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Removing The Classical Landmark: Assessing An Epistemology Governed By Methodological Naturalism, Kegan Shaw May 2013

Removing The Classical Landmark: Assessing An Epistemology Governed By Methodological Naturalism, Kegan Shaw

Masters Theses

This paper proposes to assess the naturalist project in epistemology with an eye towards exposing the project as deficient for serving as a robust epistemological project. Epistemologists treasure a certain family of questions and burden themselves with a number of specific concerns the most important of which, I think, cannot be answered by the epistemological naturalist. Ignoring these questions, I will argue, essentially amounts to a dismissal of the principle tension that primarily motivates and properly guides epistemological theorizing. This tension is the familiar appearance vs. reality distinction and characterizes what I am calling the classical landmark or boundary-stone for …


On The Possibility Of Inductive Knowledge, Raam P. Gokhale Jan 2013

On The Possibility Of Inductive Knowledge, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

In this paper, we utilize a disjunction of familiar inductive beliefs—the disjunction being deductively valid—to show that we most likely have inductive knowledge, the likelihood depending on the usual inductive considerations like size and robustness of the sample, etc., i.e. on what it should depend on, not the usual 'philosophical' culprits like the old and new riddles of induction. While this is in itself philosophically significant, the implications of this for a justification of induction are also explored. Induction will be found to be supported but not justified by the proposed example. Lastly, to address this lacuna, and deriving support …