Recent Work on Skepticism in Epistemology

Abstract

This paper critically surveys 20 years of recent work on radical skepticism. It focuses on three key issues. First, it starts by exploring how philosophers have recently challenged our understanding of radical skeptical arguments. It then unpacks and critically evaluates some influential reactions to radical skepticism: structuralism, knowledge-first epistemology, epistemological disjunctivism, and hinge epistemology. Third, it explores some novel developments of pragmatism, like pragmatic skepticism, gauges its anti-skeptical import, and reflects on the ways in which radical skeptical epistemology and ethics might meet.

The consequences of seeing imagination as a dual‐process virtue

“…3 E.g., Williamson 2007Williamson , 2016Kind 2016Kind , 2018Balcerak Jackson 2018;Myers 2021;Williams 2021. 4 E.g., Axtell 1997Axtell , 2017Samuelson and Church 2015;Mi and Ryan 2020;Ohlhorst 2022. 5 to a fast and automatic type of cognition that occurs below the level of conscious awareness.…”

“…In a recent article on dual‐process virtue epistemology, Jakob Ohlhorst (2022) presents a complementary view of Type 1 and Type 2 virtues (modeled on reliabilist and responsibilist virtues, as well as on Type 1 and Type 2 processing). Instead of looking for a normative goal that unites them, such as producing true beliefs (e.g., Axtell 1997; Greco 2010; Sosa 2015), he advocates for unification based on their equal but complementary roles in a single organism's cognitive apparatus.…”

Talk-Story: Performing an Indigenous Research Methodology With Hesitant Non-Indigenous Participants to Learn Previously Silenced Knowledge

“…Fine (1993), suggests that most fieldwork research findings would fall short. Before Scott (2018) published a sociology of nothing, Fuller’s (1988, 1996) suggestion that misrepresentation of authentic worldviews may occur because participants cannot express experiencing the mundane or that only expert sociologists can identify the injustices hidden in everyday banality, was plausible. However, that proposition is no longer defensible.…”

“…Only selected codes and themes gathered from those who choose or are chosen for representation are ever heard, we never learn that participants may presuppose or experience misrepresentation. Indeed, Fuller (1988, 1996) suggests that researchers are only accountable to the elite in their discipline; they are answerable only to the people who publish their findings, with no relational accountability to the participants in their studies. Hence, behind Stern’s (1998) methodological simplicity, there are complex questions regarding who should trust whom, why, and who should have the power to represent participant voices and epistemologies.…”