Reading Group
During the academic year 2008-2009, we will be reading the following books:
Summer Quarter
Our Epistemic Reliance on Others, by Sanford Goldberg
"In this book I take issue with the assumption that the cognitive processes relevant to the epistemic assessment of a given belief all take place within the mind/brain of the believing subject herself. My contention is that process reliabilism accepts this individualistic assumption only at the cost of a distorted epistemic assessment of at least some of the beliefs we form through epistemic reliance on our peers. Here my key case will be testimony; I will be arguing that a proper reliabilist assessment of testimonial beliefs will require an assessment of the reliability of cognitive processes that take place in the mind/brain(s) of the subject’s informant(s). But testimonial belief is not the only sort of belief formed through epistemic reliance on one’s peers. So after developing my account of testimonial belief I will present two other examples of epistemic reliance on one’s peers. I argue that an individualistic account of such beliefs is adequate if, but only if, such an account regards certain social factors as part of the ‘background conditions’ against which we assess the reliability of the beliefs in question.
I have chosen the label ‘socializing reliability’ for the project of rethinking reliabilism without its individualistic orientation. While I am confident that this is a very important and timely project, I am significantly less confident in the particular proposals I make in my attempt to ‘socialize reliability’. In light of this it is perhaps best to think of this book as bringing forth a new set of problems for reliabilist epistemology, deriving from the need to rethink how we should assess the variety of beliefs formed through epistemic reliance on one’s peers. My hope is that there is value in highlighting these problems even if the particular solutions I propose are rejected whole cloth."
Mondays @ 2pm, Kresge Hall, Room 2-345
Spring Quarter
The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, by Keith DeRose
"It's an obvious enough observation that the standards that govern whether ordinary speakers will say that someone knows something vary with context: What we are happy to call "knowledge" in some ("low-standards") contexts we'll deny is "knowledge" in other ("high-standards") contexts. But do these varying standards for when ordinary speakers will attribute knowledge, and for when they are in some important sense warranted in attributing knowledge, reflect varying standards for when it is or would be true for them to attribute knowledge? Or are the standards that govern whether such claims are true always the same? And what are the implications for epistemology if these truth-conditions for knowledge claims shift with context? Contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards a subject must meet in order for a claim attributing "knowledge" to her to be true do vary with context, has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of language during the last few decades. In The Case for Contextualism Keith DeRose offers a sustained state-of-the-art exposition and defense of the contextualist position, presenting and advancing the most powerful arguments in favor of the view and against its "invariantist" rivals, and responding to the most pressing objections facing contextualism."
Mondays @ 1pm, Kresge Hall, Room 2-345
Winter Quarter
Our Knowledge of the Internal World, by Robert C. Stalnaker
"On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own internal world -- of one's current thoughts and feelings -- is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we can move beyond this knowledge, how we can form a conception of an objective world, and how we can know that the world answers to our conception of it. This book is in the anti-Cartesian tradition that seeks to reverse the order of explanation. Robert Stalnaker argues that we can understand our knowledge of our thoughts and feelings only by viewing ourselves from the outside, and by seeing our inner lives as features of the world as it is in itself. He uses the framework of possible worlds both to articulate a conception of the world as it is in itself, and to represent the relation between our objective knowledge and our knowledge of our place in the world. He explores an analogy between knowledge of one's own phenomenal experience and self-locating knowledge -- knowledge of who one is, and what time it is. He criticizes the philosopher's use of the notion of acquaintance to characterize our intimate epistemic relation to the phenomenal character of our experience, and explores the tension between an anti-individualist conception of the contents of thought and the thesis that we have introspective access to that content. The conception of knowledge that emerges is a contextualist and anti-foundationalist one but, it is argued, a conception that is compatible with realism about both the external and internal worlds."
Wednesdays @ 12:30PM, Linguistics Seminar Room, 2016 Sheridan Rd.
Fall Quarter
Reference and Description:The Case against Two-Dimensionalism, by Scott Soames"In this book, Scott Soames defends the revolution in philosophy led by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan against attack from those wishing to revive descriptivism in the philosophy of language, internalism in the philosophy of mind, and conceptualism in the foundations of modality. Soames explains how, in the last twenty-five years, this attack on the anti-descriptivist revolution has coalesced around a technical development called two-dimensional modal logic that seeks to reinterpret the Kripkean categories of the necessary aposteriori and the contingent apriori in ways that drain them of their far-reaching philosophical significance.
Arguing against this reinterpretation, Soames shows how the descriptivist revival has been aided by puzzles and problems ushered in by the anti-descriptivist revolution, as well as by certain errors and missteps in the anti-descriptivist classics themselves. Reference and Description sorts through all this, assesses and consolidates the genuine legacy of Kripke and Kaplan, and launches a thorough and devastating critique of the two-dimensionalist revival of descriptivism. Through it all, Soames attempts to provide the outlines of a lasting, nondescriptivist perspective on meaning, and a nonconceptualist understanding of modality. "
Wednesdays @ 2PM, Kresge Hall, Room 2-345
For more information on the reading group contact Sandy Goldberg.
2007-2008 Reading Groups
