The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer (Philosophical Studies Series)

You looking to find the "The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer (Philosophical Studies Series)" Good news! You can purchase The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer (Philosophical Studies Series) with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

Product Description

This book is an extensive, self-contained, up-to-date study of Lehrer's epistemological work. Covering all major aspects, it contains original contributions by some of the most distinguished specialists in the field, outgoing from the latest, significantly revised version of Lehrer's theory. All basic ideas are explained in an introductory chapter. Lehrer's extensive replies in a final chapter give unique access to his current epistemological thinking.

</p>

The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer (Philosophical Studies Series) Review

The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer edited by Erik J. Olsson (Philosophical Studies Series, V. 95: Kluwer Academic) The authors who have contributed to this book were asked to take a closer look at Lehrer's epistemology from their own different perspectives. Many are, of course, critical; that is in the nature of the game. But the reader will also find several constructive attempts to defend or improve on Lehrer's theory. In the final essay, Lehrer gives his replies. All articles appear in this volume for the first time.

After a survey Introduction by the Editor which outlines the main outlines of Lehrer' views the contributing essays are group under five topics.

1. The first topic, Externalism vs. Internalism, Ernest Sosa, "Epistemology: Does it Depend on Independence?" attempts to clarify and question the way coherentism undermines supervenience arguments but possibly may also undermine its own rationale by only using supportive arguments for independence without supervenience.

In "Why Not Reliabilism?" John Greco raises the question why isn't agent reliability enough? Or better, why does knowledge require, in addition to agent reliability, further conditions regarding coherence? In pursuing this question, Greco considers Lehrer's three most important arguments for thinking that agent reliability is not enough, and that therefore something further is required, such as coherence. Greco argues that none of Lehrer's arguments against a non-coherentist version of reliabilism is persuasive.

Knowledge has a functional role in science and in practical reasoning, and this functional role requires abilities involving articulation, reason-giving, and defense against objections. Hence the grounds of knowledge must be in an appropriate way available to the knower, as they are in a coherence theory.

Externalism in general, and reliabilism in particular, are open to "the opacity objection." More specifically, they are open to counter-examples such as that of Mr. Truetemp, in which a) the person in question is reliable in what he accepts, but b) this reliability is opaque to him. Contra reliabilism, such persons lack knowledge. However, coherence removes opacity and thereby issues in knowledge.

Greco argues something like this: Depending on how we interpret Lehrer's conditions for coherence, we must say either a) that Mr. Truetemp satisfies those conditions and therefore knows, or b) that in ordinary cases of perception, people do not satisfy those conditions and therefore do not know. If (a), then the counter-examples employed by the opacity objection fail to distinguish Lehrer's coherentism from non-coherentist versions of reliabilism. If (b), then Lehrer's coherentism has unacceptable skeptical results.

Gettier problems show that true reliable acceptance is not sufficient for knowledge. However, coherence requires further conditions, and these work so as to solve Gettier problems. Greco argues that a non-coherentist version of agent reliabilism can adopt a strategy very similar to Lehrer's so that his arguments are not persuasive.

Jonathan L. Kvanvig in "Justification and Proper Basing," believes that there is more to be said on behalf of Lehrer's view that a causal account of the basing relation is defective than has been appreciated. Causality is ubiquitous in nearly all of our experience of the world, but it is not conceptually involved in the concepts of knowledge or justification. In particular, Lehrer is right that the basing relation is not a species of causal relation. Kvanvig attempts to show why.

Todd Stewart in "Lehrer on Knowledge and Causation" takes up the same situation, arguing that Lehrer's theory of knowledge as it stands remains silent about the relationship of causation to justification. "Indeed, it seems possible to easily accommodate the view that causation is necessary for justification by simply understanding reasons claims as always being partly causal. Causation would enter the picture here because it is explicitly represented in reasons claims, and improper causation can make such reasons claims false. Of course, Lehrer's theory is also compatible with the view that justifying reasons need not be causal. Whether the incompleteness of Lehrer's theory is a virtue or a vice, and both the flexibility and difficulty of assessment this incompleteness reveals" is left up in the air.

