Epistemic entitlement : the right to believe / Hannes Ole Matthiessen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Matthiessen, Hannes Ole, 1979- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Knowledge, Theory of.

Belief and doubt.

Physical Description:

vii, 206 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Summary:

In Epistemic Entitlement: The Right to Believe Hannes Ole Matthiessen develops a social externalist account of epistemic entitlement and perceptual knowledge. The basic idea is that positive epistemic status should be understood as a specific kind of epistemic right, that is a right to believe. Since rights have consequences for how others are required to treat the bearer of the right, they have to be publicly accessible. The author therefore suggests that epistemic entitlement can plausibly be conceptualized as a status that is grounded in a publicly observable perceptual situation rather than in a perceptual experience, as current theories of epistemic entitlement state. It is then argued that such a social externalist account of entitlement, in which the perceiver's epistemic perspective becomes relevant only in the exceptional case where an entitlement is challenged, can nevertheless do justice to our central intuitions about first-personal epistemic phenomenology. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Right to Believe 9

1.1 Personal and doxastic epistemic status 10

1.2 Epistemic entitlement: Recent conceptions 19

1.3 The standard account of epistemic entitlement 51

1.4 Summary 57

2 The Social Character of Entitlements 59

2.1 Entitlements and accessibility 59

2.2 An alternative: The social externalist account 66

2.3 Internalism and externalism in the social externalist account 71

2.4 Two types of entitlement? 77

3 A Default and Challenge Model of Perceptual Entitlement 85

3.1 Defeasible inferences, concepts and entitlements 86

3.2 Entitlements by default and public accessibility 116

3.3 Default conditions for perceptual entitlement 118

3.4 Challenge conditions 131

4 Perceptual Knowledge 134

4.1 Degrees of entitlement 135

4.2 Contingency 140

4.3 The analysis problem again 143

4.4 Externalism and internalism 144

4.5 Social externalism 152

5 Perceptual Knowledge and the First-Person Perspective 159

5.1 Austin's and McDowell's insights 160

5.2 The social externalist account and the first-person perspective 167

5.3 Austin's and McDowell's insights revisited 174

6 Concluding Remarks 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781137414977

1137414979

OCLC:

881655944

Publisher Number:

99961080715