number of things I believed to be true. A few examples: I believed I was in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. I believed I was caught up on my student loan payments. I believed that, when I was seven, a dog named Tuffy lived across the street with a family whose name I can’t recall. I believed all these things, but I was less confident in some of those beliefs than others. Why? One way of explain...

Foundationalism and coherentism in epistemology, like so many other polar philosophical positions, have been going through periodic bouts of trials and tribulations to the delight of each other’s opponent. In the recent cycle of this ongoing saga, coherentism has suffered a severe blow from the defection of Laurence BonJour, as one of its most prominent and persistent defenders, to the oppositi...

Abstract: One important strand of Sellars’s attack on classical foundationalism from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is his thesis about the priority of is-talk over looks-talk. This thesis has been criticized extensively in recent years, and classical foundationalism has found several contemporary defenders. I revisit Sellars’s thesis and argue that is-talk is epistemically prior to look...

Epistemic justification has been claimed to be a special case of argument by philosophers such as Accordingly for each attempt, epistemic justification is the occasion of the arguer making a case for some conclusion based on other premises, when the audience and the arguer are the same person. The dialectical model of argument is used to inform how it is that a subject could come to justify her...