justification without awareness a defense of epistemic externalism jul 2006

[...]... ‘conceptual2 awareness 33 Thus, nonconceptual weak awareness what in Bergmann (2006) I called plain old ‘nonconceptual awareness —is awareness that doesn’t involve the application of any concepts to the object of awareness Cows and dogs presumably experience pain of some sort And presumably these animals are aware of such experiences Yet although they are aware of these experiences, it seems likely that... justification of the relevant belief Nondoxastic strong awareness is just strong awareness that isn’t doxastic And an actual strong awareness requirement demands that the subject actually be aware whereas the potential strong awareness requirement demands only that the subject be able on reflection alone to be aware I will first argue that actual doxastic strong awareness results in regress problems and... belief held by that subject II The awareness required by internalism is either strong awareness or weak awareness 20 Notice that weak awareness can involve conceiving too, so long as it doesn’t involve the sort of conceiving that is distinctive of strong awareness In Bergmann (2006) , strong awareness is called ‘conceptual1 awareness and weak awareness is called ‘nonconceptual1 awareness 21 See BonJour... introspection, rational intuition, and memory 12 Not all awareness that it is metaphysically possible for a person to have counts as potential awareness Potential awareness is just awareness that a person is able to have by reflection alone 13 Why require awareness of only some justification-contributor rather than of all justificationcontributors? To require awareness of all justification-contributors is to require... with what I take to be common assumptions in order to give the reader some idea of what nonconceptual awareness is All that we really need here, to grasp what nonconceptual weak awareness is, is an example of a creature that can be aware of a pain experience without applying concepts to it Choose your own example if you disagree with the account given here of dogs and cows 20 A Dilemma for Internalism... the awareness required is nonconceptual, a person can have the required awareness of RP without conceiving of RP in any way without categorizing it according to any classificatory scheme But then Jack can be nonconceptually aware of RP without conceiving of RP as relevant at all to the appropriateness of his belief According to the SPO, if Jack does not conceive of RP as something relevant to the appropriateness... Let’s say that ‘conceptual weak awareness is weak awareness that involves the application of some concept or other to the object of awareness i.e it involves conceiving of the object of awareness in a certain way.32 Thus, although it does not involve conceiving of the object of awareness as in some way relevant to the truth or justification of the relevant belief, it does involve conceiving of it in... There are numerous passages of a similar nature throughout BonJour’s works 17 He thinks of having access to a fact as having (or being able on reflection alone to have) a justified belief that the fact in question obtains See Fumerton (1995: 63–73) A Dilemma for Internalism 11 acquaintance with certain facts that are crucial to a belief’s justification And, in characterizing the most important feature of. .. judgmental: it has the assertive content that something, in this case a sensory experience, has one set of features rather than one of the various others that it might have had How can a state whose content does not in any way say or indicate that things are one way rather than another nonetheless provide a reason or any sort of basis for thinking that the propositional content of a belief that they are... nonconceptual weak awareness when he says: ‘If the direct apprehension [or awareness] of the experience involves no claim or assertion regarding its character, so that who thus has such an apprehension is apparently not thereby aware that it has such-and-such features, then in what way is his belief that he has an experience with those features justified by that apprehension? The basic belief, after all, .