Lastly Volker Halbach in "Can We Grasp Consistency?" attempts to show that the arguments proposed to prove that consistency is as hardly accessible as purely external facts are not conclusive. Of course, consistency is not accessible, if `accessible' is understood in a very strong way, for general procedures for determining whether an arbitrary given set of sentences is consistent has not been formalized. But this kind of accessibility is not required for most epistemological purposes. For those purposes, we only need to establish the consistency of our own belief system or the consistency of our belief system with another belief. Which the bedrock of Lehrer's coherentism. Halbach asserts these discussed arguments are not conclusive. He does not claim that consistency actually is accessible in a relevant sense. Church's Theorem and G�del's Second Theorem makes it hard to assert a general account of how justification may be obtained, if consistency is to be used as a partial criterion for justification.

2. Coherence and Personal Justification section begins with Glenn Ross's: "Reasonable Acceptance and the Lottery Paradox: The Case for a More Credulous Consistency." The skeptical and the inconsistency solutions to this paradox presuppose a principle of symmetry: that if I have equally good reason to accept of any ticket that it will lose as I have to accept that any other ticket will lose, I should adopt the same attitude uniformly. I should either accept of each ticket that it will lose or not accept of any ticket that it will lose. Lehrer accepts the principle of symmetry and argues that considerations of consistency show it is not reasonable to accept that any lottery ticket will lose. He then proceeds to show how he can get this result from his theory of rational acceptance. Lehrer analyzes personal justification in terms of coherence in an acceptance system. Whether a statement is reasonable to accept depends upon what statements compete with it.

Ross proposes that we can slip through the horns by adopting a consistently credulous approach: one can rationally accept that one's ticket will lose, while not accepting that of many of the others, even though one is no less confident that they too will lose.

There are good theoretical reasons to reject the Symmetry Principle. We accept in order to gain truth and avoid error. Basing acceptance on purely statistical grounds can be epistemically reasonable when the prospects for gain are great and the risks of loss small. A concomitant commitment to coherence provides the epistemological basis for our avoiding recognized inconsistency. Thus, Ross speak well of a position of credulous consistency as the most plausible of the three resolutions of the lottery paradox for reasonable acceptance. The lesson of the lottery is that we can sometimes have no better reason to accept, but reason enough.

Charles B. Cross' "Relational Coherence and Cumulative Reasoning" begins by formalizing slightly simplified version of Lehrer's theory of relational coherence as a species of inductive reasoning. As an exercise in logic, the hypothesis that relational coherence is a species of inductive reasoning appears to be a success. Nothing could be more natural in the context of Lehrer's theory of knowledge than an account of inductive reasoning in terms of relational coherence.

In "Lehrer Meets Ranking Theory" Wolfgang Spohn claims that ranking theory is the only existing theory suited for underpinning Keith Lehrer's account of knowledge and justification. However, the result of defining Lehrer's primitive notions in terms of ranking theory can disappoint. Justified acceptance has, depending on the interpretation, either an unintelligible structure or reduction to mere acceptance, and in the latter interpretation, knowledge will be reduced to true belief. Of course, this result requires a discussion of who would be disappointed.

Carl G. Wagner's "Two Dogmas of Probabilism" rounds off section two, with a discussion of dogmatic restrictions on the representation of uncertain judgment, or on the way in which such judgment is revised, undermine the goal of faithfully representing the evidence regarding the state of the world.

While Bayesian dogmatism has begun to yield to other principled methods of probability revision, the dogma of precision is still dominant in epistemic accounts. One source of resistance to working with non-additive upper and lower probabilities is the fear that such measures must necessarily be mathematically intractable. This greatly exaggerates the true state of affairs. There is a useful theory of upper and lower expectation, as well as a generalization of probability kinematics that provides new evidence. There is a theory of consensus for upper and lower probabilities that is remarkably similar to that in Lehrer and Wagner.

3. Trustworthiness section begins with a contribution by James Van Cleve, "Lehrer, Reid, and the First of All Principles." Lehrer's groundbreaking work on the philosophy of Thomas Reid has revitalized Reid's philosophy. Cleve raises certain questions concerning Lehrer's interpretation of Reid's epistemology, especially with Lehrer's view that one among Reid's principles of common sense as a linchpin of an indispensably important metaprinciple.

