On the Reliability of Experience and the Norm of Revision

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Notes

1 Page numbers always refer to Anil Gupta, Empiricism and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

2 Strictly speaking, not all views are admissible as initial views: some of them can be discarded a priori. The discussion of admissible views helps Gupta cope with the problem of solipsism: he argues that solipsist views have to be ruled out as inadmissible (on the grounds that they are rigid, i.e., they are immune to revision in the light of experience). It is a task for an empiricist to give a reasonable set ofa priori constraints on views that rule out the inadmissible views for revision. These topics will not be discussed here. An important point is that restrictions on admissibility affect the initial views, not the subsequent ones, so that views that are discarded could reappear afterwards (see p. 96).

3 The book introduces a rich array of concepts to analyse processes of revision‐fundamental equivalence, stability, strong convergence – but I will centre my comments only on the notion of convergence. See pp. 91–102.

4 This is an important difference with respect to the revision theory of circular definitions, where the revision of a hypothesis for the extension of a circular predicate (the analogue of a view) is univocally determined by the rule of revision.

5 I am grateful to Anil Gupta, Genoveva Martí, Luis Robledo and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Also to the participants in two reading groups organized by the Logos and Phronesis research groups. I acknowledge the support given by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia through the contract Ramón y Cajal and the Research Project HUM 2006–08236/FISO (C‐Consolider).