Rethinking Scepticism about Justification. Don't Forget the Old Evil Demon. - a podcast by MCMP Team

Thomas Grundmann (Cologne) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "New Perspectives on External World Scepticism" (9-10 July, 2013) titled "Rethinking Scepticism about Justification. Don't Forget the Old Evil Demon.". Abstract: Mentalism about justification is typically motivated by the new evil demon intuition. According to it, mental duplicates, i.e., people who share all their non-factive mental states, also share their justificatory properties, no matter whether they are in abnormal conditions or whether they are permanently deceived by an evil demon. At the same time, mentalists often ignore another intuition that drives many traditional sceptical arguments and that I will call the old evil demon intuition. According to this second intuition, demon scenarios are sceptical hypotheses that challenge one's own justification unless one is in a position to rule them out from one's own epistemic perspective. Moreover, there are two different kinds of sceptical hypotheses: hypotheses that conflict with the truth of a target belief, and hypotheses that conflict with the belief's reliability. As I will argue, claiming that one needs to rule out the later kind of hypothesis in order to achieve first- or second-order justification commits one to the view that reliability is at least a necessary condition for justification and, hence, that mentalism is false. I will conclude with some suggestions how both intuitions may fit together within an overall reliabilist framework.

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