In "Self-Trust and the Reasonableness of Acceptance," G. J. Mattey asserts that Lehrer's doctrine of reasonableness is based solely on acceptance, which leaves him open to a charge of broad circularity, a charge avoided by foundationalist accounts of reasonableness. It is only through a relation of mutual support that acceptances can make one another reasonable. Lehrer singles out a special acceptance, that I am trustworthy in what I accept, as playing a key role in providing that support. Mattey argues that acceptance of the principle makes the mere acceptance of a piece of information, including itself, reasonable to some extent, though in an entirely generic way. It does so in the context of the acceptance system as a whole.

The principle of trustworthiness might also make itself reasonable by applying to itself directly, in which case it seems to be foundational and potentially to avoid the problem of broad circularity. But this direct application is narrowly circular and so holds no advantage in this respect over the indirect application. Because a direct application explains nothing that is not explained by the indirect approach, and indeed omits what ought to be included in any explanation of reasonableness, there is no reason to concede anything to the foundationalist. The essential ingredients in the explanation of reasonableness are to be found in the acceptance system as a whole, as is consonant with Lehrer's coherence approach to justification. The narrowly circular application of the principle of trustworthiness to itself is an aberration.

Richard N. Manning in: "The Dialectic Illusion of a Vicious Bootstrap," also finds self-trust problematic by thinking of a principle of general self-trust as not a member of one's acceptance system, but a kind of hand-stamper at the door, whose effect is to mark contents as accepted, thereby making them available in truth directed reasoning and justification. Self-trust, then, operates, not as a principle of detachment of an acceptance operator, but to distinguish which among those contents we can think are to be exploited in epistemic inquiry. The way Lehrer conceives of self-trust-as a principle which is special, but special among acceptances to be exploited in bootstrapping-forces him to attempt give accounts of justification on two levels, the first subjective and doxastic, the second objective and veridical. The express purpose behind the objective accounts is in each case the avoidance of Gettier and Gettier related counterexamples. The lesson of Gettier and other cases may be that a certain kind of skepticism, the skepticism which claims that in any given case our justified empirical beliefs may fall short of knowledge, is unavoidable. The gap between personal, doxastic justification and veridical epistemic warrant will seem to need closing, by hook or by crook or by bootstrap, only if we fail to separate these two threats. And we will fail to separate them only if we think that the only way to ensure our grip on reality is through the identification of a justificatory procedure that will give us the ability to weed out the false from the true in our particular beliefs. The coherentist who feels the need for bootstraps shares at least that much with the foundational Cartesian: the urge for a principle the satisfaction of which by any given case of believing will show that belief to be true. Surely all the cooperation the world can provide will not make you knowledgeable if you lack the epistemic virtues embodied in the concept(s) of justification. And in this same way we can answer the question which motivated Lehrer's bootstrap in the first place, of how justification, in the light of these results, is epistemic at all. Justification is epistemic because of the intrinsically epistemic nature of what gets justified and does the justifying.

4. Undefeated Justification and the Gettier Problem introduced in . Manning's essay is given a closer look by Hans Rott's "Lehrer's Dynamic Theory of Knowledge." Rott uses the concepts and ideas borrowed from belief revision theory to elaborate Lehrer's dynamic theory of knowledge. One of the most relevant distinctions for belief revision is that between foundationalist and coherentist approaches in epistemology. The foundationalist's and the coherentist's views seem potentially complementary. Rott refers to his worked out framework that characterizes the two fundamentally different perspectives on the process of belief revision. In the current theories of belief change, belief bases are not supposed to carry reductive connotations. Basic beliefs are distinguished from derived beliefs only by the fact that they are somehow `given', either explicitly or as things that are taken for granted. Givenness is not at all supposed to imply indefeasibility here.

In "Some Remarks on the Definition of Lehrer's Ultrasystem" Gordian Haas asserts that,

according to the analysis of knowledge proposed by Lehrer, knowledge equals undefeated justified acceptance. Undefeated justification is then spelled out as coherence with every element of the ultrasystem, as Lehrer calls it. The question arises how this key-notion should be defined. Two definitions of the ultrasystem which have been proposed by Lehrer are investigated by Haas. He argues that both definitions are flawed and offers instead an alternative formal proof that is a third and simpler way to define the ultrasystem.

