I wrote some general comments earlier today (and a few additions/edits now). I’m not that confident about them. Also, I think I’m being a bit generous for some of the points, like I’m trying too hard to map what was written to ideas I already know to make sense of it.
I’m a bit hesitant to share b/c I think I probably don’t have the skill to make any particularly useful comments, but I’ve already spent the time reading the quote and writing the following, so I don’t really see a downside to sharing.
Comments:
- This was hard to read (like, I needed to go slow) → difficult to understand and criticize → language seems sorta gate-keepy (i.e., if you don’t understand/follow then you’re not good enough to read it); the gate-keeping thing might be my biases tho
- I’m not convinced that Pettigrew understands what he’s writing about.
- the spectrum Pettigrew sets up seems anti-yes/no
- makes it harder to argue that a class of ideas is wrong
- sorta implies there’s some point on the spectrum that’s correct (which is infallibalist)
- incompatible with multi-factor decision making math – like the position of each idea on the spectrum is based on averaging how much it’s internalist and how much it’s externalist
- I don’t think one could put CF on there (b/c the spectrum is incompatible w/ both internal/external stuff being 100% necessary)[1]
- the “extremely externalist position” is infallibalist if it means what I think it does. (see near end of this post)
- I checked the PDF and was surprised that the quote is the second paragraph in the article! (No explanation of key terms, even after this paragraph, too)
- I guess the intended audience is familiar with what “internal states of a subject” specifically means (or they think they are, at least), but those terms are never really explained / defined. how does the audience know that the author thinks the same thing they do?
- Lots of fancy words/phrasing (note: there are fancier words in the paragraphs before and after, like “putative” and “adduce”)
- The title is a bit wtf.
- the title reminds me a bit of the Jan Hendrik Schön documentary (particularly about journals watching catchy titles)
- I searched for ‘radical’ to find other references, and the 2nd hit (1st is the title) is a sentence with 77 words! (and seems like nonsense)
- the 3rd hit is very wtf. quoted in footnote[2]
- after reading further into the paper via the above points, the original quoted paragraph was comparatively pretty clear.
My main response to reading what I have is that it’d be a waste of my time to focus more of that article. Like, epistemology is interesting to me, but the article seems like trash.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the article was written as like an attempt to contribute something to the field so that it’d be published. There is obviously an attempt to contribute something. I might be biased on this point b/c I watched how to write a philosophy article and get it published earlier today.
And the most extremely externalist position says that a belief is justified just in case it is true.
Did Pettigrew omit a the? Like: “just in [the] case it is true”.
I guess that he means something like ‘a belief is justified only if it is true’, but what’s written seems to be more like ‘it’s okay to treat a belief as justified just in case it’s true’.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/just+in+case says:
just in case
in the event that (something happens). All right. I’ll take it just in case. I’ll take along some aspirin, just in case.
Replacing “just in case” with “in the event that” in the original quote reads okay, but my intuition is that ‘just in case X’ means roughly ‘on the off chance that X’.
This is based on my understanding of what internal and external mean – my guess is that our ideas, understanding, past experiences, etc are internal, and criticism from the world (like testing a theory with an experiment) is external. if testing a theory with an experiment is internal, tho (b/c it’s based on our ideas/interpretation/etc) then it seems like everything would be internal which sorta defeats the point. ↩︎
↩︎Now, epistemic goods—such as knowledge, true belief, understanding, wisdom, and evidence—are unequally and unfairly distributed within our society. This is due partly to the inequities of our education systems, the prevalence of hermeneutic epistemic injustices, and unequal access to shared evidence, public debate, and the tools for individual theorising. But it is also due to the effects of other, more local epistemic weapons. A crucial part of a radical epistemological project is therefore to develop effective defences against those weapons.