Arché is launching a new project in epistemology, and they have put out a call for expressions of interest from prospective Research and Visiting fellows, PhD students and Network members. Many more details below the fold, and even more at their site.
Arché is planning to launch a new multi-year project in Epistemology, provisionally scheduled to run from September 2006 to December 2010 and led by Jessica Brown, Duncan Pritchard and Crispin Wright. We will be applying for dedicated external funding to support a number of postdoctoral fellowships and PhD studentships for research within the project agenda or on topics closely associated with. However, at this stage we are keen to identify prospective postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers who would potentially be interested in applying for their own individual awards from external sources (such as the British Academy and the AHRC) to enable them to join the project. Arché will provide tailored support for the individual funding applications of accepted candidates, who will of course also be eligible for any appointments made possible by a major project award to the Centre.
An outline of a proposed programme of research is given below. This is provided for guidance only; we welcome feedback and comments and will, naturally, be willing to factor in the research interests of successful applicants when finalizing the details of the project.
We are also keen to receive expressions of interest from prospective visiting scholars at senior and intermediate career stages who would welcome an opportunity to spend time at Arché during the period of the project and contribute to its research, and/or to join the international network of scholars who will participate in an associated programme of twice-yearly workshops. Those who have already expressed interest in the network include Martin Davies, Christopher Hookway, James Pryor, Ralph Wedgwood, and Tim Williamson.
At this stage, enquiries and informal expressions of interest can be sent by email to the Executive Director, Carrie Jenkins. Please give details of your current and prospective research interests, and of any external source to which you intend to apply for funding.
Basic Knowledge: Outline of Research Problems and Questions
(a) The overarching problem
Much knowledge is based on reasons. But an old thought says that since reasoning in general needs premises and cannot improve epistemically on their quality, vicious circularity or regress threatens any attempt so to conceive all of our knowledge. This seems to enforce a category of basic knowledge, unsupported by articulable reasons.
This conclusion is independently plausible. Perceptual knowledge, memories, basic psychological self-knowledge, elementary logical, mathematical and modal knowledge — all these, it seems, are characteristically non-inferential. In each case, the phenomenology of belief is normally one of immediacy and spontaneity, with the natural responses to a request for reasons – “I can see it”, “I was there”, “It’s my toothache”, “It’s obvious”, “It couldn’t be otherwise” – usually (though debatably) understood as serving not to supply them but to deny the need.
The project’s goal will be to explore in depth a cluster of questions to which these thoughts give rise:
Must some of our knowledge be non-inferential?
If so, what varieties of such knowledge should be countenanced?
What different models of the achievement of such knowledge are possible?
These questions are given urgency by a threat which seems to overshadow basic knowledge. Knowledge, surely, requires forming beliefs in some intellectually responsible fashion, involving (the possibility of) scrutiny of their pedigree. Yet in the case of basic beliefs – where there will be no supporting beliefs – it looks as though there will be nothing to scrutinise. Where reasons give out, so, it seems, does any scope for policing.
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(b) The Strategy
Our work will concentrate successively on five key sets of questions whose treatment will inform responses to the overarching concerns.
PHASE 1 will be devoted to the two most important Sceptical Paradoxes. …
PHASE 2 will focus on Closure and Transmission of Knowledge across Entailment….
PHASE 3 will address the prospects for Non-evidential Warrant – “entitlements”, according to contemporary idiom…
PHASE 4 will be concerned with the contrast between Internalist and Externalist Standpoints…
PHASE 5 will focus on a priori knowledge, drawing on recent work by Boghossian, BonJour, Peacocke and Yablo, and building on the work of existing Arché projects in Modality and Foundations of Mathematics…