Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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234404

Destructive defeat and justificational force

the dialectic of dogmatism, conservatism, and meta-evidentialism

Matthias Steup

pp. 2907-2933

Abstract

Defeaters can prevent a perceptual belief from being justified. For example, when you know that red light is shining at the table before you, you would typically not be justified in believing that the table is red. However, can defeaters also destroy a perceptual experience as a source of justification? If the answer is ‘no’, the red light defeater blocks doxastic justification without destroying propositional justification. You have some-things-considered, but not all-things-considered, justification for believing that the table is red. If the answer is ‘yes’, the red light defeater blocks doxastic justification by destroying propositional justification. You have neither all-things-considered nor some-things-considered justification for believing that the table is red. According to dogmatism, the justificational force of perceptual experiences is indestructible. According to conservatism about sense experience, a perceptual experience ceases to have justificational force if there is evidence against its reliability. Finally, according to meta-evidentialism, a perceptual experience is blocked from being a source of justification is there is no evidence of its reliability. I argue that, of these three theories, meta-evidentialism is the most plausible.

Publication details

Published in:

Moretti Luca, Piazza Tommaso (2018) Defeaters in current epistemology. Synthese 195 (7).

Pages: 2907-2933

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-016-1182-1

Full citation:

Steup Matthias (2018) „Destructive defeat and justificational force: the dialectic of dogmatism, conservatism, and meta-evidentialism“. Synthese 195 (7), 2907–2933.