epistemology

on viewing the paradox through this epistemological lens, and how modern theories frame this distinction between absolute non-existence and unobservable existence. My core argument is that "non-existence" or "nothingness" is not an absolute state, but rather an artifact of human and instrumental... Read more

Published on August 21, 2026 9:36 PM GMT Why I favor fallibilism over cluelessness I’ve long been struck by a structural commonality between radical skepticism and cluelessness worries . Since the EA Forum has been discussing cluelessness this week , I figured I’d take another stab at explaining why I don’t find it a credible concern. (Too late to qualify for the official contest , alas.) Skeptic…

_Oxford Studies in Epistemology_. forthcomingAccording to reliabilism, whether a belief is justified, or amounts to knowledge, is a matter of reliability. We consider familiar arguments that reliabilism is incompatible with defeat, and show how reliabilists can respond to them by understanding reliability in a more flexible way—roughly, whether a belief is reliable is a matter of how likely belie…

Tom Rockmore, professor emeritus of philosophy at Peking University and distinguished professor emeritus at Duquesne University, has died. (The following memorial notice was written by Gabriel Gottlieb.) Tom Rockmore, professor emeritus at Peking University, passed away on August 6th. He was known for his work on German Idealism, where he emphasized its constructivist methods in epistemology. Tom…

It’s not what you think you know, but how you can justify your knowledge that is most important.

_Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy_. forthcomingThe principle of the fixity of the past says that nobody is able to act in a way such that the past would have been different. The aim of this paper is to cast epistemic doubt on this principle. I do so by advancing two kinds of debunking arguments—arguments that purport to undermine our rational confidence in a given belief by pointing out…

Strategic science skeptics criticize scientific claims solely to promote non-epistemic goals. I will analyze and debunk a philosophically neglected argument exploited by strategic science skeptics: the argument from disagreement. The core of this argument is that one should lower one’s confidence in a scientific claim when having learned that there is a scientific disagreement about this claim. I…

_Philosophical Studies_. forthcomingMany philosophers have argued that the orthodox analysis of epistemic-modal sentences, on which such sentences assert facts about what is compatible with some contextually given informational state, is fatally flawed. As an alternative, some have suggested a nonfactualist reading of such sentences. On this reading, utterances of epistemic-modal sentences do not…

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 11 August 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-08704-9 From movement to motor behavior: epistemology of embodied knowledge and the limits of its digital representation

Analytic philosophy's highlight reel is a gallery of splittings. Frege split 'is' three ways and 'meaning' into sense and reference; Gettier prised apart the faces of 'knows'; the truth literature stabilised into three families; 'possible' fissioned into metaphysical, epistemic, and conceptual; and Kripke's separation of the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic was received as a revolution. …