Digital Commons Network^™

Questions And Inquiry: Some Epistemological Applications, Jason Rourke

Dissertations - ALL

Abstract: A recent and innovative research program in epistemology aims to connect the related phenomena of questions and inquiry with epistemological concerns. This dissertation project contributes to that program, taking as its inspiration the contrastive theory of knowledge developed by Jonathan Schaffer in a series of recent papers. The dissertation is comprised of three main parts. I begin by articulating a positive account of the evaluation of knowledge attributions, an account that aims to respect the basic insights of Schaffer's contrastivism while situating them in a modal framework that makes manifest the utility of questions for epistemological theorizing. Then I …