Content area

Abstract

Stewart Cohen's New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman and Ernest Sosa, involves distinguishing different notions of justification. Juan Comesaña has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaña's proposal suffers serious difficulties from the perspective of the philosophy of language. More specifically, we show that the two readings of sentences involving the word 'justified' which are required for Comesaña's solution to the problem are not recoverable within the two-dimensional framework of Robert Stalnaker to which he appeals. We then consider, and reject, an attempt to overcome this difficulty by appeal to a complication of the theory involving counterfactuals, and conclude the paper by sketching our own preferred solution to Cohen's New Evil Demon.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Details

Title
Indexical Reliabilism and the New Evil Demon
Author
Ball, Brian; Blome-tillmann, Michael
Pages
1317-1336
Publication year
2013
Publication date
Dec 2013
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
ISSN
01650106
e-ISSN
15728420
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1469709485
Copyright
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013