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Erkenn (2013) 78:13171336
DOI 10.1007/s10670-012-9422-3
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Brian Ball Michael Blome-Tillmann
Received: 9 February 2012 / Accepted: 5 December 2012 / Published online: 29 December 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract Stewart Cohens New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justication. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman and Ernest Sosa, involves distinguishing different notions of justication. Juan Comesaa has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaas proposal suffers serious difculties from the perspective of the philosophy of language. More specically, we show that the two readings of sentences involving the word justied which are required for Comesaas 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 difculty by appeal to a complication of the theory involving counterfactuals, and conclude the paper by sketching our own preferred solution to Cohens New Evil Demon.
1 Indexical Reliabilism
Cohens (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justication. Here is the argument
Thanks to two anonymous referees for this journal. The paper is fully collaborative; authors are listed alphabetically.
B. Ball
Faculty of Philosophy, St Annes College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]
M. Blome-Tillmann (&)
Department of Philosophy, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
Indexical Reliabilism and the New Evil Demon
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1318 B. Ball, M. Blome-Tillmann
(we let NED denote the New Evil Demon Thesis, SR the thesis of Standard Reliabilism, and Biv the brain in a vat in the closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat)1:
The New Evil Demon Argument:
(NED) Bivs beliefs are as justied as our own beliefs. A
(1) Our beliefs are justied. A
(2) Bivs beliefs are justied. From NED, 1
(SR) xs belief that p is justied iff it was produced by a reliable process. A
(3) Bivs beliefs were produced by a reliable process.2 From 2, SR
The argument is valid, but its conclusion(3)is clearly false. Thus, we have to reject at least one...