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Seemings and Justification: An Introduction

In Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 1-29 (2013)

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  1. Epistemic Internalism, Justification, and Memory.B. J. C. Madison - 2014 - Logos and Episteme 5 (1):33-62.
    Epistemic internalism, by stressing the indispensability of the subject’s perspective, strikes many as plausible at first blush. However, many people have tended to reject the position because certain kinds of beliefs have been thought to pose special problems for epistemic internalism. For example, internalists tend to hold that so long as a justifier is available to the subject either immediately or upon introspection, it can serve to justify beliefs. Many have thought it obvious that no such view can be correct, (...)
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  • If Dogmatists Have a Problem with Cognitive Penetration, You Do Too.Chris Tucker - 2014 - Dialectica 68 (1):35-62.
    Perceptual dogmatism holds that if it perceptually seems to S that P, then S thereby has prima facie perceptual justification for P. But suppose Wishful Willy's desire for gold cognitively penetrates his perceptual experience and makes it seem to him that the yellow object is a gold nugget. Intuitively, his desire-penetrated seeming can't provide him with prima facie justification for thinking that the object is gold. If this intuitive response is correct, dogmatists have a problem. But if dogmatists have a (...)
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  • Moral Sentimentalism.Antti Kauppinen - 2002 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Religious Epistemology.Chris Tweedt & Trent Dougherty - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (8):547-559.
    Religious epistemology is the study of how subjects' religious beliefs can have, or fail to have, some form of positive epistemic status and whether they even need such status appropriate to their kind. The current debate is focused most centrally upon the kind of basis upon which a religious believer can be rationally justified in holding certain beliefs about God and whether it is necessary to be so justified to believe as a religious believer ought. Engaging these issues are primarily (...)
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  • Seemings: still dispositions to believe.Preston J. Werner - 2014 - Synthese 191 (8):1-14.
    According to phenomenal conservatism, seemings can provide prima facie justification for beliefs. In order to fully assess phenomenal conservatism, it is important to understand the nature of seemings. Two views are that (SG) seemings are a sui generis propositional attitude, and that (D2B) seemings are nothing over and above dispositions to believe. Proponents of (SG) reject (D2B) in large part by providing four distinct objections against (D2B). First, seemings have a distinctive phenomenology, but dispositions to believe do not. Second, seemings (...)
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  • (1 other version)Anorexia Nervosa, Body Dissatisfaction, and Problematic Beliefs.Stephen Gadsby - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1:1-20.
    Body dissatisfaction has long been considered an integral component of and driving force behind anorexia nervosa. In this paper, I characterise body dissatisfaction in terms of problematic beliefs about body size and the value of thinness. I suggest two methods for understanding these beliefs. Regarding body size beliefs, I suggest focusing on certain forms of misleading phenomenal evidence that sufferers of anorexia nervosa are exposed to. Regarding beliefs about the value of thinness, I suggest focusing on the benefits of such (...)
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  • Epistemic and Aesthetic Conflict.Zoe Jenkin - 2023 - British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (4):457-479.
    Do epistemic and aesthetic values ever conflict? The answer might appear to be no, given that background knowledge generally enhances aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience in turn generates new knowledge. As Keats writes, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats, 1996). Contra this line of thought, I argue that epistemic and aesthetic values can conflict when we over-rely on aesthetically enhancing background beliefs. The true and the beautiful can pull in different directions, forcing us to choose between flavours of normativity.
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  • Reflective awareness, phenomenal conservatism, and phenomenal explanationism.Kevin McCain & Luca Moretti - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    According to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), if a subject S has an appearance that P, in the absence of defeaters, S has justification for believing P by virtue of her appearance's inherent justifying power. McCain and Moretti (2021) have argued that PC is affected by the problem of reflective awareness: if S becomes reflectively aware of an appearance, the appearance loses its inherent justifying power. This limits the explanatory power of PC and reduces its antisceptical bite. This paper provides a novel (...)
