The gist of modal epistemology is expressed in the idea that you fail to know if you do believe truly but it is seriously possible for you to believe falsely. According to subjunctivism, this idea is captured by certain subjunctive conditionals. One formulation invokes a safety condition -- If S had believed P, then P would have been the case, "while the other invokes a sensitivity condition -- "If P had been false, S would not have believed that P." According to simple subjunctivism, such conditionals do not contrapose and Sosa derives important epistemological consequences which favor safety from this difference. However, simple subjunctivism is inadequate. I return to Goodman and his analysis of factuals and propose modal stability, which is restricted sensitivity or enhanced safety as a proper epistemic condition for the non-accidental connection between the basis for the belief and the relevant facts of the matter. The idea of modal stability combines robustness (benefi ts of safety) with responsiveness to facts (benefi ts of sensitivity) and recovers the original motivation for the relevant alternatives theory -- when testing for claims of knowledge that p we ask what might be the case if not-p, but we ignore irrelevant possibilities. Epistemic modal conditions should be expressed in terms of conditionals of connection which contrapose within the limits of relevance.
COBISS.SI-ID: 22004744
The article considers the question whether a human teacher can be replaced by a virtual (machine) one and takes into account hidden traps as well as technological possibilities that are at hand. In order to answer the question we have to start with the inquiry of a social level, more precise, the educational system or school as an institution in which a learning process takes place, and then transfer the results to the individual level, that is, to a teacher or scholar. We will proceed from cybernetic pedagogy and didactics that evolved in the 1970's and were then victims of our poor technological capacities and end up with sophisticated hybrid models of mind as the basis of all learning algorithms. The article introduces their revised version which includes a special type of a hybrid model (mRKP) that could be or even should be the grounding element of all contemporary e-learning materials and its possible application to the field of e-learning. Our idea is that an artificial tutor (a computer program) if based on a hybrid model mRKP can autonomously adapt the learning process to needs and potentials of individual scholars.
COBISS.SI-ID: 21600264
The paper discusses Sosa's view of intuitional knowledge and raises the question of the nature of reflective justification of intuitional beliefs. It is assumed, in agreement with Sosa, that pieces of belief of good researchers are typically reflectively justified, in addition to being immediately, first-level justified. Sosa has convincingly argued that reflective justification typically mobilizes and indeed should mobilize capacities distinct from the original capacity that has produced the belief-candidate for being justified, in order to assess the reliability of the original capacity. It has to go beyond justifiers that are of the same-kind ("homogeneous") as first-level immediate ones, in order to enlarge the circle of justification (and thus avoid viciousness), and is, therefore, holistic and coherentist. But if this holds, it seems that reflective justification of armchair beliefs, presumably produced by intuition and some reasoning, should revert to empirical considerations testifying to the reliability of intuition and reasoning. Therefore, it typically combines, in an articulated way, a posteriori elements contributing to the thinker's reflective trust in her armchair capacities. In short, the paper argues that Sosa's own view of second-order justification goes better with a more aposteriorist view, if it does not even force such a view.
COBISS.SI-ID: 22021896