Murray Clarke

Resurrecting the tracking theories

Much of contemporary epistemology proceeds on the assumption that tracking theories of knowledge, such as those of Dretske and Nozick, are dead. The word on the street is that Kripke and others killed these theories with their counterexamples, and that epistemology must move in a new direction as a result. In this paper we defend the tracking theories against purportedly deadly objections. We detect life in the tracking theories, despite what we perceive to be a premature burial.

Natural Selection and Indexical Representation

The claim that true belief is a useful commodity should strike no one as perverse. If I am to eat that red berry on that shrub it had better be the case that its consumption will not terminate my life. There may be exceptions to the above claim, cases where ‘ignorance is bliss’ or ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ but a generally false belief set just cannot, by and large, be an advantage for humans. In fact, I am almost embarrassed to have to defend the claim that true belief is a useful commodity: so entirely preposterous does its negation seem to me. But defend it I will, in what follows.

Seeing Things: Defending Direct Perception

Abstract When we experience the world (open our eyes, smell the roses, touch the steering wheel), we come into contact with the world. On one end of this relation is the mental state, the experience. On other end are the objects, events experienced. Though we shall often use examples from vision because of its dominance as a sensory modality, what we say will apply to all senses. If experiences are on one end of this relation, what is on the other end? We will defend the view that when the experiences are veridical and of the world, the world itself is on the other end. The alternative would be some events caused by the world, perhaps in the mind, but not the world itself. So on the view we want to defend, experiencing the world is a two-placed relation. On the view we will reject, experiencing the world is at least a three-placed relation and the world itself (its objects, properties) is never the direct object of perception. We will reply to several objections to the two-placed view of “direct perception”—objections such as “infinite regress” objection, argument from “illusion and hallucination,” and the argument this ordinary language needs a radical reconstruction yielding the distinction between “perception of objects” and “objects of perception.” For the purposes of this paper, we will outline the basic tenets of this view and reply to the reasons that lead Robert French to reject the view.

Concepts, Intuitions and Epistemic Norms

In this paper, I argue that Dual Process Theories of cognition, as recently defended by Keith Frankish and Jonathan Evans, Keith Stanovich, Peter Carruthers, Richard Samuels, and others, offer a useful framework that can transform our conception of the nature and role of concepts in cognitive science and the role of intuitions in epistemology. The result is that recent debates concerning competing accounts of concepts, the role of intuition in epistemology, and debates between internalists and externalists concerning the nature of epistemic justification and knowledge, can be usefully advanced given the resources of such Dual Process Theories.