An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional (firstorder) epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory (e.g., Olson 2011, Reasons for belief; cf., Streumer 2012, J Philos 110:1–25) and epistemic relativism (e.g., MacFarlane 2005, Oxford Stud Epistemol 1:197–233; 2011; 2014, Assessment sensitivity: Relative truth an...

one of the most controversial problems in western epistemology is the division of propositions into analytic and synthetic. this division drew the attention of many proponents and opponents and faced many objections. one the most important objections which if valid enough, can destroy the basis of this division and resulting epistemological consequences is the of relativity of both analytic as ...

The weak epistemic modal operators might, possible, likely, and probable display embedding behaviors and scope interactions that are interestingly different from their logically stronger counterparts must and certain. I present two problematic sets of facts about these operators which have not received much attention in the literature. The first is that weak epistemic modals embed freely under ...

The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane's assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to context-dependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom-up, building block, model, while expressivism is part...

This paper is about a class of conditionals that Anthony Gillies (ms) has dubbed ‘open indicatives’, that is, indicative conditionals “whose antecedents are consistent with our picture of the world” (1). I believe that what I say here can eventually be extended to all indicative conditionals, but indicatives that aren’t open raise special problems, so I’ll set them aside for today. In [auth 200...

Many prominent arguments for epistemic relativism take their departure from the observation that a certain kind of symmetry is present in particular empirical cases. In this paper, we seek to attain further clarity about at issue, and sort which such can reasonably be taken give rise. The need an investigation made apparent, believe, by fact anti-relativist as advanced Boghossian his influentia...

Frege famously held that each act of utterance expresses a complete thought, and that each thought is true or false absolutely. Until a few years ago, analytical philosophers have sided with their most venerable ancestor: traditionally, relativism about truth has been dismissed as an extravagant and confused piece of semantic nonsense. But in recent times several writers have proposed relativis...

Abstract Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent disagreement between members different communities motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge the coherence relativism. While many acknowledge this problem, attempts solve it so far have been wanting. In response, either give up claim that there can be or end ...