Nathan Ballantyne

Conciliationism and Uniqueness

Two theses are central to recent work on the epistemology of disagreement: Conciliationism: In a revealed peer disagreement over P, each thinker should give at least some weight to her peers attitude. Uniqueness: For any given proposition and total body of evidence, the evidence fully justifies exactly one level of confidence in the proposition. 1This paper is the product of full and equal collaboration between its authors. Does Conciliationism commit one to Uniqueness? Thomas Kelly 2010 has argued that it does. After some scene-setting (§1), in §2 we explain and criticize Kellys argument, thereby defeating his larger argument that Conciliationism deserves no dialectical special treatment. But we argue further that Conciliationists are committed to a disjunction, one of whose disjuncts is Uniqueness, that amounts to an ‘extremely strong and unobvious position’ (§§3–4). If we are correct, theorists should not treat Conciliationism as a default position in debates about the epistemic significance of disagreement.

Does luck have a place in epistemology

Some epistemologists hold that exploration and elaboration of the nature of luck will allow us to better understand knowledge. I argue this is a mistake.

Augustine on Testimony

Philosophical work on testimony has fl ourished in recent years. Testimony roughly involves a source affi rming or stating something in an attempt to transfer information to one or more persons. It is often said that the topic of testimony has been neglected throughout most of the history of philosophy, aside from contributions by David Hume (17111776) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). True as this may be, Hume and Reid aren’t the only ones who deserve a tip of the hat for recognizing the importance of testimony: Augustine of Hippo (354-430) affi rms the place of testimony in human cognition, at least in his later writings. In what follows, we consider three questions raised by Augustine’s thinking about testimony: the analytical question of what sources count

Verbal Disagreements and Philosophical Scepticism

ABSTRACT Many philosophers have suggested that disagreement is good grounds for scepticism. One response says that disagreement-motivated scepticism can be mitigated to some extent by the thesis that philosophical disputes are often verbal, not genuine. I consider the implications of this anti-sceptical strategy, arguing that it trades one kind of scepticism for others. I conclude with suggestions for further investigation of the epistemic significance of the nature of philosophical disagreement.

Implicit racial bias and epistemic pessimism

Abstract Implicit bias results from living in a society structured by race. Tamar Gendler has drawn attention to several epistemic costs of implicit bias and concludes that paying some costs is unavoidable. In this paper, we reconstruct Gendler’s argument and argue that the epistemic costs she highlights can be avoided. Though epistemic agents encode discriminatory information from the environment, not all encoded information is activated. Agents can construct local epistemic environments that do not activate biasing representations, effectively avoiding the consequences of activation. We conclude that changing our local environments provides a way to avoid paying implicit bias’s epistemic costs.