Philosophy 502
Selected Topics in the Theory of Knowledge
Fall 2005

Text:   Knowledge and Lotteries by John Hawthorne

Other readings will be put on reserve in the departmental library or will be made available electronically.

Topic: Hawthorne’s book raises a challenging epistemological puzzle: people are inclined to credit themselves with knowing some ordinary propositions yet to deny knowing some of the logical consequences of these ordinary propositions. There seem to be a limited number of possible responses: either a) they do not know the ordinary propositions they think they know; b) they do know the propositions they think they don’t know; or c) they do know what they think they know and they don’t know what they think they don’t know. These options seem to amount to (a) skepticism, (b) dogmatism, and (c) the denial of an intuitively plausible doctrine that has been called “closure.” Each option has its problems. Contextualism is a recently popular doctrine that seems to avoid the difficulties of (a), (b), and (c). Hawthorne, as well as several other recent writers, reject contextualism and instead defend “subject sensitive invariantism.” This implies that there is a pragmatic element in knowledge. Thinking through this puzzle and the various responses requires addressing a wide range of issues in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of language. In this course, we will work through Hawthorne’s book and also read important articles on the issues raised in it. Our emphasis will be the epistemological rather than the philosophy of language issues raised by the puzzle.

Here is a list of the topics we’ll cover:

1. Closure

2. Contextualism

3. Knowledge and the norm of assertion

4. Knowledge and practical reasoning

5. Skeptical resolutions of the puzzle

6. Dogmatic resolutions of the puzzle

7. Subject sensitive invariantism

Requirements:
1) 8 “weeklies”: Weeklies are 1-2 page discussions of the week’s readings. They need not be fully developed critical papers. They should be more than random notes taken while doing the reading. They should identify an issue (or issues) that merit discussion during the seminar meeting. Weeklies should be emailed to me (or put in my mailbox) by 1:00PM on the Friday before the seminar in which they will be discussed. (Submitting a weekly late is scarcely better than not submitting one at all.) While formal seminar presentations will not be required, students will routinely be asked to present to the rest of the class the ideas developed in their weeklies. I will try to send out each week on Tuesday some questions and things to think about for the following week’s seminar.

2) A term paper: The paper can be on any of the topics discussed during the semester. If all goes well, weeklies will grow into term papers. There is no specific page requirement. 10-15 pages is probably a reasonable target. Discuss topics with me when you decide about them. A draft of the paper should be turned in just before the end of classes and the final version will be due soon after classes end. Exact dates will be announced later.

3) Participation in class discussion: I do not plan to come in and lecture for 3 hours each week. I will prepare material, based in part on the weeklies, but class meetings will largely be discussions in which we all participate.

Website

There is a website for this course. Here’s the link:

http://www.ling.rochester.edu/~feldman/philosophy502/index.html

I will post some reading lists there, links to papers, and maybe some other stuff.