Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism

Download or read book Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism written by Tomoji Shogenji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian skepticism, but the latter allows us to defeat Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, Shogenji addresses a number of related issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, including epistemic circularity, epistemic closure, and inductive skepticism.