Professor Crispin Wright
This event has now finished.
I/A/009 Department of Philosophy
Event details
Timothy Williamson meets the New evil Demon
The New Evil Demon (NED) problem, due to Stewart Cohen, is presented as a difficulty for externalist conceptions of epistemic justification. The Victim in the NED scenario lives in an external world radically unlike yours, but their Demon-manipulated experience is a perfect phenomenological duplicate of yours. Victim forms what they take to be perceptual beliefs based on taking their experience as mostly trustworthy. As a result, these beliefs are systematically false. Are they nevertheless justified?
Stu Cohen says “yes” and many find this answer highly intuitive — indeed are tempted to say that Victim has exactly the same justification that you do.
Externalists about epistemic justification must reject this answer. While they differ in detail, there is agreement among externalists that epistemic justification is a matter of the actual external provenance of the belief in question— of, for example, the reliability of belief- forming methods involved, or the modal profile (safety or sensitivity in their usual technical senses) of the belief.
Tim Williamson is firmly in this camp but recognizes that something needs to be said to address the internalist ‘intuition’. His response is to attempt to explain it away as a confusion of justification, properly so termed, with the possession of excuses.
Project for the talk: scrutinize this response and suggest a resolution of the debate.
References:
Stewart Cohen1984. “Justification and Truth” Philosophical Studies 46: 279-96
Timothy Williamson (forthcoming; downloadable from his website), ‘Justifications, excuses, and skeptical scenarios’, in J. Dutant and F. Dorsch (eds.), The New Evil Demon, OUP
Clayton Littlejohn (2009), “The Externalist's Demon” in Canadian Journal Of Philosophy, Vol. 39, No. 3, 09. 2009, p. 399-434
Jessica Brown (2018), chapter 4 of her Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, OUP