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  • The Phenomenology of Moral Intuition.Robert Audi - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (1):53-69.
    Moral judgment commonly depends on intuition. It is also true, though less widely agreed, that ethical theory depends on it. The nature and epistemic status of intuition have long been concerns of philosophy, and, with the increasing importance of ethical intuitionism as a major position in ethics, they are receiving much philosophical attention. There is growing agreement that intuition conceived as a kind of seeming is essential for both the justification of moral judgment and the confirmation of ethical theories. This (...)
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  • On an Epistemic Cornerstone of Skeptical Theism: in Defense of CORNEA.Timothy Perrine - 2022 - Sophia 61 (3):533-555.
    Skeptical theism is a family of responses to arguments from evil. One important member of that family is Stephen Wykstra’s CORNEA-based criticism of William Rowe’s arguments from evil. A cornerstone of Wykstra’s approach is his CORNEA principle. However, a number of authors have criticized CORNEA on various grounds, including that it has odd results, it cannot do the work it was meant to, and it problematically conflicts with the so-called common sense epistemology. In this paper, I explicate and defend a (...)
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  • Safely Denying Phenomenal Conservatism.Aaran Burns - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2685-2700.
    Phenomenal Conservatism is an ethics of belief that has received considerable support in recent years. One of the main arguments for it is the Self-Defeat Argument. The argument claims that the denial of Phenomenal Conservatism is self-defeating. The argument is at present highly controversial, with both supporters and critics. Critics have failed to discern the real problems with the argument: (I) that there are reasons to deny Phenomenal Conservatism that avoid the self-defeat in question and (II) the conclusion of the (...)
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  • A defense of modal appearances.C. A. McIntosh - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (3):243-261.
    I argue that beliefs about what appears possible are justified in much the same way as beliefs about what appears actual. I do so by chisholming, and then modalizing, the epistemic principle associated with phenomenal conservatism. The principle is tested against a number of examples, and it gives the intuitively correct results. I conclude by considering how it can be used to defend two controversial modal arguments, a Cartesian argument for dualism and an ontological argument for the existence of God.
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  • The prospects of emotional dogmatism.Eilidh Harrison - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (8):2535-2555.
    The idea that emotional experience is capable of lending immediate and defeasible justification to evaluative belief has been amassing significant support in recent years. The proposal that it is my anger, say, that justifies my belief that I’ve been wronged putatively provides us with an intuitive and naturalised explanation as to how we receive epistemic justification for a rich catalogue of our evaluative beliefs. However, despite the fact that this justificatory thesis of emotion is fundamentally an epistemological proposal, comparatively little (...)
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  • (1 other version)Not So Phenomenal!Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & John Hawthorne - forthcoming - The Philosophical Review.
    Our main aims in this paper is to discuss and criticise the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified (a thesis we label Standard Phenomenal Conservatism). This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, we embed it, first, in a (...)
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  • Intuitionism in the Philosophy of Mathematics: Introducing a Phenomenological Account.Philipp Berghofer - 2020 - Philosophia Mathematica 28 (2):204-235.
    The aim of this paper is to establish a phenomenological mathematical intuitionism that is based on fundamental phenomenological-epistemological principles. According to this intuitionism, mathematical intuitions are sui generis mental states, namely experiences that exhibit a distinctive phenomenal character. The focus is on two questions: what does it mean to undergo a mathematical intuition and what role do mathematical intuitions play in mathematical reasoning? While I crucially draw on Husserlian principles and adopt ideas we find in phenomenologically minded mathematicians such as (...)
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  • The Phenomenal Conservative Approach to Religious Epistemology.Logan Paul Gage & Blake McAllister - 2020 - In John M. DePoe & Tyler Dalton McNabb (eds.), Debating Christian Religious Epistemology: An Introduction to Five Views on the Knowledge of God. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 61-81.
    In this chapter, we argue for a phenomenal conservative perspective on religious epistemology and attempt to answer some common criticisms of this perspective.
