Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Lewis thought concessive knowledge attributions (e.g., 'I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that he's just a cleverly disguised mule') caused serioustrouble for fallibilists. As he saw it, CKAs are overt statements of the fallibilist view and they are contradictory. Dougherty and Rysiew have argued that CKAsare pragmatically defective rather than semantically defective. Stanley thinks that their pragmatic response to Lewis fails, but the fallibilist cause is not lost because Lewis was wrong about the commitments of fallibilism. There are problems with Dougherty and Rysiew's response to Stanley and there are problems with Stanley's response to Lewis. I'll offer a defense of fallibilism of my own and show that fallibilisms needn't worry about CKAs.

In Chapter 1 of Evidence and Evolution, Sober (2008) defends a Likelihodist account of favoring. The main tenet of Likelihoodism is the so-called Law of Likelihood. In this note, I explain why the Law of Likelihood fails to undergird an adequate explication of favoring.

This response to Sober's (2008) Evidence and Evolution draws out and criticizes some consequences of his analysis because of its reliance on a likehhoodframework for adjucating the dispute between (Intelligent Design) creationism and evolution. In particular, Sober's analysis does not allow it to be formally claimed that evolutionary theory better explains living phenomena than Intelligent Design and makes irrelevant the contribution of the theory of evolution by natural selection to assessments of the status of the argument from design. Finally, a rudimentary alternative framework for theory confirmation is presented here which avoids these conclusions by rejecting likelihoodism and deploying multiple criteria to the problem of scientific theory choice.