpretation of Wright’s suggestion that shields it from objections. I then lay down a fourth Bayesian framework that provides a simplified model of the unified explanation of transmission failure envisaged by Wright.

When warrant transmits and when it doesn’t: towards a general framework

In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright’s analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that Wright’s analysis is partially incoherent with our analysis of warrant transmission and prima facie defective. We conclude exploring three alternative lines of reply: developing a more satisfactory account of transmission failure, which we outline; dismissing the Bayesian counterexample by rejecting some of its assumptions; reinterpreting Wright’s analysis to make it immune to the counterexample.

Skepticism and Epistemic Closure: Two Bayesian Accounts

This paper considers two novel Bayesian responses to a well-known skeptical paradox. The paradox consists of three intuitions: first, given appropriate sense experience, we have justification for accepting the relevant proposition about the external world; second, we have justification for expanding the body of accepted propositions through known entailment; third, we do not have justification for accepting that we are not disembodied souls in an immaterial world deceived by an evil demon. The first response we consider rejects the third intuition and proposes an explanation of why we have a faulty intuition. The second response, which we favor, accommodates all three intuitions; it reconciles the first and the third intuition by the dual component model of justification, and defends the second intuition by distinguishing two principles of epistemic closure.

Defeaters in current epistemology: introduction to the special issue

Suppose you see that a red light is shining at the wall before you, or that the painter tells you that the wall is white. When this happens, your perceptual justification for believing that the wall is red is typically defeated. In the last few years there has been a surge of attention to the topic of defeaters. Symptoms and consequences of this are, for example, Sudduth (2017)’s entry “Defeaters in Epistemology” of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Grundmann (2011)’s chapter “Defeasibility Theories” of the Routledge Companion to Epistemology (edited by Bernecker and Pritchard). The expression “epistemic defeasibility” refers to a belief’s or a proposition’s liability to lose, have it downgraded or be prevented from acquiring some positive epistemic status, such as—for instance—being justified, being warranted or being knowledge. An epistemic defeater—possibly coinciding with an experience, a reason, a belief or a fact—is, broadly speaking, what actualizes this possibility. The extant literature on epistemic defeaters has mainly been driven by the aims to (1) identify epistemic statuses that constitute the target of epistemic defeat, and (2) understand and classify the “mechanisms” in virtue of which defeaters negatively impact on the epistemic statuses that constitute their targets. Recently, research on defeaters has also been driven by (3) the recognition that a number of important questions in epistemology can be illuminated by inspecting roles played by defeaters, and by the recognition that debates between rival epistemological theories can sometimes

Inferential seemings and the problem of reflective awareness

ABSTRACT Phenomenal conservatism (PC) is the internalist view that non-inferential justification rests on appearances. PC’s advocates have recently argued that seemings are also required to explain inferential justification. The most developed view to this effect is Michael Huemer ’s theory of inferential seemings (ToIS). Luca Moretti has recently shown that PC is affected by the problem of reflective awareness, which makes PC open to sceptical challenges. In this paper I argue that ToIS is afflicted by a version of the same problem and it is thus hostage to inferential scepticism. I also suggest a possible response on behalf of ToIS’s advocates.

Assessing Concept Possession as an Explicit and Social Practice

We focus on issues of learning assessment from the point of view of an investigation of philosophical elements in teaching. We contend that assessment of concept possession at school based on ordinary multiple-choice tests might be ineffective because it overlooks aspects of human rationality illuminated by Robert Brandoms inferentialism—the view that conceptual content largely coincides with the inferential role of linguistic expressions used in public discourse. More particularly, we argue that multiple-choice tests at schools might fail to accurately assess the possession of a concept or the lack of it, for they only check the written outputs of the pupils who take them, without detecting the inferences actually endorsed or used by them. We suggest that school tests would acquire reliability if they enabled pupils to make the reasons of their answers or the inferences they use explicit, so as to contribute to what Brandom calls the game of giving and asking for reasons. We explore the possibility of putting this suggestion into practice by deploying two-tier multiple-choice tests.

Antirealism and the conditional fallacy: the semantic approach

The expression conditional fallacy identifies a family of arguments deemed to entail odd and false consequences for notions defined in terms of counterfactuals. The antirealist notion of truth is typically defined in terms of what a rational enquirer or a community of rational enquirers would believe if they were suitably informed. This notion is deemed to entail, via the conditional fallacy, odd and false propositions, for example that there necessarily exists a rational enquirer. If these consequences do indeed follow from the antirealist notion of truth, alethic antirealism should probably be rejected. In this paper we analyse the conditional fallacy from a semantic (i.e. model-theoretic) point of view. This allows us to identify with precision the philosophical commitments that ground the validity of this type of argument. We show that the conditional fallacy arguments against alethic antirealism are valid only if controversial metaphysical assumptions are accepted. We suggest that the antirealist is not committed to the conditional fallacy because she is not committed to some of these assumptions.

Epistemic transmission and interaction

Mainstream and formal epistemology naturally meet on issues pertaining to justification and knowledge transmission for one agent and cognitive interaction issues between two or more rational agents. Principles of transmission of justification, knowledge, and other epistemic properties have been subject to extensive investigation and discussion in the recent epistemological literature. Some discussions zoom in on epistemic transmission within a single agent. For instance, it has been hotly debated whether Moore’s infamous proof of a material world transmits warrant from the premises to the conclusion. Some argue that it fails because one of its premises cannot be warranted prior and independently of the conclusion. More generally, it is an open issue whether the justification of perceptual belief transmits to all its logical consequences or whether it cannot transmit to the negations of the non-perceiving hypotheses (such as sceptical alternatives). Formal epistemologists have been investigating the conditions that permit incremental confirmation to transmit across entailment. Other discussions concern the transmission of true belief, warrant or knowledge between agents—the discussion of testimonial warrant and knowledge being a prime example, another being the debate over whether certain arrangements (such as free speech) do better in terms of promotion of true beliefs in groups of agents than alternative arrangements.