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  • Phenomenology and Experimental Psychology: On the Prospects and Limitations of Experimental Research for a Phenomenological Epistemology.Philipp Berghofer - 2020 - Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 1 (1):85-108.
    Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is first and foremost a science of the structures of consciousness. Since it is intended to yield eidetic, i. e., a priori insights, it is often assumed that transcendental phenomenology and the natural sciences are totally detached from each other such that phenomenological investigations cannot possibly benefit from empirical evidence. The aim of this paper is to show that a beneficial relationship is possible. To be more precise, I will show how Husserl’s a priori investigations on consciousness (...)
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  • Intuition as a Capacity for a Priori Knowledge.Henry W. Pickford - 2019 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (28):147-169.
    This article lays the groundwork for a defense of rational intuitions by first arguing against a prevalent view according to which intuition is a distinctive psychological state, an “intellectual seeming” that p, that then constitutes evidence that p. An alternative account is then offered, according to which an intuition that p constitutes non-inferential a priori knowledge that p in virtue of the concepts exercised in judging that p. This account of rational intuition as the exercise of conceptual capacities in a (...)
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  • (1 other version)Phenomenal Conservatism.Luca Moretti - 2020 - In Seemings and Epistemic Justification: how appearances justify beliefs. Cham: Springer.
    In this chapter I introduce and analyse the tenets of phenomenal conservatism, and discuss the problem of the nature of appearances. After that, I review the asserted epistemic merits phenomenal conservatism and the principal arguments adduced in support of it. Finally, I survey objections to phenomenal conservatism and responses by its advocates. Some of these objections will be scrutinised and appraised in the next chapters.
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  • Cognitive Penetrability.Luca Moretti - 2020 - In Seemings and Epistemic Justification: how appearances justify beliefs. Cham: Springer.
    In this chapter I introduce the thesis that perceptual appearances are cognitively penetrable and analyse cases made against phenomenal conservatism hinging on this thesis. In particular, I focus on objections coming from the externalist reliabilist camp and the internalist inferentialist camp. I conclude that cognitive penetrability doesn’t yield lethal or substantive difficulties for phenomenal conservatism.
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  • Predictive processing and foundationalism about perception.Harmen Ghijsen - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 7):1751-1769.
    Predictive processing accounts of perception assume that perception does not work in a purely bottom-up fashion but also uses acquired knowledge to make top-down predictions about the incoming sensory signals. This provides a challenge for foundationalist accounts of perception according to which perceptual beliefs are epistemically basic, that is, epistemically independent from other beliefs. If prior beliefs rationally influence which perceptual beliefs we come to accept, then foundationalism about perception appears untenable. I review several ways in which foundationalism might be (...)
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  • Husserl’s Noetics – Towards a Phenomenological Epistemology.Philipp Berghofer - 2018 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50 (2):120-138.
    ABSTRACTFor Husserl, noetics is the most fundamental science and the centrepiece of a phenomenological epistemology. Since in his major works Husserl does not develop noetics systematically but uses its main ideas and achievements often in apparent isolation without clarifying their systematic unity, the significance of noetics is often overlooked. Although Husserl has repeatedly stressed the importance of a phenomenological epistemology, what the concrete theses of such an undertaking are supposed to be often remains obscure. We shall see that the best (...)
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  • The Perspective of Faith: It's Nature and Epistemic Implications.Blake McAllister - 2018 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (3):515-533.
    A number of philosophers, going back at least to Kierkegaard, argue that to have faith in something is, in part, to have a passion for that thing—to possess a lasting, formative disposition to feel certain positive patterns of emotion towards the object of faith. I propose that (at least some of) the intellectual dimensions of faith can be modeled in much the same way. Having faith in a person involves taking a certain perspective towards the object of faith—in possessing a (...)
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  • Expressions, Looks and Others' Minds.William E. S. McNeill - 2000 - In Anita Avramides (ed.), Other Minds. New York: Routledge.