Jacob Rosenthal, "On Lehrer's Solution to the Gettier Problem," claims that, a true belief of a subject is knowledge iff the subject has a justification for the belief that remains a justification when in the subject's acceptance system all false beliefs are replaced with the corresponding true ones. It is not required that every justification of the subject has this property - a belief may be justified in many different ways, and it is no harm when some of them are faulty. But at least one possible justification, a justification that the subject could use if asked, must be able to survive the mentioned strong correction of the acceptance system. Then, and only then, is the true belief knowledge. In comparison with Lehrer-type proposals, this proposal for solving the Gettier problem has the advantage of involving just two belief systems, whereas the former have the advantage of using merely the concept of a justified belief (relative to a system of beliefs) and not the more demanding concept of (sufficient) reasons for a belief (relative to a system of beliefs).

Rosenthal offeres two proposals for solving the Gettier problem: first, the modified Lehrer proposal, and second, the one just mentioned. Rosenthal is not sure whether they are equivalent. But they could both be satisfactory solutions to the Gettier problem and yet not be equivalent, as long as they agree in all clear cases. There are borderline cases of belief in which one does not know whether to call the belief in question knowledge, because the intuitions are unclear or divided. No proposed criterion can be dismissed just because it decides a borderline case in this or that way. As long as it gets the clear cases right, it may count as a solution of the Gettier problem, and so there may be many nonequivalent solutions. But Rosenthal fears that sooner or later a clear example will come up for which the two proposals considered here fail, as was the fate of so many of their predecessors.

5. The section on Skepticism begins with John W. Bende's essay entitles. "Skepticism, Justification and the Trustworthiness Argument." Lehrer sees that an evaluation system dereft of principles of trustworthiness and reliability will not produce coherence that supports justification or knowledge. He, therefore, requires them as part of one's personal evaluation system and believes they carry through as truths to the ultrasystem. Knowledge requires this. But, for all his talk of loops-loops of trustworthiness, and loops of explanation-we have been hard-pressed to see how those loops are not circles in the epistemically vicious sense in which no justification is generated. The most "direct" argument for the justification of my acceptance that I am trustworthy is supposed, by Lehrer, to be the "loop of trustworthiness," but this argument is found wanting. Lehrer believes that there is good inductive support for principle, but very little in the way of a detailed argument for this has been provided. We are, once again, left with the old Pyrrhonian, and neo-Humean worry that Lehrer has begged the question against the skeptic. Skepticism is acknowledged by Lehrer as a serious and coherent threat to knowledge. This paper has been an attempt to show that Lehrer's recent theory lacks the theoretical agility to loop around the skeptic and lead us to knowledge and meta-knowledge.

In "Coherence, Knowledge and Skepticism," Peter Klein proposes that we need not "answer" or "neutralize" (in Lehrer's sense of those expressions) the academic skeptic's challenge to our acceptances. We can show that the arguments employed by such a skeptic do not succeed. Further, we can coherently not accept the proposition (T) namely, I am trustworthy (worthy of my own trust) in what I accept with the objective of accepting something just in case it is true. However abstaining from accepting T does not necessarily lead to embracing academic skepticism. Such skeptics accept that T is false. The third alternative-the pyrrhonian alternative -is to withhold accepting T. That would bring with it withholding any proposition whose defense against objections depended upon accepting T. It seems to Klein that such a view is satisfyingly coherent and, indeed, better fits Lehrer's own preference system than the model of justification he has suggested.

David A. Truncellito's "The Ultrasystem and the Conditional Fallacy," attempts to defend Lehrer's account of justification and knowledge against Shope's conditional fallacy objection, which is also close to Klein's objections. Perhaps Lehrer's description of the ultrasystem is not adequately perspicuous- for instance, he might describe the members of the acceptance system in terms of their content (that is. as 'p' rather than as 'S accepts that p'), and he might be more clear that the ultrasystem is distinct from, albeit related to, the acceptance system-which has thus led some readers to overlook the fact that utrasystem is a new system, and a theoretical system at that, rather than an actual modification to the acceptance system.

"Coherence, Circularity and Consistency: Lehrer Replies summarizes and concludes the volume. Keith Lehrer's responses by unifying the critiques and admitting alternation of his ideas are influenced by his more perspicuous critics. The volume on the whole offes critical entry to Leher's epistemology with crucial areas highlighted without overwhelming in technical detail.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer (Philosophical Studies Series)" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer (Philosophical Studies Series) ...