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Eg Phd, Mphil, Dclinpsychol This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Evidential Externalism Giada Fratantonio Doctor of Philosophy University of Edinburgh 2018 Abstract It is widely accepted, amongst epistemologists, that evidence plays an important role in our epistemic life. Crucially, there is no agreement on what evidence is. Follow- ing Silins, we can cash out the disagreement around the notion of evidence in terms of the opposition between Evidential Internalism and Evidential Externalism (Silins, 2005). Evidential internalists claim that evidence supervenes on one’s non-factive mental states, such as, beliefs, impressions (BonJour, 1999, Audi, 2001). Eviden- tial Externalists deny that. In this Thesis, first, I contrastively assess the plausibility of two prominent contemporary externalist theories: Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemological Disjunctivism, the thesis on which one’s evidence in perceptual cases is truth-entailing and reflectively accessible (Pritchard, 2012), and Timothy Williamson’s E=K, the the- sis on which one’s evidence is all and only the propositions one knows (Williamson, 2000). Second, I develop a novel externalist account of evidence that I call Ecumenical Evidentialism. I show how Ecumenical Evidentialism is able to bring together some of the benefits of both Pritchard’s Disjunctivism and Williamson’s E=K. This Thesis is structured into three sections, each of which addresses the following three questions respectively: • Does the Access Problem represent a real threat to Evidential Externalism? • Is Evidential Externalism committed to a sceptical variety of Infallibilism? • How does Evidential Externalism understand the relation between evidence and epistemic justification? I argue that neither Epistemological Disjunctivism nor E=K are fully satisfying Ex- ternalist accounts of evidence. On one hand, I argue that Disjunctivism captures the orthodox intuition on which justification is a matter of being evidence-responsive, but it does so on pain of facing the so-called Access Problem. On the other hand, by re- jecting any strong accessibility thesis, Williamson’s E=K is better positioned to resist both the Access Problem as well as the Infallibility Problem, but it does not vindicate the orthodox intuition on which justification is a matter of being evidence-responsive. Finally, I show that, while retaining the main commitments of Williamson’s theory of evidence, such as, E=K, my Ecumenical Evidentialism is able to capture the orthodox responsiveness intuition about epistemic justification. iii Declaration I declare that this thesis was composed by myself and that the work contained therein is my own, except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text. (Giada Fratantonio) v vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 I Evidential Externalism and The Access Problem 15 1 The Access Problem for E=K 19 1.1 Introduction . 19 1.2 The Access Problem . 20 1.3 What is Armchair Knowledge? . 23 1.3.1 On Silins’ Notion of Armchair Knowledge . 23 1.3.2 A Clarification . 25 1.4 A First Response: A Restriction of Armchair Access . 26 1.5 A Second Response: On the Nature of Armchair Knowledge . 29 1.5.1 Experience, Counterfactuals, and Imagination . 32 1.5.2 Second-order Knowledge Through Imagination . 35 1.5.3 Why Knowing the Environment from the Armchair is not Absurd 37 1.6 Easy Second-order Knowledge . 38 1.7 Conclusion . 40 2 The Access Problem for Epistemological Disjunctivism 43 2.1 Introduction . 43 2.2 Epistemological Disjunctivism and The Access Problem . 45 2.3 Pritchard’s Response to The Access Problem . 47 2.4 On the Metaphysical and Folk Interpretation of Essential Dependency 49 2.5 On the Epistemic Interpretation of Essential Dependency . 51 2.5.1 Why The Epistemic Interpretation is Problematic . 53 2.5.2 Restricting Closure . 56 2.6 An Alternative Diagnosis: Tim Kraft’s Source/Content Distinction . 60 vii 2.7 Conclusion . 65 II Evidential Externalism and The Infallibility Problem 67 3 E=K and the Infallibility Problem 71 3.1 Introduction . 71 3.2 The Argument from E=K to Scepticism . 72 3.3 What is Infallibilism? . 74 3.3.1 Varieties of Infallibilism (and Underdetermination) . 77 3.3.2 Comments on Varieties of Infallibilism . 81 3.3.3 E=K: what Infallibilism? What Underdetermination? . 83 3.4 What is Underdetermination? . 87 3.4.1 Varieties of Underdetermination (and Infallibilism) . 90 3.4.2 Comments on Varieties of Underdetermination . 