    We can know some things about each others' mental lives. The view that some of this knowledge is genuinely perceptual is getting traction. But the idea that we can see any of each others' mental states themselves - the Simple Perceptual Hypothesis - remains unpopular. Very often the view that we can perceptually know, for example, that James is angry, is thought to depend either on our awareness of James' expression or on the way James appears - versions of what (...)
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  • How to solve Hume's problem of induction.Alexander Jackson - 2019 - Episteme 16 (2):157-174.
    This paper explains what’s wrong with a Hume-inspired argument for skepticism about induction. Hume’s argument takes as a premise that inductive reasoning presupposes that the future will resemble the past. I explain why that claim is not plausible. The most plausible premise in the vicinity is that inductive reasoning from E to H presupposes that if E then H. I formulate and then refute a skeptical argument based on that premise. Central to my response is a psychological explanation for how (...)
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  • Inferential seemings and the problem of reflective awareness.Luca Moretti - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (2):253-271.
    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 general and developed view to this effect is Huemer (2016)’s theory of inferential seemings (ToIS). Moretti (2018) has 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 (...)
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  • Is phenomenal force sufficient for immediate perceptual justification?Lu Teng - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):637-656.
    As an important view in the epistemology of perception, dogmatism proposes that for any experience, if it has a distinctive kind of phenomenal character, then it thereby provides us with immediate justification for beliefs about the external world. This paper rejects dogmatism by looking into the epistemology of imagining. In particular, this paper first appeals to some empirical studies on perceptual experiences and imaginings to show that it is possible for imaginings to have the distinctive phenomenal character dogmatists have in (...)
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  • The evolution of moral intuitions and their feeling of rightness.Christine Clavien & Chloë FitzGerald - 2016 - In Richard Joyce (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
    Despite the widespread use of the notion of moral intuition, its psychological features remain a matter of debate and it is unclear why the capacity to experience moral intuitions evolved in humans. We first survey standard accounts of moral intuition, pointing out their interesting and problematic aspects. Drawing lessons from this analysis, we propose a novel account of moral intuitions which captures their phenomenological, mechanistic, and evolutionary features. Moral intuitions are composed of two elements: an evaluative mental state and a (...)
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  • Basic beliefs and the perceptual learning problem: A substantial challenge for moderate foundationalism.Bram Vaassen - 2016 - Episteme 13 (1):133-149.
    In recent epistemology many philosophers have adhered to a moderate foundationalism according to which some beliefs do not depend on other beliefs for their justification. Reliance on such ‘basic beliefs’ pervades both internalist and externalist theories of justification. In this article I argue that the phenomenon of perceptual learning – the fact that certain ‘expert’ observers are able to form more justified basic beliefs than novice observers – constitutes a challenge for moderate foundationalists. In order to accommodate perceptual learning cases, (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian Theater.David James Barnett - 2019 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Volume 6. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-34.
    According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems diachronically irrational. To (...)
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  • A phenomenal conservative perspective on religious experience.Aaran Burns - 2017 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (3):247-261.
    Can religious experience justify belief in God? We best approach this question by splitting it in two: Do religious experiences give their subjects any justification for believing that there is a God of the kind they experience? And Does testimony about such experiences provides any justification for believing that there is a God for those who are not the subject of the experience? The most popular affirmative answers trace back to the work of Richard Swinburne, who appeals to the Principle (...)
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  • Against an Inferentialist Dogma.Thomas Raleigh - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1397-1421.
    I consider the ‘inferentialist’ thesis that whenever a mental state rationally justifies a belief it is in virtue of inferential relations holding between the contents of the two states. I suggest that no good argument has yet been given for the thesis. I focus in particular on Williamson (2000) and Ginsborg (2011) and show that neither provides us with a reason to deny the plausible idea that experience can provide non-inferential justification for belief. I finish by pointing out some theoretical (...)
