Bob Beddor
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PH4210/PH6211:  Naturalism in Epistemology

 Course Overview:    
Many philosophers have been attracted to naturalism – roughly, the idea that everything that exists can be explained using the vocabulary and/or methods of the natural sciences. While many thinkers have found naturalism appealing, many others have expressed serious doubts about the naturalistic project. 

Historically, debates over naturalism have waged most fiercely in philosophy of mind and metaethics. But epistemology raises equally pressing questions for naturalists. This course will aim to get clear on these questions. In particular, we will examine what it means to develop a naturalistic epistemology, and we will consider whether the project of developing such an epistemology is well-motivated. We will also explore in depth some specific examples of naturalistically oriented accounts of knowledge and justification, with particular emphasis on reliabilist theories. Other topics include the role of the experimental methods in epistemology, epistemic expressivism as a form of naturalism, and the viability of the naturalistic program in philosophy more generally.



                                                                         Schedule

Unit 1:  Preliminaries
 
Week 1 – Introduction:  What is Naturalism? ​(handout)


Week 2 - Is Naturalized Epistemology a Branch of Psychology?  ​(handout)
 
Required Reading: 
  • Quine, "Epistemology Naturalized"
  • Kim, “What is Naturalized Epistemology?” 
 
Unit 2:  Metaphysical Naturalism in Epistemology


Week 3 - Reliabilism as Naturalized Epistemology (handout)
 
Required Reading:
  • Goldman, "What is Justified Belief?”
 
Further Reading:
  • Comesaña, “Reliabilism”
  • Goldman and Beddor, "Reliabilist Epistemology"

Week 4 – Challenges to Reliabilism
 
Required Readings:
  • Cohen, “Justification and Truth”
  • Conee and Feldman, “The Generality Problem for Reliabilism”

Further Reading:
  • Comesaña, “The Diagonal and the Demon”

Week 5 – Further Challenges to Reliabilism (handout)
 
Required Reading: 
  • Weisberg, “The Bootstrapping Problem

Further Reading:
  • Beddor, "Process Reliabilism's Troubles with Defeat"
  • Week 6 – Is Knowledge a Natural Kind?

Required Reading:
  • Millikan, “Naturalistic Reflections on Knowledge”
  • Kornblith, Knowledge and its Place in Nature (selections)


Unit 3:  Epistemic Expressivism as Naturalized Epistemology
Week 7  – Normative Expressivism Introduced

Required Reading:
  • Schroeder, Noncognitivism in Ethics, Chapters 1 & 4.
  • Feldman, Epistemology, Chp.5, section II “Truth Tracking” (pp.86-90) 
     
Week 8 – Expressivism and the Frege-Geach Problem

Required Reading:
Schroeder, Noncognitivism in Ethics, Chps. 3 & 6

Recommend Readings:
  • - Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Chapter 5 (“Normative Logic”)
     ​
Week 9 – Epistemic Expressivism (handout)
 
Required Reading: 
  • Chrisman, “From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism”
  • Greco, “Epistemological Open Questions”
     
Recommend Readings:
  • Field, “Epistemology without Metaphysics”

Week 10 -
Is Epistemic Expressivism Incompatible With Inquiry? (handout)

Required Reading:
  • Lynch, “Truth, Value, and Epistemic Expressivism”

Further Reading:
  • Carter and Chrisman, “Is Epistemic Expressivism Incompatible with Inquiry?”
  • Cuneo, The Normative Web (selections)

Unit 4: 
Methodological Naturalism in Epistemology: The Experimental Method
 
Week 11 - Experimental Work on Variations in Intuitions ​(handout)

Required Reading:
  • Weinberg et al., “Normativity and Intuitions”
  • J. Nagel et al., “Lay Denial of Knowledge for Justified True Beliefs”

Recommended Reading:
    • Machery et al., “Gettier Across Cultures”

    Week 12 - What Good are Intuitions?

    Required Reading:
    • Nado, “Why Intuition?”
    • Goldman, “Philosophical Naturalism and Intuitional Methodology”

    Recommended Reading:
    • J. Nagel, “Epistemic Intuitions”
    • Sosa, “Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition”

    Week 13 - What Good are Intuitions? (Continued)

    Required Reading:
    • J. Nagel, “Intuitions and Experiments:  A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology”
    • Brown, “Intuitions, Evidence, and Hopefulness”
     



     


     

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