PHIL 106 Introduction to Theories of Knowledge
Essay Topics #1

Papers are due January 31, by midnight. They should be between 1500 and 2000 words long, which works out to between four and five pages with a font this size and one inch margins. Extensions will only be granted if I am given advance notice and only with good reason. Please consult the class handouts and website for more information on writing the paper.

1. Descartes suggests that the only way to make sense of our perceptions - including dreams, hallucinations, etc. - is to posit a another set of objects that we directly perceive.  Rather than seeing tables and chairs and so forth, what we actually see are "sense-impressions" or "mental images" of tables and chairs and so forth.  If he is right, then we never directly perceive anything and skepticism can always use this as a lever against our claims of knowledge.  Could you make the case that we do in fact directly perceive things external to our minds, or at least some things external to our minds?  What argument might you offer, and how would you respond to the problems of dreams, hallucinations, etc.?

2. Sellars argues that it is impossible for anything to serve as the sort of basic beliefs that foundationalists describe. If something were to serve as a basic belief - say, a report about my sense-impressions - then it would have to have a certain authority to it that it could only have in virtue of its relations to other pieces of knowledge, e.g. To report "this looks green to me" requires one to know what it is for something to be green, which involves knowing a host of other color concepts, etc. Is Sellars right about this? Is there anything I could know independent of all other pieces of knowledge? Offer your best argument against Sellars.

3. Foundationalists say that some version of their position has to be true if there is to be any knowledge at all because it is the only way to escape the Pyrrhonic dilemma. That is, there must be some basic self-justifying beliefs or else we will either find ourselves trapped in an infinite regress of justification or a circular regress of justification. Coherentists will argue that this is a misconstrual of the very notion of justification, which does not require a "regress-stopper" of the sort described here. Which of these two schools of thought presents the more compelling picture of justification? (You should take this as a question about the nature of justification in general, not whether you think that there are any regress stoppers or not. The matter at hand is the Pyrrhonic dilemma itself.)

4. Coherence theories stress the importance of mutual support among beliefs as a criterion of justification.  Yet critics will assert that there are some beliefs that we get by methods that do not call on other beliefs, but are "immediate" in some sense, e.g. introspection and perception.  Can the coherentist reply to this objection effectively?

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Papers are due February 26, by midnight. They should be between 1500 and 2000 words long, which works out to between four and five pages with a font this size and one inch margins. Extensions will only be granted if I am given advance notice and only with good reason. Please consult the class handouts for more information on writing the paper.

1. Critics of virtue theory in ethics have often said that the notion of virtue is either vacuous, irrelevant or derivative upon something else in an account of good or right conduct.  That is, an ethical theory must tell us some firm facts about what counts as right conduct and virtues simply do not determine such facts without begging the question in some way.  Some critics, particualrly John Stuart Mill, have said that we could speak of virtues in ethics, but their importance lay solely in their propensity to increase utility.  A similar argument might be made about virtue epistemology: the epistemic virtues discussed by Goldman, Plantinga, Zegzebski and Greco could only be significant as habits that tended to increase something else that was of epistemic interest to us, such as the instrumental reliability of our beliefs.  Would such an argument succeed in undermining the possibility of any form of virtue epistemology?

2. What is the generality problem for reliabilists?  How might a reliabilist solve it?  (Note: If you take up this topic, be sure that you do not simply rehearse the path covered by Conee and Feldman.  You may take up points they make in discussion, but you will have to expand on what is said there to effectively complete the assignment.)

3. Unger argues that to have knowledge requires that one have certainty, and to assert that one is certain of something is to be dogmatic.  Here, you may recall the Principle of Non-Dogmatism that we discussed and you may see that Unger's method involves offering plausible counterhypotheses to our commonly accepted ones.  He offers several very broad ways of attacking our knowledge claims, rather than attacks on specific claims, e.g. his discussion of the confusion over terms on pg. 51 applies not only to Descartes but to any piece of knowledge that seems self-evidently true.  Take one of the strategies he describes and argue that it fails to undercut all our knowledge of that sort.

4. Global skeptics have argued that there is no category of knowledge that survives their criticisms.  We have considered a number of challenges to this view in class, including second-order knowledge and conditional knowledge.  Do either of these categories of purported knowledge survive the attacks of the global skeptic?  (Note that this question deals with many of the same issues as question 3.  You might prefer this question if you want to make a positive case for the possibility of knowledge in the face of global skepticism, and prefer number 3 if you want to make a negative case.)
 

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Papers are due March 17. They should be between 1500 and 2000 words long, which works out to between four and five pages with a font this size and one inch margins. There will be no extensions without a medical excuse. The deluge of work at the end of the semester is not grounds for an extension, and your grade will be docked for each day that it is late. Please consult the class handouts for more information on writing the paper.

1. Brandom (echoing McDowell) suggests that the reliabilist has something right and something wrong.  They are quite right in saying that something's serving as justification is not merely its appearance in your head, but quite wrong in thinking that merely getting it right over and over again is enough.  Reliability is important because it becomes a reason for others to take us seriously in a set of social practices.  Thus, reason and justification become things that take shape only in communities of people.  This may cause some people to worry that rationality and justification will become relativistic, i.e. what counts as a good reasons will be a matter determined relative to the group of people to whom it is presented.  How can Brandom work around this?  Will this work? (Note: Those who take up this topic may want to get a little supplemental reading on Brandom from me.)

2. Tanesini introduced us to the notion of "perspective" or "standpoint" in epistemology.  This idea suggests that the judgments, assumptions and inferences people make are always tied up with their social situation, including things like gender.  If so, we could not even hope to have the kind of universal, generic sort of epistemology that Descartes wanted to offer.  At most, that would be one perspective or one type of perspective keeping its idiosyncracies (or biases) hidden.  Critics of this view have sometimes conceded that we always come to questions from some sort of perspective, but that the project in epistemology is always a social one and that we begin by looking for what is common to all (or at least as close as possible) so that people with different standpoints could effectively interact with one another.  Consider these two approaches and argue for the one you find more plausible.

3. Dreyfus and Dreyfus argue that one of the problems with traditional epistemology, especially as it manifests itself in artificial intelligence research and the philosophy of mind, is its emphasis on propositional knolwedge and formal systems of deduction.  They argue that much of our faculty of judgment and how we actually come to form beliefs is not a matter of starting with premises and deducing conclusions, but rather being embodied in various ways and developing skills with which to deal with the world.  How plausible is this?  Are there aspects of our knowledge that this is particularly bad at handling?  Can Dreyfus and Dreyfus correct this?

4. Greco raises the objection of 'epistemic responsibility' in criticzing most versions of virtue epistemology.  That is, he asserts that in claiming our beliefs are justified, we have an obligation to reflect on our reasons for having them, not simply the probability that they are true.  For instance, he would say that someone who has sudden psychic revelations and accepts them without question is epistemically irresponsible because they do not have good reasons to accept those beliefs.  Externalists such as Goldman will argue that this is an unreasonable condition to place on us because most of our beliefs are not voluntary (try to believe that 2+2=5 - don't just think that to yourself or write it down, try to believe it) and so we cannot be said to be 'responsible' for such 'choices'.  Where do you stand on this?  Does all justification have to involve explicit consideration of reasons, or can some of it just be a matter of how we come to have our beliefs?  (Note: You do not necessarily have to make this a paper about virtue epistemology since it is really about internalism and externalism, but you may take virtue epistemology up along the way.)
 
 
 
 

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