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Chapter Seven - Political Hinge Epistemology
- Edited by Constantine Sandis, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock
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- Book:
- Extending Hinge Epistemology
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 09 December 2022
- Print publication:
- 14 June 2022, pp 127-148
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Summary
Introduction
Political epistemology is the intersection of political philosophy and epistemology. It is where the political and the epistemological meet. Broadly speaking, political epistemology takes many of our contemporary political problems to be intimately intertwined with social epistemological problems. Political epistemologists are interested in questions like:
• How does ignorance, ideology, or propaganda undermine political belief and action?
• How should we respond to political disagreement?
• Do the epistemic qualities of political agents or their decision procedures play a role in their authority?
• What is the role of truth in political decision making?
These questions are inextricably political and epistemic. How should we approach them? By far the dominant approach is veritistic epistemology, which takes truth to be the fundamental epistemic good and evaluates belief-forming processes and evidence by way of their relation to truth. In political epistemology, then, the emphasis is placed on just how well political agents track the truth. Another important approach is virtue epistemology, which in this context looks at the way political agents might become more intellectually virtuous or how group inquiry and deliberation can be epistemically improved in order to facilitate an intellectually flourishing society.
By way of introduction, hinge epistemology is an orientation in epistemology that approaches theoretical and social epistemological problems with the guiding idea that there are certain fundamental presuppositions of worldviews or belief systems that legitimate the reason-giving relations in those systems, but which are themselves immune to rational evaluation of the kind recognized by mainstream epistemology.
For example, we routinely rely on our experiences to form beliefs or to evaluate the attitudes of other people. Hinge epistemology says that if we did not presuppose that experience is reliable, our experiences could not intelligibly be presented as reasons for belief or other sorts of doxastic attitudes. Since our commitment to the reliability of experience plays such an essential reason-giving role in our belief systems, it is a hinge proposition. Hinge propositions, in turn, are those background presuppositions that frame our worldviews, limit our inquiries and constrain what we take to be good reasons for belief. ‘That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn’, as Wittgenstein put it (OC 341).
13 - Common Sense and Ontological Commitment
- from Part II
- Edited by Rik Peels, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, René van Woudenberg, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Common-Sense Philosophy
- Published online:
- 06 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 19 November 2020, pp 287-309
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Summary
How ontologically committal is common sense? Is the common-sense philosopher beholden to a florid ontology in which all manner of objects, substances, and processes exist and are as they appear to be to common sense, or can she remain neutral on questions about the existence and nature of many things because common sense is largely non-committal? This chapter explores and tentatively evaluates three different approaches to answering these questions. The first applies standard accounts of ontological commitment to common-sense claims. This leads to the surprising and counter-intuitive result that common sense has metaphysically heavyweight commitments. The second approach emphasizes the superficiality and locality of common-sense claims. On this approach, however, common sense comes out as almost entirely non-committal. The third approach questions the seriousness of ontological commitment as such. If ontological commitment is cheap, it becomes possible both to accept the commitments of common sense at face value and to avoid the counter-intuitive consequences of heavyweight metaphysical commitments.
6 - Putnam on BIVs and radical skepticism
- from Part II - Epistemology
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- By Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh, Chris Ranalli, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
- Edited by Sanford C. Goldberg, Northwestern University, Illinois
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- Book:
- The Brain in a Vat
- Published online:
- 05 June 2016
- Print publication:
- 13 June 2016, pp 75-89
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Summary
Putnam's BIV argument
A familiar way of arguing for radical skepticism is by appeal to radical skeptical hypotheses, such as the hypothesis that one might be a brain in a vat (BIV) which is being radically, and undetectably, deceived about its environment. Roughly, the skeptical argument goes that since such skeptical hypotheses are by their nature indistinguishable from normal experience, so one cannot know that they are false. Furthermore, if one cannot know that they are false, then it follows that one can't know much of what one believes, most of which is inconsistent with radical skeptical hypotheses.
This last step will almost certainly require some sort of closure-style principle, whereby knowledge is closed under known entailments. Thus, if one does have knowledge of the ‘everyday’ propositions which one takes oneself to know (e.g. that one has hands), and of the fact that these propositions entail the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses (e.g. the BIV hypothesis, because BIVs don't have hands), then one could come to know that one is not a BIV. Conversely, insofar as one grants that it is impossible to know that one is not a BIV, then it follows that one cannot know the everyday propositions which are known to be inconsistent with the BIV hypothesis either.
There are many ways of responding to radical skepticism of this form, which we will refer to as BIV skepticism. One might deny the relevant closure principle, for example, or one might put forward an epistemology according to which one could know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, and so on. On the face of it, Hilary Putnam's (1981b) famous argument against BIV skepticism would appear to be a variation on this last anti-skeptical strategy, in that he also seems to be, effectively, claiming that one can know that one is not a BIV.
The parallels between these two anti-skeptical approaches are superficial, however, and the differences significant. In particular, Putnam's overarching goal is not to make the epistemological claim that such anti-skeptical knowledge is possible, but rather to motivate the semantic claim that one cannot truly think the thought that one is a BIV. But these claims are logically distinct, in both directions. That one can know the denial of the BIV hypothesis is obviously consistent with the possibility that one can truly think the thought that one is a BIV.