Abstract:This paper aims for a more robust epistemological disjunctivism (ED) by offering on its behalf a new and better response to the 'new evil genius' problem. The first section articulates the 'new evil genius challenge' (NEG challenge) to ED, specifying its two components: the 'first-order' and 'diagnostic' problems for ED.The first-order problem challenges proponents of ED to offer some understanding of the intuition behind the thought that your radically deceived duplicate is no less justified than you are for adopting her perceptual beliefs. In the second section, Iargue that blamelessness explanations are inadequate to the task and offer better explanations in their place-that of 'trait-level virtue' and 'reasonability'. The diagnostic problem challenges proponents of ED to explain why it is that classical internalists disagree with them about how to interpret new evil genius considerations. The proponent of ED owes some error theory. I engage this problem in the third section, arguing that classical internalists are misled to overlook disjunctivist interpretations of new evil genius thinking owing to a mistaken commitment to a kind of 'vindicatory' explanation of proper perceptual belief.

This paper explores religious belief in connection with epistemological disjunctivism. It applies recent advances in epistemological disjunctivism to the religious case for displaying an attractive model of specifically Christian religious belief. What results is a heretofore unoccupied position in religious epistemology-a view I call 'religious epistemological disjunctivism' (RED). My general argument is that RED furnishes superior explanations for the sort of 'grasp of the truth' which should undergird 'matured Christian conviction' of religious propositions. To this end I first display the more familiar perceptual epistemological disjunctivism (PED), contrasting it with both externalist and classically internalist views. This prepares the way for introducing RED with its own distinctive factive mental state operator-pneuming that p. In this second section I present the RED model, not failing to address a potential problem concerning religious disagreement. I also clarify RED's distinctive internalist aspect, describing how it comports with con-temporary internalist thinking in epistemology. I then move in section three to criticize externalist and classical internalist views, showing where they fail to make proper sense of the sort of knowing which should ground mature Christian conviction. Specifically, I highlight three intuitions which I think any theory of religious belief should capture: what I call the caseclosed intuition, the good believer intuition, and the Plantingian platitude. This is all to set up for the final section where I argue that RED is superior for understanding proper religious believing-capturing the aforementioned intuitions. ! 1! ! 2! 2.0 Perceptual Epistemological Disjunctivism Before displaying the disjunctivist model for religious knowledge and exploring its implications for matured and rationally-based Christian conviction, it'd be helpful to first display the more familiar perceptual epistemological disjunctivism (or PED), contrasting it sharply with externalist and classical internalist perspectives.PED 3 holds that in the best cases of perceptual knowledge that p, one's knowledge is in virtue of one's belief that p enjoying reflectively accessible and factive rational support. 4 On the standard view, this support is furnished by one's seeing that p to be the case. 5 So for instance take Madison who in standard epistemic conditions enjoys a veridical perception of a moose and believes and comes to know that there's a moose. This is our 'good' case. Compare Madison with her non-factive mental state duplicate Kaylie who -to keep things simple -is the victim of some radical deception plot (she's a brain in a vat, say).Kaylie undergoes a matching experience as of a moose -a mere seeming seeing 6 of a moose -which is introspectively indistinguishable from Madison's veridical experience. Of course Kaylie is not in position to know that there's a moose -contrary to what she thinks -least because there's no moose there to be seen. This is our corresponding 'bad case'.As PED views ...

Epistemological disjunctivism says that one can know that p on the rational basis of one's seeing that p. The basis problem for disjunctivism says that that can't be since seeing that p entails knowing that p on account of simply being the way in which one knows that p.

The paper highlights how a popular version of epistemological disjunctivism (Pritchard 2012, 2016) labors under a kind of ‘internalist challenge’—a challenge that seems to have gone largely unacknowledged by disjunctivists. This is the challenge to vindicate the supposed ‘internalist insight’ that disjunctivists claim their view does well to protect (Littlejohn forthcoming 2015). The paper argues that if we advance disjunctivism within a context that recognizes a distinction between merely functional and judgmental belief (Sosa 2015), we get a view that easily overcomes the internalist challenge.

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