University of Tasmania, Australia

Description

This project examines a number of foundational questions in epistemology, including.

1. Paraconsistent analyses of vagueness

The project explores sorites arguments that arise essentially in continuous rather than discrete domains (where mathematical induction, chains of conditionals, the least number principle and other standard soritical generators are not available). Another involves the use of content externalism and social choice theory to improve the standard motivations for subvaluationism.

2. Mixed modalities in epistemology

Epistemologists are wont to make all sorts of claims in which epistemic and alethic notions interact, and it’s clear that some debates in epistemology come down to questions about the way we should treat such fusions. This project is particularly interested in knowability claims (the coherence of Dummettian anti-realism in the face of Fitchian concerns), and revisability claims in the Quinean tradition (and their alleged incoherence or self-contradiction).

3. Epistemic normativity

The project looks at the role of constitutive norms of language-use in founding the epistemic norms of truth-seeking and falsity-avoiding, and considers the plausibility of a functionalist account of the meanings of many epistemic evaluative terms.

Recent Work Includes

Chase, J (2012) ‘The logic of Quinean revisability’, Synthese 184:357-373.

Contacts

• James Chase