I just finished a draft of a very long paper on pragmatic encroachment in epistemology.

bq. “Can we do without pragmatic encroachment?”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf

The idea behind the paper is that once we have a suitably pragmatic understanding of belief, we don’t need to also have a pragmatic understanding of justification in order to have a suitably pragmatic theory of justified belief. Along the way there’s stuff about the preface paradox, closure principles, principles of practical implication and much more.

The paper doesn’t yet have any references, and most importantly doesn’t have a proper acknowledgements section. When it does many of the commentators on this blog will get thanked!

Although the paper started off life as an attempt to say something about Hawthorne and Stanley’s views about knowledge, I had to stick to justification here in order to have something of managable length. Perhaps knowledge will be the next project.

Comments, of course, more than welcome.

UPDATE: I seem to have fairly badly misinterpreted/misremembered (at the time of writing) parts of the paper by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath that I’m in part responding to here. Until further notice, take anything I say in there about what they say with a tilde of salt.

SECOND UPDATE: I updated the PDF (as of 2.30pm, June 7) to remove at least some of the most blatant misinterpretations.