So, despite my best-laid plans over the last two weeks, I haven’t succeeded in reading the texts that I promised a few weeks ago. This isn’t to say I haven’t done any reading for my research paper. I’ve done something a wee bit sneaky: I’ve done course prep that is also research. As a result, I’ve still managed to make progress on reviewing literature pertinent to my project, and have a number of useful argument reconstructions. They’re scattered throughout these three documents:
(And there’s a third one, but I can’t show it to you until tomorrow night. Otherwise, Louis will have an unfair advantage over other students in PHIL0316.)
I think that there are two lessons for you here. First, a lesson that may not apply: owing to my teaching schedule this semester, I managed to kill multiple birds (teaching and research) with one stone. While I suspect that this might be harder for you to do, I’m hopeful that at least some of your other courses are contributing to your research.
Second, although not everything in these documents is relevant, there are some key points that are:
- As you’ll recall from my abstract, part of the goal is to discuss how well scientific practices comport with veritism, the thesis that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic good. The bulk of the literature that I’ve read is about what scientific representations are. For those representations to comport with veritism, all scientific representations must express propositions and be valuable only when true. Much of the literature that I’ve covered above suggests that this is not the case.
- Another thing I’m trying to do is contribute to the literature on perspectivism. (Indeed, the conference is about perspectivism in epistemology.) I’ve given a fairly careful reading of one of the most prominent perspectivists, Ronald Giere.