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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Practical Reasons, Theoretical Reasons, And Permissive And Prohibitive Balancing, John Brunero
Practical Reasons, Theoretical Reasons, And Permissive And Prohibitive Balancing, John Brunero
Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications
Philosophers have often noted a contrast between practical and theoretical reasons when it comes to cases involving equally balanced reasons. When there are strong practical reasons for A-ing, and equally strong practical reasons for some incompatible option, B-ing, the agent is permitted to make an arbitrary choice between them, having sufficient reason to A and sufficient reason to B. But when there is strong evidence for P and equally strong evidence for ~P, one isn’t permitted to simply believe one or the other. Instead, one must withhold belief, neither believing that P nor believing that ~P. This paper examines what …
Impossible Worlds And The Safety Of Philosophical Beliefs, Zack Garrett, Zachariah Wrublewski
Impossible Worlds And The Safety Of Philosophical Beliefs, Zack Garrett, Zachariah Wrublewski
Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications
Epistemological accounts that make use of a safety condition on knowledge, historically, face serious problems regarding beliefs that are necessarily true. This is because necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, and so such beliefs can be safe even when the bases for the beliefs are epistemically problematic. The existence of such problematically safe beliefs would undermine a major motivation for the condition itself: the ability to evaluate how well a belief tracks the truth. This paper argues that incorporating impossible worlds into the evaluation of beliefs solves this problem, but only if the relevant account of impossible worlds …