Abstract

We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases (MoC), exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism. But Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely. We defend an intermediate position. We offer an internal critique of Macherian pessimism about Gettier cases. Most crucially, we argue that Gettier cases needn’t exhibit ‘disturbing characteristics’ that Machery posits to explain why philosophical cases induce dubious judgments. It follows, we show, that Machery’s central argument for the effective abandonment of MoC is undermined. Nevertheless, we engineer a restricted variant of the argument—in harmony with Williamsonian ideology–that survives our critique, potentially limiting philosophy’s scope for establishing especially ambitious modal theses, despite traditional MoC’s utility being partially preserved.

Highlights

  • Naturalism is the vague but suggestive doctrine that philosophy ought to be continuous with science

  • We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases (MoC), exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism

  • Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely

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Summary

Introduction

Naturalism is the vague but suggestive doctrine that philosophy ought to be continuous with science. Theorists on the F-line focus on the form and content of (the reasoning induced by) philosophical thought experiments They aim to provide a rational reconstruction of the ‘Gettier-reasoning’ that supports the standard ‘Gettier judgment’ (knowledge is not justified true belief) in response to Gettier cases (Gettier 1963). Williamson (2007) and Geddes (2017) develop a broadly naturalistic version of the F-line, eschewing appeal to ‘rational insight’ based on, for instance, a sui generis faculty of intuition (Bealer 1998; BonJour 1998; Bealer 2002) or mere conceptual competence (Boghossian 1996).2 Instead, their accounts are nonexceptionalist: they only appeal to ordinary cognitive capacities whose nature and reliability is amenable to scientific (e.g. evolutionary) explanation.. On a Williamsonian model, the resulting moderate modal skepticism subtly contrasts with a more familiar form advocated by van Inwagen (1998) and Hawke (2011, 2017)

Common ground
Macherian pessimism
Gettier and framing
Is Gettier disturbing?
Entanglement
Unusualness
Atypicality
Radical restrictionism
Modal modesty
Findings
31 A potential objection
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