Epistemology

Advanced

Graduate level. Metatheory, technical variants, and disputes that are still open, with the primary literature named rather than gestured at.

Contextualism, Invariantism, and Pragmatic Encroachment
Whether 'knows' shifts with the speaker's context, with the subject's stakes, or not at all
24 min
Knowledge-First Epistemology and Anti-Luminosity
Treating knowledge as primitive, defining evidence from it, and the margin-for-error argument that no condition is luminous
26 min
Needs firstContextualism, Invariantism, and Pragmatic Encroachment
Epistemological Disjunctivism and the New Evil Demon
A reason that is both reflectively accessible and factive, offered against the demand to choose between internalism and externalism
25 min
Needs firstKnowledge-First Epistemology and Anti-Luminosity
Epistemic Value and the Swamping Problem
Why knowledge is worth more than mere true belief, and why reliability alone cannot say so
21 min
Needs firstEpistemological Disjunctivism and the New Evil Demon
Formal Epistemology: Probabilism and Updating
Probability axioms as coherence constraints, and the rules for revising credences
28 min
Needs firstEpistemic Value and the Swamping Problem
Accuracy-First Epistemology
Deriving the probability axioms from accuracy alone, with no bets and no bookie in sight
27 min
Needs firstFormal Epistemology: Probabilism and Updating
Confirmation Theory, Ravens, and Grue
Why a white shoe appears to confirm that all ravens are black, and what grue breaks
24 min
Needs firstAccuracy-First Epistemology
Lottery, Preface, and the Threshold View of Belief
If believing is having a high enough credence, rational belief is not closed under conjunction. Something has to give
22 min
Needs firstConfirmation Theory, Ravens, and Grue
Self-Locating Belief and Sleeping BeautyPlanned
What conditionalization says when the new information is about which person, or which time, you are
25 min
Higher-Order Evidence and Peer DisagreementPlanned
Evidence about the reliability of your own reasoning, and whether the levels can come apart
24 min
Fitch's Paradox and the Knowability PrinciplePlanned
A short proof that if every truth can be known, then every truth already is known
23 min
The Epistemology of ModalityPlanned
How anyone comes to know what is possible or necessary, with no experience of it
22 min
Transformative ExperiencePlanned
Choices whose outcomes you cannot assess until after you have made them, and what that does to expected utility
19 min
Zetetic Epistemology and the Norms of InquiryPlanned
Norms governing what to look into rather than what to believe, and the tension between the two
21 min