Philosophy Lecture 4

Epistemic Peers

When peers are roughly equal with respect to intelligence, power of reasoning, background information

The Uniqueness Thesis

(i) A given body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a set of competing propositions (ii) A given body of evidence justifies exactly one attitude towards any given proposition; belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgement

Feldman's Questions

1) Can there be reasonable disagreement between epistemic peers who have shared evidence 2) Can I reasonably maintain my belief while granting that an epistemic peer who has the same evidence but who disagrees with me also has a reasonable belief? Feldman: No to both

Hans Reichenbach Induction

Induction is legitimate because it could not go worse if we use it,might go better

Circularity of Induction

Inductive reasoning is justified using inductive reasoning

Shared Evidence

Two people have shared evidence about a topic if they have fully discussed it, and share whatever reasons, justification they have for their belief, withholding

Counter-induction

infer that the next case will be unlike all the previous cases

Nature is not uniform

then using induction is at least not going to make us worse off

Nature is uniform

using induction is better than not doing so

Disagree

when there is a proposition concerning how the world is that one believes and the other denies

Reasonable disagreement

when they disagree, and each is reasonable/justified in their own belief