1st Edition
New Perspectives on Epistemic Closure
This volume brings together new research on the topic of epistemic closure from both leading philosophers and emerging voices in epistemology. It connects epistemic closure principles to related themes in epistemology such as scepticism, dogmatism, evidentialism, epistemic logic, and modal epistemology.
Epistemic closure is of central importance to contemporary epistemology, so much so that no epistemology is complete without an answer to the question of where it stands on the issue. The chapters in this book touch on the central themes of closure and transmission and argue for and against different closure and transmission principles. The contributors address issues such as whether knowledge and justification are closed under deductive entailment; whether scepticism can be properly contained by restricting closure principles; whether justification for a set of premises can fail to transmit across inference to a conclusion; Moore’s Paradox; and which theories of knowledge—contextualism, contrastivism, or relevant alternatives epistemology—emerge from denying closure.
New Perspectives on Epistemic Closure will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology.
Introduction Matthew Jope and Duncan Pritchard
1. Intuitive Closure, Transmission Failure, and Doxastic Justification Matthew Jope
2. Modest Foundations for Perceptual Knowledge Krista Lawlor
3. Closure, Warrant Transmission, and Defeat Mona Simion
4. Modal Epistemology and the Logic of Counterfactuals Timothy Williamson
5. The Skeptical Paradox and the Generality of Closure (and other principles) Yuval Avnur
6. Dogma, Defeat, and Transmission Christoph Kelp
7. In Defence of Closure Duncan Pritchard
8. No Spindly Brown Grass: Knowledge, Closure, and Subjective Distinguishability Genia Schönbaumsfeld
9. Underdetermination and Closure: Thoughts on Two Sceptical Arguments Martin Smith
10. Closure and Transmission Again Crispin Wright
Biography
Matthew Jope is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His main area of research is epistemology, with a focus on closure, scepticism, trust, and risk. Previously, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Barcelona and the University of Glasgow, and before that, he was a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher at the University of Edinburgh where he completed his PhD. His work has appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, and Erkenntnis.
Duncan Pritchard FRSE is UC Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology & Society. His main area of research is epistemology, and he has published widely in this area, including the monographs Epistemic Luck (2005), The Nature and Value of Knowledge (co-authored, 2010), Epistemological Disjunctivism (2012), and Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (2015). His most recent book is Scepticism: A Very Short Introduction (2019). In 2007, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2011, he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013, he delivered the annual Soochow Lectures in Philosophy in Taiwan.
