Intellectual Assurance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism
Brett Coppenger and Michael Bergmann
Abstract
This volume presents a dozen essays by prominent contemporary epistemologists providing a critical evaluation of traditional epistemic internalism, an old-fashioned view that has recently been revitalized for the 21st century by philosophers such as Laurence BonJour and Richard Fumerton. Unlike competing versions of internalism, the guiding principle of traditional internalism is not to accommodate our commonsense nonskeptical views about the rationality of our ordinary beliefs. Instead, it emphasizes the need for philosophical or intellectual assurance—on the basis of evidence that can withst ... More
This volume presents a dozen essays by prominent contemporary epistemologists providing a critical evaluation of traditional epistemic internalism, an old-fashioned view that has recently been revitalized for the 21st century by philosophers such as Laurence BonJour and Richard Fumerton. Unlike competing versions of internalism, the guiding principle of traditional internalism is not to accommodate our commonsense nonskeptical views about the rationality of our ordinary beliefs. Instead, it emphasizes the need for philosophical or intellectual assurance—on the basis of evidence that can withstand the strongest skeptical challenges—that our ordinary beliefs (perceptual and otherwise) are true. Traditional internalists standardly try to achieve such assurance by relying solely on direct acquaintance with the subject matter of foundational beliefs and on deductive certainty in making inferences from them. The focus of these essays is on what traditional internalism has to say about the nature of non-inferentially justified belief, the nature of inferentially justified belief, and the best way to respond to skepticism. The result is a collection of probing objections to traditional internalism, pushing its proponents to provide creative new defenses if they want this old-fashioned view to survive in the modern world.
Keywords:
Richard Fumerton,
epistemology,
internalism,
externalism,
inferential justification,
non-inferential justification,
assurance,
skepticism,
acquaintance,
foundationalism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198719632 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719632.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Brett Coppenger, editor
Tuskegee University
Michael Bergmann, editor
Purdue University
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