My purpose in this paper is to argue for two separate, but related theses. The first is that contemporary analytic philosophy is incoherent. This is so, I argue, because its methods contain as an essential constituent...My purpose in this paper is to argue for two separate, but related theses. The first is that contemporary analytic philosophy is incoherent. This is so, I argue, because its methods contain as an essential constituent a non-classical conception of intuition that cannot be rendered consistent with a key tenet of analytic philosophy unless we allow a Bayesian-subjectivist epistemology. I argue for this within a discussion of two theories of intuition： a classical account as proposed by Descartes and a modem reliabilist account as proposed by Komblith, maintaining that reliabilist accounts require a commitment to Bayesian subjectivism about probability. However, and this is the second thesis, Bayesian subjecfivism is itself logically incoherent given three simple assumptions： （1） some empirical propositions are known, （2） any proposition that is known is assigned a degree of subjective credence of 1, and （3） every empirical proposition is evidentially relevant to at least one other proposition. I establish this using a formal reductio proof. I argue for the t-u-st thesis in section 1 and for the second in section 2. The final section contains a summary and conclusion.展开更多
文摘My purpose in this paper is to argue for two separate, but related theses. The first is that contemporary analytic philosophy is incoherent. This is so, I argue, because its methods contain as an essential constituent a non-classical conception of intuition that cannot be rendered consistent with a key tenet of analytic philosophy unless we allow a Bayesian-subjectivist epistemology. I argue for this within a discussion of two theories of intuition： a classical account as proposed by Descartes and a modem reliabilist account as proposed by Komblith, maintaining that reliabilist accounts require a commitment to Bayesian subjectivism about probability. However, and this is the second thesis, Bayesian subjecfivism is itself logically incoherent given three simple assumptions： （1） some empirical propositions are known, （2） any proposition that is known is assigned a degree of subjective credence of 1, and （3） every empirical proposition is evidentially relevant to at least one other proposition. I establish this using a formal reductio proof. I argue for the t-u-st thesis in section 1 and for the second in section 2. The final section contains a summary and conclusion.
