I examine Thomas Kuhn’s work regarding the role played by the concept of practice in the development of his theory of scientific rationality. I outline the epistemological implications of his theory of incommensurability. I then show how the original intuition of a practice-based and social conception of incommensurability is replaced by a more conventional linguistic interpretation. I then examine Kuhn’s solution to the problem of incommensurability and explain its inadequacy. I then show that, ultimately, his failure to grasp the epistemological dimension of practice prevents him from providing a fully satisfactory solution to the epistemological problem raised in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Laurence BonJour has proposed a novel defense of the inductive principle (IP) in response to a skeptical challenge posed by Hume. In this paper, I elaborate and criticize BonJour’s strategy. Along the way, I draw attention to Anthony Brueckner’s criticisms of BonJour’s approach, detailing why they fall short of providing an effective rebuttal of BonJour’s argument. By distinguishing and applying two different kinds of probability assessment to BonJour’s premises, I argue that BonJour’s a priori strategy fails to provide a cogent defense of IP. I conclude by drawing out some implications for a priori attempts to argue for the principle.

This paper reformulates the analogy between text and action in Paul Ricœur’s philosophy. My hypothesis is that such a reformulation better contextualizes the tensions in Ricœur’s practical philosophy, specifically between the social and the institutional. The aim is to show that Ricœur’s philosophy is tensional because it’s based on the principle of analogy. In order to think about this tension, we must grasp its true horizon: the analogy of text and action. After outlining this analogy’s genesis, we will see that each of these terms—text, action, analogy—is determined by a “grammar of analogy,” which conditions all of Ricœur’s speeches and has its roots in his interpretation of intentionality.

Plato is not serious when he has Socrates deduce that poetry must be mostly narrative with just a little dialogue. Not only is the argumentation purposely flawed, but he also has Socrates purposely obfuscate a key distinction. He then has Socrates pretend to be confused by his own obfuscation. By forcing us to work our way through the thickets of his faulty argumentation, Plato gives us the opportunity to become more deeply involved with the underlying issues and to discover his theme: a good person is one who is stoically indifferent to both bad fortune and good fortune.

The lottery paradox plays an important role in arguments for various norms of assertion. Why is it that, prior to information on the results of a draw, assertions such as, “My ticket lost,” seem inappropriate? This paper is composed of two projects. First, I articulate a number of problems arising from Timothy Williamson’s analysis of the lottery paradox. Second, I propose a relevant alternatives theory, which I call the Non-Destabilizing Alternatives Theory (NDAT), that better explains the pathology of asserting lottery propositions, while permitting assertions of what I call fallible propositions such as, “My car is in the driveway.”

This article is a defence of representationalism against the objection of phenomenal saliency, which Chalmers, Nickel and Speaks have developed. According to my approach, covert shifts of attention enhance the resolution of perceptual representations at fixation point. This local enhancement accounts for the saliency effect, typical of focal attention, and preserves the representationalist intuition.

In this paper, I develop an interest-relative theory of justification in order to answer the question, “How can I maintain that P when someone whom I consider to be my epistemic peer maintains that not-P?” The answer to this question cannot be determined by looking at evidence alone, I argue, since justification cannot be determined by looking at evidence alone. Rather, in order to determine whether a subject S is justified in believing that P at time t, we need to assess her evidence in favour of P in proportion to her interest in P.