- This event has passed.
Epistemology Seminar: Marvin on Pluralism
20th June 2018 @ 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Event Navigation
According to one of the most influential theories of truth – alethic-pluralism – what makes a belief or a proposition true can vary depending on the domain of inquiry. Drawing inspiration from alethic-pluralists, this paper proposes a novel pluralist theory of justification. According to this theory – I call it The Functionalist Theory of Justification – there is more than one way for a belief to be justified. More specifically, I defend the view that the property that makes a belief justified can vary depending on our epistemic environment. This pluralist picture of justification, I argue, is attractive for a number of reasons: (i) it promises an attractive way out of a difficult dilemma faced by its monist counterparts, (ii) it accommodates an important intuition about certain comparative cases, and (iii) it offers interesting new solutions to a number of well-known epistemic puzzles including the lottery-paradox, the preface paradox, and various puzzles involving statistical evidence.