Department of Humanities, Section of Philosophy

In Language, Truth and Logic Ayer explicitly defends the notion of analyticity that is nowadays discussed under the label, introduced by P. Boghossian, of “metaphysical analyticity”. According to Ayer, this notion of analyticity is key to defending the empiricist principle that all knowledge of reality stems from and is justified by experience from the objection that some propositions are known a priori. In this paper I argue for two negative claims. The first claim is that even if all a priori knowledge were knowledge of metaphysical analyticities, it would still not follow that it is not knowledge about reality. The second claim is that Ayer’s metaphysical analyticity is not a property that any sentence could intelligibly instantiate.

Quite recently, Luciano Floridi has put forward the fascinating suggestion that knowledge should be analyzed as special kind of information, in particular as accounted information. As I will try tentatively to show, one important consequence of Floridi’s proposal is that the notion of justification, and of evidence, should play no role in a philosophical understanding of knowledge. In this paper,

The article addresses the question whether the semantic realist
should accept the principle (R) according to which every reason to think that
a statement is true is a reason to think that the statement is warrantedly
assertible, and vice versa. As against W. Alston’s suggestion, according to
which the acceptance of (R) commits one to regarding “true” and “warrant-
edly assertible” as having the same extension, it is argued that (R) just follows
from the neutral assumption, also shared by Alston, that the acceptance of all
non-pathological instances of the Equivalence Schema (it is true that p iff p)
provides a necessary condition for understanding the truth-predicate. So, it is
argued, (R) is open both to the realist and to the antirealist. In addition, in the
final part it is sketched a general argument against the anti-realistic identifica-
tion of meaning with assertibility conditions, which is essentially premised on
(R). With this it is shown that the realist has also good dialectical motivations
to accept (R).

In a recent article M. Colyvan has argued that Quinean forms of scientific realism are faced with an unexpected upshot. Realism concerning a given class of entities, along with this route to realism, can be vindicated by running an indispensability argument to the effect that the entities postulated by our best scientific theories exist. Colyvan observes that among our best scientific theories some are inconsistent, and so concludes that, by resorting to the very same argument, we may incur a commitment to inconsistent entities. Colyvan’s argument could be interpreted, and in part is presented, as a reductio of Quinean scientific realism; yet, Colyvan in the end manifests some willingness to bite the bullet, and provides some reasons why we shouldn’t feel too uncomfortable with those entities. In this paper we wish to indicate a way out to the scientific realist, by arguing that no indispensability argument of the kind suggested by Colyvan is actually available. To begin with, in order to run such an indispensability argument we should be justified in believing that an inconsistent theory is true; yet, in so far as the logic we accept is a consistent one it is arguable that our epistemic predicament could not be possibly one in which we are justified in so believing. Moreover, also if our logic admitted true contradictions, as Dialetheism does, it is arguable that Colyvan’s indispensability argument could not rest on a true premise. As we will try to show, dialetheists do not admit true contradictions for cheap: they do so just as a way out of paradox, namely whenever we are second-level ignorant as to the metaphysical possibility of evidence breaking the parity among two or more inconsistent claims; Colyvan’s examples, however, are not of this nature. So, even under the generous assumption that Dialetheism is true, we will conclude that Colyvan’s argument doesn’t achieve its surprising conclusion.

According to Hartry Field, the mathematical Platonist is hostage of a dilemma. Faced with the request of explaining the mathematicians' reliability, one option could be to maintain that the mathematicians are reliably responsive to a realm populated with mathematical entities; alternatively, one might try to contend that the mathematical realm conceptually depends on, and for this reason is reliably reflected by, the mathematicians' (best) opinions; however, both alternatives are actually unavailable to the Platonist: the first one because it is in tension with the idea that mathematical entities are causally ineffective, the second one because it is in tension with the suggestion that mathematical entities are mind-independent. John Divers and Alexander Miller have tried to reject the conclusion of this argument—according to which Platonism is inconsistent with a satisfactory epistemology for arithmetic—by re-describing the second horn of the dilemma in light of Crispin Wri...

Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridical experience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility of perceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut.

It is widely accepted that when it perceptually seems to a subject S that reality is a certain way S acquires some degree of defeasible justification for believing that reality is that way. The main objective of this paper is to account for the specific way in which this justification can be lost when a subject acquires a reason D for supposing that her perceptual seemings are unreliable. Along with a widely accepted answer, which traces back to J. Pollock, D undercuts S’s justification from the seeming. This answer conflates two different senses––the direct and indirect one––in which S’s seeming that P can contribute to the justification of S’s belief that P. While D undercuts S’s indirect justification from the seeming, namely the inferential justification based on S’s introspective belief that it seems to her that P, it does not undercut also the direct justification from the seeming, which is non-inferential justification. In the final part of the paper I invoke a principle distilled by N. Silins––according to which S’s direct justification for believing P from the seeming cannot exceed S’s justification for believing that S sees P from the seeming––and argue that D defeats the first justification by rebutting the second.

It is an alleged virtue of Pritchard's Epistemological Disjunctivism (ED) that it makes available a promising line of resistance against the sceptic about perceptual knowledge. According to J. Zalabardo's reconstruction of it, however, this line of resistance-in particular, the solution it supplies to what Pritchard calls the Evidential Problem-is ultimately flawed. Whether or not the solution criticized by Zalabardo is the one supplied by ED-that which Pritchard has denied-my aim in this paper is to show that Zalabardo's criticism of this solution fails. To begin with, I show that it is based on excessively demanding epistemic principles. Moreover, I argue that on a more plausible epistemic principle Zalabardo's conclusion doesn't go through. I conclude that the solution to the Evidential Problem criticized by Zalabardo has not been shown by him to fail.