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  • The Epistemic Unity of Perception.Elijah Chudnoff & David Didomenico - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4):535-549.
    Dogmatists and phenomenal conservatives think that if it perceptually seems to you that p, then you thereby have some prima facie justification for believing that p. Increasingly, writers about these views have argued that perceptual seemings are composed of two other states: a sensation followed by a seeming. In this article we critically examine this movement. First we argue that there are no compelling reasons to think of perceptual seemings as so composed. Second we argue that even if they were (...)
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  • What seemings seem to be.Samuel A. Taylor - 2015 - Episteme 12 (3):363-384.
    According to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), if it seems to a subject S that P, S thereby has some degree of (defeasible) justification for believing P. But what is it for P to seem true? Answering this question is vital for assessing what role (if any) such states can play. Many have appeared to adopt a kind of non-reductionism that construes seemings as intentional states which cannot be reduced to more familiar mental states like beliefs or sensations. In this paper I (...)
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  • How you know you are not a brain in a vat.Alexander Jackson - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2799-2822.
    A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a brain in a vat ; but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible (...)
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  • (1 other version)Phenomenal Conservatism.Luca Moretti - 2015 - Analysis 75 (2):296-309.
    I review recent work on Phenomenal Conservatism, the position introduced by Michael Huemer according to which if it seems that P to a subject S, in the absence of defeaters S has thereby some degree of justification for believing P.
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  • Explanationist evidentialism.Kevin McCain - 2013 - Episteme 10 (3):299-315.
    In their most recent co-authored work, Conee and Feldman (2008) suggest that epistemic support should be understood in terms of best explanations. Although this suggestion is plausible, Conee and Feldman admit that they have not provided the necessary details for a complete account of epistemic support. This article offers an explanationist account of epistemic support of the kind that Conee and Feldman suggest. It is argued that this account of epistemic support yields the intuitively correct results in a wide variety (...)
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  • Moore’s Proof, Warrant Transmission and Skepticism.Simon Dierig - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (2):487-502.
    Two major arguments have been advanced for the claim that there is a transmission failure in G. E. Moore’s famous proof of an external world. The first argument, due to Crispin Wright, is based on an epistemological doctrine now known as “conservatism.” Proponents of the second argument, like Nicholas Silins, invoke probabilistic considerations, most important among them Bayes’ theorem. The aim of this essay is to defend Moore’s proof against these two arguments. It is shown, first, that Wright’s argument founders (...)
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  • (1 other version)Not So Phenomenal!John Hawthorne & Maria Lasonen-Aarnio - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (1):1-43.
    The main aims in this article are to discuss and criticize the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified. This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, the article embeds it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which updating on (...)
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  • Evaluative experiences: the epistemological significance of moral phenomenology.Philipp Berghofer - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5747-5768.
    Recently, a number of phenomenological approaches to experiential justification emerged according to which an experience's justificatory force is grounded in the experience’s distinctive phenomenology. The basic idea is that certain experiences exhibit a presentive phenomenology and that they are a source of immediate justification precisely by virtue of their presentive phenomenology. Such phenomenological approaches usually focus on perceptual experiences and mathematical intuitions. In this paper, I aim at a phenomenological approach to ethical experiences. I shall show that we need to (...)
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  • The direct argument is a prima facie threat to compatibilism.Ori Beck - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1791-1817.
    In the early 1980’s van Inwagen presented the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism with moral responsibility. In the course of the ensuing debate, Fischer, McKenna and Loewenstein have replied, each in their own way, that versions of the Direct Argument do not pose even a prima facie threat to compatibilism. Their grounds were that versions of the Direct Argument all use the “Transfer NR” inference rule in a dialectically problematic way. I rebut these replies here. By so doing, (...)
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  • Basic knowledge and the normativity of knowledge: The awareness‐first solution.Paul Silva - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):564-586.
