All Embracing But Underwhelming…

James van Cleve, ‘Why Coherence is not Enough: A Defense of Moderate Foundationalism’ in ‘Contemporary Debates in Epistemology,’ eds. Steup, Matthias and Sosa, Ernest, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2005

p. 169 - Coherence is not denied by foundationalists; they simply think that there should be some basic beliefs before coherence amplifies things.

p. 174 - Argues Elgin’s case study of the three witnesses is a mischaracterisation of what we should be looking at. Suggests a variant of Jon’s ‘Dead blackbird’ story.

‘In other words, it is not identity or even equivalence of content, but rather something like the relation [C. I. ] Lewis calls congruence: a matter of each item being more probable given the rest than it is on its own.’

C. A. J. Coady, ‘Speaking of Ghosts’ in ‘Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimensions of Knowledge,’ editor: Frederick F. Schmitt, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Maryland, 1994

p. 77 - Summary of his position about the autonomous knower from the Testimony book: ‘…does the autonomous knower accept testimony because he has independently ascertained the reliability of this particular witness, or the reliability of some class of cognitive agents to which the witness belongs (and, if so, which class), or is it merely that he knows he can do one or the other of these checks if need be?’

p. 78 - ‘…I argue in Testimony, the existence of a common language in which reports are made and accepted or rejected already carries with it a commitment to some degree of unmediated acceptance of testimony on the ground floor of our cognitive endeavours.’

p. 80 - Uses the term ‘depositions’ in regard to testimonial utterances.

p. 82-5 - The analogy of the depositions of spirit land inhabitants vs. experts (i.e. pespeakers who occupy different worlds, in some respect, to hearers). You could also run a similar, I think (and Coady later alludes to), case study in respect to a foreign speaker telling you about their homeland.

p. 84-5 - Runs a similar line as above but now with respect to extraterrestials who might well lie to us about their homeworld. They could make us trust them by being trusthful about oour world but they might still be deceitful about theirs.

‘Spies in a foreign land during wartime will need, for both semantic and prudential reasons, to speak many truths about the world they share with the foreigners, but this leaves them free to lie dramatically about their  homeland.’

p. 87 - We can test the assertions of these aliens [as well we do with spies to discover them; actually, this is an important point he does not seem to make].

Philip Kitcher, ‘Contrasting Conceptions of Social Epistemology’ in ‘Socializing Epistemology: The Social Dimensions of Knowledge,’ editor: Frederick F. Schmitt, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Maryland, 1994

p. 111 - Internalism as instrumentalism[; when we trust others it is because we have 'calibrated them']

p. 112 - The Two Problems on Reductionism: ‘…we employ sources for whom comparisons with the individualistic basis are far too slender to support the extensive use we make of them … [and] there may be no propositions that we can know without being epistemically dependent on others.’

p. 113 - ‘In consequence, the exact pointy at which epistemology becomes social is in the appreciation of the possibility that whether or not a subject is justified (or whether or not a belief-forming process counts as reliable in the pertinent sense) turns on the properties of other people or of the group to which the subject belongs.’

Minimal social epistemology:

‘(1) Individuals are the primary subjects of knowledge. To ascribe knowledge to a community is to make an assertion about the epistemic states of members of the community. [Individualistic assumption]
(2) X knows that p if and only if (a)  X believes that p and (b) p and (c)  X’s belief that p was formed by a reliable process.
(3) The reliability of the process that produces X’s belief that p depends on the properties and actions of agents other than X.’

p. 114 - Social epistemology should be concerned with the organisation of the community of knowers and the processes that occur in and amongst such communities that promote both collective and the individual acquisition of true [his term] belief.
There is a question of how the balance of consensus application will work; communities could end up being two strict or two lenient, so how do we get the right level?

p. 116 - Doesn’t really favour getting rid of individualism entirely from social epistemology (this his weak view could really be considered as a mixed-view).

p. 117 - Proposes (but does not, I think, support) a modified version of social epistemology that challengers (1):

‘…starting with an account of community knowledge, the social epistemologist proposes that items of individual belief count as knowledge just in case, first, the propositions believed are members of the set known in the community and, second, the processes that underlie the formation of the beliefs are of types approved as knowledge-generating within the community.’

p. 126-7 - On the Duhem-Quine Thesis; this thesis does not license us to say that the ‘language/story’ of commonsense is as good as the ‘language/story’ of nonsense (as some theorists might have us believe).