Dustin Olson

Epistemic defeat has to do with the lowering, eliminating, or general downgrading of positive epistemic statuses, especially the statuses of being justified or having knowledge. On most accounts of justification, beliefs can be justified even when the property in virtue of which they are justified does not guarantee their truth. That is, justification is fallible. And for any fallibly justified belief, there is always the possibility that further information could come to light, which would render the belief unjustified once the subject becomes aware of it. When a subject becomes aware of such further information, her justification is defeated, and the defeating information (or her awareness of it) is a defeater. Furthermore, according to standard defeasibility analyses of knowledge, roughly, the existence of defeating information for a subject S’s justification for her belief that p is sufficient to prevent S from having knowledge that p, even while S is unaware of the defeating in...

A number of philosophers argue that because of its history of systematic disagreement, philosophy has made little to no epistemic progress – especially in comparison to the hard sciences. One argument for this conclusion contends that the best explanation for systematic disagreement in philosophy is that at least some, potentially all, philosophers are unreliable. Since we do not know who is reliable, we have reason to conclude that we ourselves are probably unreliable. Evidence of one’s potential unreliability in a domain purportedly defeats any first-order support one has for any judgments in that domain. This paper defends philosophy. First, accepting that science is rightfully treated as the benchmark of epistemic progress, I contend that a proper conception of epistemic progress highlights that philosophy and science are relevantly similar in terms of such progress. Secondly, even granting that systematic disagreement is a mark of unreliability and that it does characterize phi...

... Open Dissertations and Theses 10-1-2011 Bertrand Russell On Perception and Knowledge (1927 - 59) ... For more information, please contact scom@mcmaster.ca. Recommended Citation Olson, Dustin Z., "Bertrand Russell On Perception and Knowledge (1927 - 59)" (2011). ...