    [Significantly updated in Chapter 7 of Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge] Many have found it plausible that knowledge is a constitutively normative state, i.e. a state that is grounded in the possession of reasons. Many have also found it plausible that certain cases of proprioceptive knowledge, memorial knowledge, and self-evident knowledge are cases of knowledge that are not grounded in the possession of reasons. I refer to these as cases of basic knowledge. The existence of basic knowledge forms a (...)
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  • The Bayesian Objection.Luca Moretti - 2020 - In Seemings and Epistemic Justification: how appearances justify beliefs. Cham: Springer.
    In this chapter I analyse an objection to phenomenal conservatism to the effect that phenomenal conservatism is unacceptable because it is incompatible with Bayesianism. I consider a few responses to it and dismiss them as misled or problematic. Then, I argue that this objection doesn’t go through because it rests on an implausible formalization of the notion of seeming-based justification. In the final part of the chapter, I investigate how seeming-based justification and justification based on one’s reflective belief that one (...)
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  • Moore’s proof, theory-ladenness of perception, and many proofs.Mark Walker - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2163-2183.
    I argue that if we allow that Moore’s Method, which involves taking an ordinary knowledge claim to support a substantive metaphysical conclusion, can be used to support Moore’s proof an external world, then we should accept that Moore’s Method can be used to support a variety of incompatible metaphysical conclusions. I shall refer to this as “the problem of many proofs”. The problem of many proofs, I claim, stems from the theory-ladenness of perception. I shall argue further that this plethora (...)
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  • (1 other version)Seemings as sui generis.Blake McAllister - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):3079-3096.
    The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...)
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  • The Explanatory Challenge: Moral Realism Is No Better Than Theism.Dan Baras - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):368-389.
    Many of the arguments for and against robust moral realism parallel arguments for and against theism. In this article, I consider one of the shared challenges: the explanatory challenge. The article begins with a presentation of Harman's formulation of the explanatory challenge as applied to moral realism and theism. I then examine two responses offered by robust moral realists to the explanatory challenge, one by Russ Shafer-Landau and another by David Enoch. Shafer-Landau argues that the moral realist can plausibly respond (...)
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  • Perceptual Experience and Cognitive Penetrability.Somogy Varga - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2):376-397.
    This paper starts by distinguishing three views about the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. ‘Low-level theorists’ argue that perceptual experience is reducible to the experience of low-level properties, ‘high-level theorists’ argue that we have perceptual experiences of high-level properties, while ‘disunified view theorists’ argue that perceptual seemings can present high-level properties. The paper explores how cognitive states can penetrate perceptual experience and provides an interpretation of cognitive penetration that offers some support for the high-level view.
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  • (1 other version)Seemings as sui generis.Blake McAllister - 2017 - Synthese:1-18.
    The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...)
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  • An Isolation Objection to Phenomenal Conservatism.Kevin McCain - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (6):1381-1390.
    Phenomenal conservatism as developed by some philosophers faces a previously unnoticed problem. The problem stems from the fact that, as some develop the view, phenomenal conservatism holds that seemings alone justify—sensations have no justificatory impact. Given this, phenomenal conservatism faces a problem analogous to the isolation objection to coherentism. As foundationalists, supporters of phenomenal conservatism will want to allow that the isolation objection is effective against coherentism, and yet claim that a similar objection is not effective against their view. Unfortunately, (...)
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  • Commonsense, Skeptical Theism, and Different Sorts of Closure of Inquiry Defeat.Jonathan Curtis Rutledge - 2017 - Faith and Philosophy 34 (1):17-32.
    Trent Dougherty argues (contra Jonathan Matheson) that when taking into consideration the probabilities involving skeptical theism (ST) and gratuitous evils, an agent may reasonably affirm both ST and that gratuitous evils exist. In other words, Dougherty thinks that assigning a greater than .5 probability to ST is insufficient to defeat the commonsense problem of evil. I argue that Dougherty’s response assumes, incorrectly, that ST functions solely as an evidential defeater, and that, when understood as a closure of inquiry defeater, ST (...)
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