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There are two dominant approaches to theorizing the a priori in epistemology. Moderate rationalism, a kind of dogmatism, posits intellectual seeming’s, while moderate empiricism accounts for the a priori in terms of analyticity. Paul Boghossian has been a recent defender of moderate empiricism until recently. He has argued that there is no “internalistically” acceptable way for a moderate empiricist to account for all instances of a priori justified belief, so we must supplement the view with a form of moderate rationalism. Against this it is shown that dogmatism in general is problematic as a theory of justification, and that, when applied to cases of a priori justification it faces an insuperable difficulty, the non-accidental relation problem. It is argued that in order to account for the a priori we should defend moderate empiricism as the only plausible option. A positive proposal is offered at the end of the paper. The theory states that a priori warrant is a function of non-evidential factors that cause justified a priori belief. / Philosophy

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In "How to Collaborate," Paul Thagard tries to explain why there is so much collaboration in science, and so little collaboration in philosophy, by giving an epistemic cost-benefit analysis. In this paper, I argue that an adequate explanation requires a more fully developed epistemic value theory than Thagard utilizes. In addition, I offer an alternative to Thagard's explanation of the lack of collaboration in philosophy. He appeals to its lack of a tradition of collaboration and to the a priori nature of much philosophical research. I claim that philosophers rarely collaborate simply because they can usually get the benefits without paying the costs of actually collaborating.

Wikipedia (the â free online encyclopedia that anyone can editâ ) is having a huge impact on how a great many people gather information about the world. So, it is important for epistemologists and information scientists to ask whether or not people are likely to acquire knowledge as a result of having access to this information source. In other words, is Wikipedia having good epistemic consequences? After surveying the various concerns that have been raised about the reliability of Wikipedia, this paper argues that the epistemic consequences of people using Wikipedia as a source of information are likely to be quite good. According to several empirical studies, the reliability of Wikipedia compares favorably to the reliability of traditional encyclopedias. Furthermore, the reliability of Wikipedia compares even more favorably to the reliability of those information sources that people would be likely to use if Wikipedia did not exist (viz., websites that are as freely and easily accessible as Wikipedia). In addition, Wikipedia has a number of other epistemic virtues (e.g., power, speed, and fecundity) that arguably outweigh any deficiency in terms of reliability. Even so, epistemologists and information scientists should certainly be trying to identify changes (or alternatives) to Wikipedia that will bring about even better epistemic consequences. This paper suggests that, in order to improve Wikipedia, we need to clarify what our epistemic values are and we need a better understanding of why Wikipedia works as well as it does.

Several different Bayesian models of epistemic utilities (e.g., Levi 1962, Horwich 1982, Maher 1990, Oddie 1997) have been used to explain why it is rational for scientists to perform experiments. In this paper, I argue that a model--suggested independently by Patrick Maher (1990) and Graham Oddie (1997)--that assigns epistemic utility to degrees of belief in hypotheses provides the most comprehensive explanation. This is because this proper scoring rule (PSR) model captures a wider range of scientifically acceptable attitudes toward epistemic risk than the other Bayesian models that have been proposed. I also argue, however, that even the PSR model places unreasonably tight restrictions on a scientist's attitude toward epistemic risk. As a result, such Bayesian models of epistemic utilities fail as normative accounts--not just as descriptive accounts (see, e.g., Kahneman and Tversky 1972, Giere 1988)--of scientific inquiry.