phlogma

Notes on:
Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
Quine begins,
Kant’s cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz’s distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. Leibniz spoke of the truths of reason as true in all possible worlds. Picturesqueness […]

Notes on:
Jonathan Dancy, “A Defense of Coherence”
208
The plurality objection stemming from Quine’s underdetermination of theory by evidence suggests that there may be competing coherent systems describing the world (since any system is allowed to reject some recalcitrant data). But if so, no system can be said to be true. Coherentists, such as Bradley, want to […]

Notes on:
Matthias Steup, “A Defense of Internalism”
310
Steup takes “internalism to be the view that J-factors [things that make beliefs justified or not] must be directly recognizable, that is recognizable on reflection.” The idea is that if one has available now, or could deduce from what is available now, information to justify a belief then one […]

Certain analogies between moral and epistemological problems

Whose problem is the problem of induction?

[Joel] Feinberg suggested having interests “presupposes at least rudimentary cognitive equipment” and that plants and trees have “no conscious wants or goals of their own.” So, “there is no possibility of kind or cruel treatment of trees.” [“The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations”]
The exclusion of plants from the realm of interest-capable entities […]