Non-inferential justification and epistemic circularity

Penelope Maddy claims that we can have no evidence that we are not being globally deceived by an evil demon. However, Maddy’s Plain Inquirer holds that she has good evidence for a wide variety of claims about the world and her relation to it. She rejects the broadly Cartesian idea that she can’t be entitled to these claims, or have good evidence for them, or know them, unless she can provide a defense of them that starts from nowhere. She likewise rejects the more limited demand for a defense that makes use only of considerations that do not concern the world outside of her mind. She allows that some considerations about the world can be appealed to perfectly appropriately as fully adequate evidence in favor of other considerations about the world. So why can’t the Plain Inquirer rule out global skeptical hypotheses by producing evidence against them that depends upon other considerations about the world? Is there good reason for singling out global skeptical hypotheses such as I am not being deceived by an evil demon as requiring a different kind of treatment? Considerations about epistemic asymmetry and epistemic circularity, as well as Wittgensteinian considerations about the relation between evidence and the real-world and human background context, all lead to the conclusion that there is not.

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Bootstrap and rollback: generalizing epistemic circularity

Synthese ◽

10.1007/s11229-011-9990-9 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 189 (2) ◽

pp. 395-413 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Jesper Kallestrup

Keyword(s):

Epistemic Circularity

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WHAT THE INTERNALIST SHOULD SAY TO THE TORTOISE

Episteme ◽

10.1017/epi.2015.12 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 209-217 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Richard Fumerton

Keyword(s):

Infinite Regress ◽

Easy Knowledge ◽

Inferential Justification ◽

Justified Belief ◽

Upper Limit ◽

Short Piece ◽

Vicious Regress

Carroll's (1895) short piece “What the Tortoise said to Achilles” in many ways anticipates issues that arise in a number of contemporary controversies. One might argue, for example, that initially plausible attempts to deal with the problem of easy knowledge will land one in the unfortunate position of Achilles who followed the Tortoise down a road that leads to vicious infinite regress. Or consider the conditions required for inferential justification. For idealized inferential justification, I have defended (1995, 2004, 2006) the view that to be justified in believing P on the basis of E one needs to be not only justified in believing E, but justified in believing that E makes probable P (where entailment is the upper limit of making probable). And again, critics have argued that such a strong requirement fails to learn the lesson that Achilles should have been taught by the Tortoise. Even more generally, one might well argue that strong access internalists will need to deal with a variation of Carroll's puzzle even for their accounts of non-inferential justification. In this paper I'll examine these controversies with a mind to reaching a conclusion about just exactly how one can accept intellectually demanding conditions on justified belief without encountering vicious regress.

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Divided by Common Sense: Mendelssohn and Jacobi on Reason and Inferential Justification

Moses Mendelssohn's Metaphysics and Aesthetics - Studies in German Idealism ◽

10.1007/978-94-007-2451-8_10 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 203-215

Author(s):

Paul Franks

Keyword(s):

Common Sense ◽

Inferential Justification

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Principles of Inferential Justification

Intellectual Assurance ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719632.003.0007 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 127-143

Author(s):

Trent Dougherty

Keyword(s):

Inferential Justification

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Synthetic Data

Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application ◽

10.1146/annurev-statistics-040720-031848 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Trivellore E. Raghunathan

Keyword(s):

Synthetic Data ◽

Future Research ◽

Annual Review ◽

Publication Date ◽

Data Sets ◽

Sensitive Information ◽

Inferential Justification ◽

Widespread Access ◽

Access To Data ◽

Privacy And Confidentiality

Demand for access to data, especially data collected using public funds, is ever growing. At the same time, concerns about the disclosure of the identities of and sensitive information about the respondents providing the data are making the data collectors limit the access to data. Synthetic data sets, generated to emulate certain key information found in the actual data and provide the ability to draw valid statistical inferences, are an attractive framework to afford widespread access to data for analysis while mitigating privacy and confidentiality concerns. The goal of this article is to provide a review of various approaches for generating and analyzing synthetic data sets, inferential justification, limitations of the approaches, and directions for future research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Statistics, Volume 8 is March 8, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Circularity and Stability

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy ◽

10.5840/wcp20-paideia199845879 ◽

1998 ◽

pp. 164-169

Author(s):

Markus Lammenranta

Keyword(s):

Practical Rationality ◽

Coherence Theory ◽

External Evaluation ◽

Epistemic Circularity ◽

William Alston ◽

Internal View

William Alston argues that there is no way to show that any of our basic sources of belief is reliable without falling into epistemic circularity, i.e. relying at some point on premises that are themselves derived from the very same source. His appeal to practical rationality is an attempt to evaluate our sources of belief without relying on beliefs that are based on the sources under scrutiny and thus without just presupposing their reliability. I argue that this attempt fails and that Ernest Sosa’s appeal to the coherence theory of justification fails, too, if it is understood as an attempt to find a similar external evaluation of our sources of belief that does not just assume their reliability. I concluded that there is no alternative to taking an internal view to our own reliability and embracing epistemic circularity.

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Pick Your Poison: Beg the Question or Embrace Circularity

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism ◽

10.1163/22105700-03021119 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 125-140 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Kevin McCain ◽

William Rowley

Keyword(s):

Reflective Equilibrium ◽

Epistemic Circularity ◽

Equilibrium Response ◽

Equilibrium Approach ◽

Fourth Way ◽

Problem Of The Criterion

According to Roderick Chisholm, there are three ways of responding to the Problem of the Criterion and they all leave something to be desired. Michael DePaul, Paul Moser, and Earl Conee have each proposed variations of a fourth way of responding to this problem that rely on reflective equilibrium. We argue that these four options for responding to the Problem of the Criterion leave one with a tough choice: accept one of the three that Chisholm describes or DePaul’s reflective equilibrium approach and beg the question or accept a reflective equilibrium response of the sort Conee and Moser propose and embrace epistemic circularity.

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