On the Epistemic Authority of Experience

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 This work has been funded by the Spanish Department of Science and Education (Programa Ramón y Cajal) and also by the Generalitat Valenciana (research project # GV 06/22).

2 Anil Gupta, Empiricism and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–4. Henceforth page numbers in the main text refer to this book.

3 Moritz Schlick’s ‘The Foundations of Knowledge’ (reprinted in A. J. Ayer (ed.) Logical Positivism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959)) offers a paradigmatic example of twentieth‐century classical empiricism. It should be added, however, that most contemporary foundationalists claim that we should dispense with incorrigibility, infallibility, indubitability, etc. Their distinctive tenet is that there are some beliefs whose justification exclusively depends on having some experiences, and not on endorsing some other beliefs. See, for instance, the papers of James van Cleve and James Pryor included in Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa (eds) Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (London: Blackwell, 2005).

4 ‘I need to judge of this particular experience that it has these qualities. And belief alone cannot prompt me – or make it rational to me – to do so’, Empiricism and Experience, p. 82.

5 For the difference between strong and plain convergence, see ibid., pp. 97–8.

6 The formal definition of rigidity is on p. 154, n. 57.