1st Edition
Epistemic Dilemmas New Arguments, New Angles
This book features original essays by leading epistemologists that address questions related to epistemic dilemmas from a variety of new, sometimes unexpected, angles.
It seems plausible that there can be "no win" moral situations in which no matter what one does one fails some moral obligation. Is there an epistemic analog to moral dilemmas? Are there epistemically dilemmic situations—situations in which we are doomed to violate an epistemic requirement? If there are, when exactly do they arise and what can we learn from them? The contributors to this volume cover a wide variety of positions on epistemic dilemmas. The coverage ranges from discussions of the nature of epistemic dilemmas to arguments that there are no such things to suggestions for how to resolve (or at least live with) epistemic dilemmas to proposals for how thinking about epistemic dilemmas can be used to inform theorizing in other areas of epistemology.
Epistemic Dilemmas will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in epistemology working on the nature of justification and evidential support, higher-order requirements, or suspension of judgment.
Introductory Note
Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford and Matthias Steup
Part I: What are Epistemic Dilemmas? Do they exist?
1. Rational Dilemmas and their Place in the Bigger Picture
Graham Priest
2. Higher-Order Evidence and the Normativity of Logic
Mattias Skipper
3. Collateral Conflicts and Epistemic Norms
J. Adam Carter
4. Epistemic Dilemma and Epistemic Conflict
Verena Wagner
5. Epistemic Dilemmas, Epistemic Quasi-Dilemmas, and Quasi-Epistemic Dilemmas
Scott Stapleford and Kevin McCain
6. Defeaters, Higher-Order Evidence, and Epistemic Dilemmas
Matthias Steup
7. Scepticism about Epistemic Dilemmas
Mona Simion
8. When in Doubt, Withhold: A Defense of Two Grounds of Rational Withholding
A.K. Flowerree
9. Epistemic Dilemmas Denied
Earl Conee
Part II: No Easy Way Out? Facing Epistemic Dilemmas
10. Embracing Epistemic Dilemmas
David Christensen
11. Knowledge-First Evidentialism and the Dilemmas of Self-Impact
Eyal Tal and Paul Silva Jr.
12. Stereotypes, Epistemic Dilemmas and Epistemic Dispositions
Katherine Puddifoot
13. Dilemmas, Disagreement, and Dualism
Liz Jackson
14. Normative Indeterminacy in the Epistemic Domain
Nick Leonard and Fabrizio Cariani
15. Who’s Afraid of Epistemic Dilemmas?
Nick Hughes
Biography
Kevin McCain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His authored works include: Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification (Routledge, 2014), The Nature of Scientific Knowledge: An Explanatory Approach (2016), (with Kostas Kampourakis) Uncertainty: How It Makes Science Advance (2019), and Epistemology: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments (Routledge, 2021). His edited works include: (with Ted Poston) Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation (2017), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism (2018), (with Ted Poston) The Mystery of Skepticism: New Explorations (2018), (with Kostas Kampourakis) What is Scientific Knowledge? An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology of Science (Routledge, 2019), and (with Scott Stapleford) Epistemic Duties: New Arguments, New Angles (Routledge, 2020).
Scott Stapleford is Professor of Philosophy at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada. He is the author of Kant’s Transcendental Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason (2008), coauthor (with Lorne Falkenstein and Molly Kao) of Logic Works: A Rigorous Introduction to Formal Logic (Routledge, 2022), coauthor (with Tyron Goldschmidt) of Berkeley’s Principles: Expanded and Explained (Routledge, 2016) and Hume’s Enquiry: Expanded and Explained (Routledge, 2021), coeditor (with Kevin McCain) of Epistemic Duties: New Arguments, New Angles (Routledge, 2020), and co-translator and coeditor (with Courtney D. Fugate and Curtis Sommerlatte) of Tetens’s Writings on Method, Language, and Anthropology (2021).
Matthias Steup received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1985. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (1996) and numerous articles in epistemology. He is the editor of Knowledge, Truth and Duty (2001) and co-editor of Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (2005, 2014) and A Companion to Epistemology (2010).
