William P. Alston

Philosophy of language

Requirements: You will be asked to write a 3-page paper analyzing an argument from the syllabus material (20%), a 6page mid-term paper synthesizing a range of arguments (30%), and an 8-page final paper (40%). You will be asked to choose between two or three assigned topics for each paper. The goal of these assignments is to encourage you to think through problems in the philosophy of language on your own. In addition I will administer 10 short reading quizzes during the course of the semester. The average of these quizzes will be worth 10% of your grade.

What's wrong with immediate knowledge?

Immediate knowledge is here construed as true belief that does not owe its status as knowledge to support by other knowledge (or justified belief) of the same subject. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a criticism of attempts to show the impossibility of immediate knowledge. I concentrate on attempts by Wilfrid Sellars and Laurence Bonjour to show that putative immediate knowledge really depends on higher-level knowledge or justified belief about the status of the beliefs involved in the putative immediate knowledge. It is concluded that their arguments are lacking in cogency.

Has foundationalism been refuted

ConclusionIt is no part of my purpose in this paper to advocate Minimal Foundationalism. In fact I believe there to be strong objections to any form of foundationalism, and I feel that some kind of coherence or contextualist theory will provide a more adequate general orientation in epistemology. Will and Lehrer are to be commended for providing, in their different ways, important insights into some possible ways of developing a nonfoundationalist epistemology. Nevertheless if foundationalism is to be successfully disposed of it must be attacked in its most defensible, not in its most vulnerable, form. Although Will and Lehrer reveal weaknesses in historically important forms of foundationalism, it has been my aim in this paper to show that their arguments leave untouched the more modest and less vulnerable form I have called ‘Minimal Foundationalism’, a form approximated to by the most prominent contemporary versions of the position. It is to be hoped that those who are interested in clearing the decks for an epistemology without foundations will turn their critical weapons against such modest and careful foundationalists as Chisholm, Danto, and Quinton

Does God have Beliefs

Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief (perhaps with some needed fourth component). (After all no one supposes that God has beliefs in addition to, or instead of knowledge.) The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pikes widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘ A knows X ’ entails ‘A believes X ’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’.

Can Psychology do Without Private Data

The behaviorist attack on the use of introspection as a source of data in psychology is an oft told tale. It was an essential part of the early behaviorist program that psychology was to be an “objective” science of the behavior of organisms, and that as a condition of that objectivity it must draw its evidence from “public” sources. Any bit of evidence adduced must be in principle equally available to any qualified observer. This has the practical effect of ruling out private data of “consciousness” — sensory qualia, mental imagery, qualities of feeling, contents of covert thinking — which by the nature of the case are directly experienceable by one and only one person. It thereby restricts the evidential basis of psychology to reports of the overt behavior of organisms, plus facts about the physical situation of that behavior.

Realism and the Christian faith

My central thesis in this paper is that nonrealism, though rampant nowadays even among Christian theologians, is subversive of the Christian faith. But before I am in a position to argue for that, I must go through some preliminaries.

Locke on people and substances

In the famous chapter on identity in the Essay (II.xxvii), Locke notoriously denies that sameness of substance is either necessary or sufficient for sameness of person. In thus denying that the identity of a person is determined by ‘unity of substance’, Locke denies that a person is a substance. If people were substances of some kind, then for me to be the same person through a stretch a time would just be for me to continue to be the same substance of that sort. And yet through most of the Essay the term ‘substance’ is used in a comprehensive contrast with ‘mode’ and ‘relation’: this is, roughly speaking, the trichotomy of thing, property, and relation. If Locke were thinking of substance in this way in the ‘Identity’ chapter, he ought to find it obvious that people are substances, that people are squarely on the substance side of the great divide that has substances (things, beings) on one side of it, and modes and relations on the other. Indeed, he not only ought to find it obvious; he does. At the very outset of the treatment of personal identity he writes: To find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places (sec. 9; 335:9).1 Surely a thinking intelligent being belongs on the list of those items that have properties and stand in relations to things, rather than on the list of properties and relations. And since a person is the same item in different times and places, it passes another standard requirement for substancehood. Thinking of a person in this way, how can Locke suppose that one and the same person can ‘involve’ different substances, and vice versa? Here is a further compounding of the puzzle. Two sections before the passage just quoted, Locke is setting up that passage by stating a methodological point: To conceive, and judge of it [identity] aright, we must consider what Idea the Word it is applied to stands for: It being one thing to be the same Substance, another the same Man, and a third the same Person, if Person, Man, and Substance, are three Names standing for three different Ideas; for such as is the Idea belonging to that Name, such must be the Identity (sec. 7; 332:24).

Identity and cardinality: Geach and Frege

The thesis that identity is always relative to. . . a criterion seems to me a truism, like Frege’s connected thesis that a number is always relative to a Begriff. It is as nonsensical to speak of identification apart from identifying some kind of thing, as to speak of counting apart from counting some kind of thing. A numerical word demands completion with a count noun; similarly for ‘the same’ and ‘another’.

Religious Experience and Religious Belief

Can religious experience provide any ground or basis for religious belief? Can it serve to justify religious belief, or make it rational? This paper will differ from many others in the literature by virtue of looking at this question in the light of basic epistemological issues. Throughout we will be comparing the epistemology of religious experience with the epistemology of sense experience. We must distinguish between experience directly, and indirectly, justifying a belief. It indirectly justifies belief B1 when it justifies some other beliefs, which in turn justify B1. Thus I have learned indirectly from experience that Beaujolais wine is fruity, because I have learned from experience that this. that, and the other bottle of Beaujolais is fruity, and these propositions support the generalization. Experience will directly justify a belief when the justification does not go through other beliefs in this way. Thus, if I amjustified,just by virtue of having the visual experiences I am now having, in taking what I am experiencing to be a typewriter situated directly in front of me, then the belief that there is a typewriter directly in front of me is directly justified by that experience. We find claims to both direct and indirect justification of religious beliefs by religious experience. Where someone believes that her new way of relating herself to the world after her conversion is to be explained by the Holy Spirit imparting supernatural graces to her, she supposes her belief that the Holy Spirit imparts graces to her to be directly justified by her experience. What she directly learns from experience is that she sees and reacts to things differently; this is then taken as a reason for supposing that the Holy Spirit is imparting graces to her. When, on the other hand, someone takes himself to be experiencing the presence of God, he thinks that his experience justifies him in supposing that God is what he is experiencing. Thus, he supposes himself to be directly justified by his experience in believing God to be present to him.

Reid on Perception and Conception

In opposition to the reigning ‘theory of ideas’ Thomas Reid sought to develop an account of sense perception according to which we, in some sense, directly perceive independently existing objects.(1) This paper is primarily concerned to determine just what sense this is, just what sort of directness Reid meant to be espousing.