92 3.4.3 E=K: What Underdetermination? What Infallibilism? . 95 3.5 Back to Dodd and Why He is Mistaken . 95 3.5.1 Why we know propositions about the future and propositions about the (unperceived) present although they are underdeter- mined! . 102 3.6 Conclusion . 105 III Evidential Externalism and Epistemic Justification 109 4 Evidence-first, Knowledge-first, and Ecumenical Evidentialism 113 4.1 Introduction . 113 4.2 Evidence-first Evidentialism . 114 4.2.1 Propositional and Doxastic Justification . 115 4.2.2 The Relation between Roles of Evidence and Justification . 120 4.3 Knowledge-first Evidentialism . 123 4.3.1 Knowledge-first Evidentialism: on Propositional Justification 124 4.3.2 Knowledge-first Evidentialism: on Doxastic Justification . 126 4.3.3 How to make sense of Knowledge-first Evidentialism . 128 4.4 Evidence-first VS Knowledge-first Evidentialism . 129 4.5 Ecumenical Evidentialism . 137 4.5.1 A two-tiered account of knowledge . 137 viii 4.5.2 Meta-epistemological Pluralism . 142 4.5.3 Non-traditional Foundationalism . 146 4.6 Conclusion . 149 Conclusion 156 References 157 ix Acknowledgements In 2013 I moved to London. I was officially enrolled at University of Milan, but I was visiting KCL as an Erasmus student. I decided to take a course called “General Philosophy” which included, amongst other things, a series of lectures on epistemol- ogy with Clayton Littlejohn. It is in that occasion that I had my first encounter with contemporary epistemology. Although it took me a while to understand why everyone seemed to be so obsessed with red barns (red barns are not really a thing in Italy as far as I know), I soon realised that many of the questions epistemologists were asking were questions I cared about. The summer after that year in London, I wanted to read more about contemporary epistemology, so I checked what book philosophers took to be influential in the contemporary epistemological debate. That summer I bought and read copy of Knowledge and Its Limits. As you can imagine, it was a pretty intense summer! In a sense, this thesis wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gone to London, and if I hadn’t gone to Littlejohn’s lectures. I have written most of this Thesis while in Edinburgh and, although it hasn’t always been a very smooth process, I was very lucky to meet great philosophers who had an incredibly positive impact on my PhD experience. I’d like to thank everyone who at some point came by Office 2.16 at DSB. In no particular order, I would like to thank Kegan Shaw, Michel Croce, Matt Jope, Joe Dewurst, Lukas Schwengerer, Rie Iizuka, Hadeel Naeem, and Carlos Portales. Thanks also to Guy Fletcher, Michela Massimi, Debbie Roberts, Ellie Mason, Lani Watson, Joey Pollock, Alistair Isaac, Pauline Phemister, Alix Cohen, Natalie Ashton, and super Fiona! A special thank goes to Di Yang, for her constant encouragement and for the long, intense but wonderful philosophical discussions on epistemology, law, and vegan cheese. I am confident she is going to make the world a better place. Thanks to my little “Edinburgh family”: Rosa Erica, Di Yang, Dan Calder, Elli Shackelton, Silvan Wittwer, Ana-Maria Cretu, Anna Ortin, Nick Rebol, Iliana Lytra and George Tentokallis. Each of them have contributed in their own way to make my 1 PhD life colourful and “homey”, and I am very grateful for that. Over the last four years I presented most of the material in this thesis to various conferences across Europe and UK. This was made possible by the generous Research Grants that I have been awarded by PPLS of Edinburgh and that I would thus like to thank. I would also like to thank all the philosophers I have met in these occasions and that have provided me with very useful feedback on my work: Jie Gao, Davide Fassio, Rachel Fraser, Adam Carter, Giorgio Volpe, Luca Moretti, Tommaso Piazza, Simon Wimmer, Claire Field, Liz Jackson, Mona Simion, Clotilde Calabi, Giacomo Melis, Josh Habgood-Coote, Jaakko Hirvela, Lewis Ross, Julien Dutant, Cameron Boult, Federica Malfatti. Thanks to Gloria Andrada DeGregorio for being an amazing pal of silence. I would like to thank Lucy Campbell and Alex Greenberg for their advice and for always cheering for me. Thanks to Lucy for all the great philosophical discussion at the Head of the River in Oxford, and for making me discover gently bubbling Pimm’s. Thanks also to Olga and Nikola. I would also like to thank The Phoenix Souls and Gospel Choir of Edinburgh. I was very lucky to sing with a bunch of wonderful music lovers.
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