Working without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology

by Richard Foley

Overview

In this new book, Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief as a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon from the rationality of decision or action. His approach generates promising suggestions about a wide range of issues—e.g., the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons for belief; the question of what aspects of the Cartesian project are still worth doing; the significance of simplicity and other theoretical virtues; the relevance of skeptical hypotheses; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of knowledge; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of rational degrees of belief; and the limits of idealization in epistemology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195076998
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/17/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.56(h) x 0.91(d)

Table of Contents

1.	Rational Belief	3
1.	Rationality as a Goal-oriented Notion	3
2.	Reasons and Perspectives	8
3.	Reasons, Beliefs, and Goals	15
4.	Evidence, Belief, and Commitment	22
5.	Evidence and Reasons for Belief	27
6.	An Evaluation Procedure for Epistemology	30
7.	Further Illustrations of the Procedure	37
2.	Skepticism	54
1.	Rationality and Skeptical Hypotheses	54
2.	The Lack of Guarantees	59
3.	Is Skepticism Self-referentially Incoherent?	62
4.	Can Metaphysics Solve the Problem of Skepticism?	67
5.	The Epistemological Circle	75
6.	Rationality and Knowledge	85
3.	Egocentric Rationality	94
1.	The Subject Matter of Egocentric Epistemology	94
2.	Responsible Belief	102
3.	What Am I to Believe?	117
4.	Why Be Egocentrically Rational?	131
4.	The Epistemology of Beliefs and the Epistemology of Degrees of Belief	140
1.	The Lockean Thesis	140
2.	Two Paradoxes for the Lockean Thesis	141
3.	Degrees of Belief	146
4.	Inconsistency, Incoherency, and Dutch Books	155
5.	Being Knowingly Inconsistent	162
6.	Being Knowingly Incoherent	174
7.	Pessimistic Scenarios	184
8.	Evidence	189
9.	Belief as Epistemic Commitment	197
	Index	211