903 EPISTEMOLOGY: Internalism & Meta-epistemology SIDELLE

1:15-3:15 R 3 CR (A)

Contemporary epistemology has been much concerned with the dispute between Internalism and Externalism. The exact nature of the dispute is part of what is in contention, but the rough idea is that, while everyone agrees that belief and truth are necessary for knowledge, Internalists focus in addition on traditional justification in the form of having reasons and arguments, which are in some way available to the believer, while Externalists think what is important epistemologically more concerns a beliefs etiology, how it is situated in the world - is it appropriately related to the state of affairs making the belief true (causal theories), or does it result from a reliable - truth conducive - belief forming mechanism or process? There are disagreements within each camp about the analyses of knowledge, justification, and more generally, what matters epistemologically, as well as the somewhat second-order dispute between the camps. In this seminar, we will look both at the internal attempts to 'do epistemology' as well as this broader internalism/externalism issue. We'll look at various attempts both to characterize the dispute and to defend one side of it. Included among these will be both attempts at reconciliation - 'throwing a bone' to the other side to allow that they are onto something - as well as full out denials that the other side is onto anything particularly important. Is there just a verbal dispute, with each side simply investigating a different subject matter? - for instance, justification for internalists and knowledge for externalists? Or is something more at stake? We will also look at other internalist/externalist issues which might be related interestingly to this one - most notably, in ethics, to which epistemologists have sometimes turned for either a possible reduction of 'What ought I to believe', and in other cases, for fruitful analogies. Some versions of the issue of moral luck seem to look like the internalist/externalist issue in epistemology. We may also consider whether semantic and/or psychological internalism/externalism have important points of contact here. Perhaps the unifying and overarching question is: Is there anything important about the first-person perspective?

920 PHIL. OF SCIENCE: Confirmation EELLS

1:15-3:15 W 3 CR (A)

We will study some of the main models of scientific confirmation that have been proposed by philosophers of science in the last 60 years or so. The main question addressed is just what it means for evidence to provide some support for a hypothesis or theory. We will critically examine Hempelian confirmation theory (including the paradoxes of confirmation, the "grue" puzzle, and the hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation of theories), Bayesian confirmation theory (which develops and makes use of the idea of subjective probability), and perhaps the so-called "bootstrap" approach to confirmation (Glymour). We may also examine the idea of acceptance of scientific theories and hypotheses.

Requirements will include several short papers and a term paper. The relevant (elementary) logic and probability theory will be covered in class and in the readings.