« July 2006 | Main | October 2006 »
September 08, 2006
New paper online: "Escape from the Humean Predicament"
This is a fairly polished draft of my writing sample. Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I outline a new strategy for answering skepticism, inspired by the words of Quine. It begins with the assumption that if skeptics have the right to make scientific assumptions for the sake of reductio ad absurdum, then anti-skeptics also have the right to make further free use of science in order to block the reductio. I illustrate how this strategy may be applied to three related skeptical conclusions: Quine's own underdetermination thesis, Humean inductive skepticism, and anti-foundationalism. Underdetermination is undermined by an appeal to scientific practice to see that it relies on a crude and unrealistic hypothetico-deductivist conception of confirmation. The classical Humean problem of induction can be resolved by appeal to a material theory of induction which recognizes diverse methods of confirmation practiced by scientists in different domains of fact. Finally, by appealing appealing to psychological evidence regarding perception and concept-formation, I show how the regress of inductive justification can be terminated in perceptual foundations.
Posted by Ben at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)
New draft of paper: "On Grasping the Whole Quine: Lessons from Kim's Critique"
This is a rewritten version of an earlier posted paper, which I am now submitting to journals. Here is the abstract:
This paper evaluates Jaegwon Kim’s influential critique of Quine’s naturalized epistemology and urges that a proper critique must evaluate the fundamental principles of Quine’s philosophy. Kim argues that Quine forces a false choice between traditional deductivist foundationalism and naturalized epistemology, contending that there are viable alternative epistemological projects. But Quine would reject these alternatives by reference to the same fundamental principles (underdetermination, indeterminacy of translation, extensionalism and behaviorism) that led him to reject foundationalism. Understanding Quine’s fundamentals also helps to defuse Kim’s charge that naturalized epistemology is inadequate or incoherent to the extent that it dispenses with epistemic normativity.
Posted by Ben at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)