I saw a great session on bootstrapping today. James Van Cleve gave a great talk, and he basically argued that any non-skeptical view will allow for bootstrapping.
Bootstrapping involves cases where a person is in a position to justify the conclusion that an evidential source is reliable by relying on that source (e.g., using perception to justify perception). This looks like it’s epistemically circular, and we’re all taught that epistemic circularity is supposed to be bad, right?
Van Cleve’s point was that any non-skeptical view will allow for the possibility of bootstrapping – he then argued that bootstrapping must be (at least sometimes permissible) This stuff is all directly related to a paper that I am currently revising. I may post that paper soon (and beg for feedback).
(…I know I haven’t fleshed out the contrastivism argument from the previous post…there’s just so much good philosophy going on here…)
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