James R. Beebe, Ph.D.
Primary Area of Specialization:
Epistemology
Other Areas of Interest: Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Religion, Science
and Religion
Current Research Foci: The Nature of Skeptical Challenges, Skepticism
About the A Priori, Epistemic Contextualism and Relativism, Experimental Epistemology
Publications:
"A Priori Skepticism" (under review) [draft]
I consider the possibility of radical skepticism about a priori knowledge and argue that it should be taken as seriously as more familiar forms of skepticism. Many philosophers contend that the necessary truth of many of our a priori beliefs or the necessary falsehood of a priori skeptical hypotheses prevents skepticism about the a priori from being possible. Others assert that any form of a priori skepticism will be self-defeating. I show that each of these obstacles can be overcome and that a priori skepticism presents a formidable epistemological challenge.
I consider a variety of interpretations of the metaethical views of the average, philosophically untrained moral relativist and evaluate them in light of how well they explain certain facts about relativist behavior. I conclude that the best interpretations of ordinary relativism are based on the idea that the ethical standards of those who attribute moral praise or blame or who assess attributions of praise or blame for truth or falsity are the primary determinants of the truth values of moral judgments. Such a view allows an agent’s practical reasons to affect the truth values of moral judgments when those reasons are sufficiently salient in the attributor’s or assessor’s context. I also offer a relevant alternatives account of moral judgment that models relativistic thinking about how changes in the ethical standards in place in various contexts occur and how these changes affect the correctness of moral judgments.
Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. It is further argued that these findings, while preliminary, have important implications for recent debates within epistemology about the relationship between knowledge and action.
In this article I examine the constraints that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy in order to be used to raise significant skeptical challenges. I argue that skeptical hypotheses do not have to be logically, metaphysically or epistemically possible. They only need to depict scenarios that are subjectively indistinguishable from the actual world and must provide some indication of how subjects can believe what they do while failing to have knowledge. I also argue that skeptical challenges can be raised against a priori beliefs, even if those beliefs are necessarily true. In this way I hope to broaden our conception of the legitimate kinds of skeptical challenges that can be raised.
I provide a comprehensive, critical examination of the family of abductivist responses to skepticism and the common problems they face. Abductivists claim that explanatory considerations (e.g., simplicity, parsimony, explanatory breadth, etc.) favor belief in the external world over skeptical hypotheses involving evil demons and brains in vats. After showing how most versions of abductivism succumb fairly easily to obvious and fatal objections, I explain how rationalist versions of abductivism can avoid these difficulties. I then discuss the most pressing challenges facing abductivist appeals to the a priori and offer suggestions on how to overcome them.
[Penultimate draft] [Published article (subscription required)]
I critically examine Laurence BonJour's (1998) recent a priori solution to the problem of induction. According to BonJour, it is necessarily true that explanations involving ordinary inductive conclusions are the best explanations of inductive premises, and we can be justified in believing this fact a priori. I clarify the probability claims that form the core of his account and argue that on the most charitable interpretation of these claims, almost all of the published objections that have been raised against them are erroneous. I then argue that the most serious challenge facing BonJour’s account stems from the purported necessity of claims he makes about the relative frequencies of worlds within the total class of possible worlds.
I reconstruct and critique two arguments Laurence BonJour offers for the necessity of believing in the a priori, arguing that neither argument succeeds.
After explaining why BonJour's rationalist version of the abductivist reply to skepticism is more defensible than other versions of the view, I argue that the notion of probability he relies upon is deeply problematic, that he incorporates an implausible double-standard concerning a priori and a posteriori justification, and that his view is vulnerable to skepticism about the a priori. I suggest that some of these problems are due to idiosyncratic commitments BonJour makes and that abductivists would be better off without them. I conclude with some suggestions about how to improve BonJour’s abductivist response to skepticism.
I examine two arguments that purport to show that an externalist epistemological theory like reliabilism cannot be combined with antirealist and epistemic theories of truth. I take antirealism about truth to be the denial of the recognition-transcendence of truth, and epistemic theories to be those that identify truth with some kind of positive epistemic status. I show that, because the recognition-transcendence of reliabilist justification is significantly weaker than the recognition-transcendence required by a realist conception of truth, antirealist theories of truth that deny the strong transcendence of truth do not threaten the externalist character of reliabilism. I show that reliabilists can analyze positive epistemic status in terms of truth and truth in terms of positive epistemic by appealing to a multiplicity of positive epistemic statuses.
I explore several issues concerning reliabilism and deflationism, including the question of whether reliabilism is compatible with deflationary theories of truth, what a deflationary account of the explanatory role of truth in reliabilism might look like, and whether a deflationary epistemology is possible.
According to the Truetemp counterexample to reliabilism, an unsuspecting subject (Mr. Truetemp) receives a weird but highly reliable new perceptual faculty. Since he is unaware of both the existence and the reliability of the faculty, many find it impossible to believe the beliefs resulting from this faculty could be justified for Truetemp. I undermine the key intuition behind the counterexample by describing and generalizing from case studies of actual subjects who have received new perceptual faculties.
In this article I propose a two-part solution to the Generality Problem for reliabilism that draws upon theoretical resources in the cognitive sciences for modeling cognitive process types.
Defenders of the prosentential theory of truth claim that the content of these prosentences (e.g., 'That is true' or 'It is true') is exhausted by the content of their antecedents. They then use the notion of the inheritance of content from an antecedent to explain the various functions of the predicate '…is true'. I argue that prosentential theorists are mistaken in thinking that in order to oppose the view that '…is true' is used to ascribe a substantive truth property to propositions they need to claim that no uses of '…is true' ever attribute any property. I identify an 'attributive' use of prosentences in which reliability is implicitly attributed to a subject.
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