1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910300622803321

Autore

Bland Steven

Titolo

Epistemic Relativism and Scepticism : Unwinding the Braid / / by Steven Bland

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2018

ISBN

3-319-94673-0

Edizione

[1st ed. 2018.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (XII, 234 p.)

Disciplina

120

Soggetti

Epistemology

Elections

Electoral Politics

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: The Principal Argument for Epistemic Relativism -- Chapter 3: Epistemic Relativism in the Analytic Tradition -- Chapter 4: Foundationalism and Coherentism -- Chapter 5: Externalism -- Chapter 6: Particularism and Methodism -- Chapter 7: The Charge of Incoherence -- Chapter 8: The Wittgensteinian Position -- Chapter 9: A Dialectical Strategy -- Chapter 10: Conclusions.

Sommario/riassunto

This book confronts the threats of epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism to analytic philosophy. Epistemic relativists reject absolute notions of knowledge and justification, while sceptics claim that knowledge and justification of any kind are unattainable. If either of these views is correct, then there can be no objective basis for thinking that one set of methods does a better job of delivering accurate information than any other set of methods. Philosophers have generally sought to resist these threats by responding to the argument that seems to motivate both positions: the Agrippan trilemma. Steven Bland argues that this is a mistaken strategy. He surveys the most influential responses to the Agrippan trilemma, and shows that none of them succeeds in undermining epistemic relativism. Bland also offers a new, dialectical strategy of challenging epistemic relativism by uncovering how epistemic methods depend on one another for their applications.



By means of this novel analysis, the book concludes that there are principled reasons to prefer naturalistic to non-naturalistic methods, even if these reasons do little to ease the threat of scepticism.