Matthew A Benton

But even in such disagreements, we can emphasize the things that unite us and engage with greater self-awareness over the disputes that divide us. Instead of trying to find common ground in Christian values and beliefs — and how to accommodate differences that are compatible with essential Christian commitments — there is a lot of disparagement and shunning. There are appeals to “our” side as exemplifying the “true” Christian take on some difficult issue. As a result, people can become more confident of their beliefs even after being shown information that should make them less confident (a phenomenon called belief polarization).

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Related and earlier topics include assertion, hedging, predictions, fallibilism, defeat, knowledge norms, and the epistemology of religion. My research has been supported by recent grants on knowledge and God, and on the philosophy of honesty through the Honesty Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He writes at the intersection of Epistemology, Ethics, and Language.

He was recently awarded a research grant from the John Templeton Foundation on Knowledge and God. Epistemologists have shown increased interest in the epistemic significance of disagreement, and in particular, in whether there is a rational requirement concerning belief revision in the face of peer disagreement. The lottery and preface paradoxes pose puzzles in epistemology concerning how to think about the norms of reasonable or permissible belief. Contextualists in epistemology have focused on knowledge ascriptions, attempting to capture a set of judgments about knowledge ascriptions and denials in a variety of contexts (including those involving lottery beliefs). This article surveys some contextualist approaches to handling issues raised by the lottery and preface, while also considering some of the difficulties encountered by those approaches.

• In epistemology we discuss what makes believing something rational.
• Review of John Pittard, Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment (Oxford University Press, 2020), in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Sept. 30, 2020 (online).
• We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology.
• Because we often try to form beliefs based on arguments, we should understand how and why an argument could lead you to more knowledge, if it started with known premises.

In logic, students learn about clear ways to reason and how to understand valid (and invalid) patterns of reasoning. This teaches them how to assess an argument and how to think carefully about their own arguments. Traditional definitions of lying require that a speaker believe that what she asserts is false. He argues that this necessary condition importantly captures nearby cases as lies which the traditional view neglects. I argue, however, that Krauss’ own account suffers from an identical drawback of being unable to explain nearby cases; and even worse, that account fails to distinguish cases of telling lies from cases of telling the truth.

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The other kind of humility can manifest even when you are very confident that you’re right. It’s a humility in how you carry yourself; how you treat others whose views you think are quite wrong. It’s not needing to show everyone how right you are and how wrong others are. Often, when confronted with evidence that contradicts a view we cherish, we become unwilling to even hear it.

This is why so many people, especially in recent decades, seem stuck in echo chambers where they mainly listen to or read news sources which spin things the way they prefer and dismiss all other sources or views before even giving them a hearing. The Knowledge Norm or Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (John Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (John Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA’s unified explanation of some of the earliest data adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals. I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA. The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor.

Many have also elevated contentious secondary views untested by a broader or more conscientious examination of what all Christians share. Then they often want to assess who is aligned with them and malign who is against them. It also shows the value of being charitable toward someone’s argument even if they reach a conclusion you disagree with. You can sometimes agree their reasoning is well structured but still disagree with one of their starting points, their premises. “Evil, Hell, and Evidence for God at a Christian College,” The Idea String interview with Dan Koch, You Have Permission podcast, Nov. 2019.