Indexical Reliabilism and the New Evil Demon

Stewart Cohen’s (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman (1988) and Ernest Sosa (1993; 2001), involves distinguishing different notions of justification. Juan Comesaña (2002; 2010) has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaña’s proposal, suffers serious difficulties from the perspective of the philosophy of language. More specifically, we show that the two readings of sentences involving the word ‘justified’ which are required for Comesaña’s solution to the problem are not recoverable within the two-dimensional framework of Robert Stalnaker (1999) to which he appeals. We then consider, and reject, an attempt to overcome this difficulty by appeal to a complication of the theory involving counterfactuals, and conclude the paper by sketching our own preferred solution to Cohen’s New Evil Demon. 1. Indexical Reliabilism Stewart Cohen’s (1984) New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. Here is the argument (we let ‘NED’ denote the New Evil Demon Thesis, ‘SR’ the thesis of Standard Reliabilism, and ‘Biv’ the brain in a vat in the closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat): * Thanks to .... The paper is fully collaborative; authors are listed alphabetically. 1 This way of introducing the name ‘Biv’ commits us to the Limit Assumption (Lewis 1973, pp. 19-21) that there is exactly one closest world to actuality in which there is a brain in a vat. This assumption could be avoided at some