Abstract
7.1 Theoretical fragility and natural solidity of our situation—Evidence as immediate—Does it make sense to seek for a justification of evidence?—Wittgenstein and the indefeasibility of our “system of evidence”—Two kinds of doubt: their local and global epistemological effects—Certainty and security—Greco on the epistemic status of “contextually basic beliefs” in Wittgenstein’s later writings—Hinge propositions: what they are and what they are for—Idea of natural ontology—Wittgensteinian contextualism and the thereness of our evidence. 7.2 Gil on common and scientific evidence—The non-discursiveness of what presents itself to us as evident: idea of “hallucination”—Evidence as transpositional in regard to all perceptive content: the status of this primordial modality—Why evidence is groundless. 7.3 Primary and secondary evidence—Gil on assent: reminiscences of Zeno —The difficulty of invalidating the feeling of reality prompted by our acts of assent. 7.4 Gil’s effort to avoid a transcendental deduction: an evidence that does not depend on us—The phantasm of a modal categorization—Similarities between Husserl and Gil apropos of the genesis of evidence—Pritchard on “epistemic angst” and “epistemic vertigo”: the phenomenological basis of the latter—Williams’ dismissal of “knowledge-specific scepticism”: beyond the sceptical problems of typical contextualist analyses.
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Notes
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The idea of a “hinge epistemology” still remains relatively unexplored. See Coliva (2015) and the collective volume of Coliva and Moyal-Sharrock (2016). In a recent work, Sosa writes: “Our approach suggests a promising way to understand the appeal to ‘relevant alternatives’ seen in responses to skepticism of years ago. At that time the notion of relevance was left in some darkness, whereas the present approach may now shine its light. Our background conditions, and their generalization to human performance generally, seem also interestingly related to Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions, though this must be left here as a topic for later study” (2017: 220, n. 5).
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All translations are my own.
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On the “meta-sceptical problem” of “epistemic vertigo”, see also Boult and Pritchard (2013: 33–34).
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The brain-in-a-vat hypothesis is presented in Putnam (1981) .
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Venturinha, N. (2018). Seeking Evidence. In: Description of Situations. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00154-4_7
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