Epistemic Entitlement: The Right to Believe

ISBN-13: 9781137414977 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 206 str.

Hannes Ole Matthiessen

Opis

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.

Spis treści

1. Introduction 2. The Right to Believe 3. The Social Character of Entitlements 4. A Default and Challenge-Model of Perceptual Entitlement 5. Perceptual Knowledge 6. Perceptual Knowledge and the First Person Perspective 7. Concluding Remarks Bibliography Index

O autorze

Hannes Ole Matthiessen has studied and taught the subject of philosophy in Frankfurt am Main, Fribourg and Berlin. His interests include epistemology, the philosophy of perception and Early Modern Philosophy. He is currently working on Thomas Reid's geometry of visibles.