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