epistemology final with annotations

When I was an undergrad at Rochester, I took an introductory epistemology course with Richard Feldman. The following is the final exam he wrote and gave us on the last day of that class, with relevent parts of the text linked to a series of annotations I've written, explaining references that might be unclear:

(non-annotated version)

Annotations
(I will be adding links soon)

• Contextualism: A somewhat recent development in epistemology is the idea that knowledge claims are context-sensitive. At least some brands of this view maintain that the standards for knowledge raise or lower based on the standards being applied in the context. Thus, in normal everyday life, one knows many things, however, if higher standards are introduced (such as higher stakes on the consequences of the claim in question, or discussion of certainty), one may not, in those contexts, truly be said to know.
• Global Skepticism: One of the longest standing problems in epistemology has been the issue of skepticism. Skepticism, as a view, purports that some class of things we take to be knowledge are not knowledge. There are many different types of skepticism, and global skepticisms are those which reject almost all knowledge claims as untrue. Two ways of getting at global skepticism are 1) the argument from certainty and 2) the introspective indistinguishability argument. Either of these uses one of a variery of skeptical hypotheses, such as the idea that we are merely dreaming, or that an evil demon is deceiving us. A more recent skeptical hypothesis is the notion that one is a brain in a vat, being fed various stimuli to create the illusion of the external world.
• Madam Malarkey: Madam Malarkey comes from a case used to object to induction. Induction is a form of reasoning where conclusions are drawn about future events/observed objects on the grounds of past observations and experiences. So, if every tiger one has observed has stripes, and one has observed a large number of tigers, one can inductively reason that tigers observed in the future will also have stripes. The Madam Malarkey case purports that one cannot provide better non-inductive reasoning to support induction than one could provide for tea leaves. So, Madam Malarkey is a tea leaf reader. One may object to her reasoning on the grounds that past use of the tea leaves was unreliable. Madam Malarkey will point out that past reliability is only a standard if one assumes inductive reasoning is good reasoning, but since inductive reasoning is only a good standard if one assumes it is, Madam Malarkey argues that her tea leaf reading is just as well supported, if you assume that it works. There are several disanologies between tea leaves and induction.
• Magic Feldman: Magic Feldman is a counterexample to coherentism, the view that a belief is reasonable if and only if it is coherent with the rest of one's beliefs. (Richard) Feldman argues that if he had all of the beliefs that Magic Johnson has at a given point in time, the beliefs would be coherent with each other, but he would not be reasonable in believing that he was a basketball player, or that he is very tall. These beliefs, Feldman argues are made unreasonable in virtue of his experiential evidence. If one's sense experiences can undermine the reasonableness of certain beliefs, than straightforward/simple versions of coherentism are not true.
• Neil Diamond: Neil Diamond is used in an example in the epistemology book used for the course.
• The Radio Case: For a very long time, knowledge was analyzed as justified true belief. This seemed to work very well, until a man named Edmund Gettier published a paper in the journal 'Analysis' called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" In this article, he puts forward cases in which it is argued that the agent has justification for believing something, and that thing is true, but the agent does not know the thing in question. One relatively simple case to make this point would be if one sees something that looks exactly like a sheep in a field. It is not a sheep, but instead a sheep-shaped robot. The person believes that there is a sheep in the field, which there is, far away and out of the person's view. The belief is justified, because of the convincingly fake sheep, and it is true, because of the unobserved actual sheep. However, it seems wrong to say the person knows there is a sheep in the field. What does this have to do with the radio? Many people have suggested a variety of fourth conditions for knowledge (justified true belief + X). One proposal for such a condition was that there be no 'defeaters' for the belief in question. A defeater is supposed to be something such that, if the person were justified in believing it, it would undermine the justification for belief in the original proposition. A challenge to such an account is the radio case, which is that a person, locked in a room with nothing but a radio that is off, in otherwise normal circumstances, knows that the radio is off. However, it is true that some station is playing a particular song. If the person were justified in believing that KWOW was playing 'American Pie', it would be because the radio was on (that is to say, the most similar scenario in which the person knows the proposition is one in which the radio is on. So, being justified in believing the KWOW proposition would undermine justification for believing that the radio is off. This is alleged to be a problem for the no-defeater view.
• Gettier's Cases: While many Gettier cases now involve a variety of convoluted stories, one of the original cases put forward by Gettier in his paper involved a situation in which, an agent believes that Jones will get a particular job. He also believes that Jones has ten coins in his pocket (which is true). Unbeknownst the agent also has ten coins in his pocket, and he is the person who will get the job. So, he believes justifiably and truly that the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, but it seems he does not know it. The Tea Leaves are a Malarkey reference.
• Get The Evidence: Evidentialism is the view that believing P is justified if and only if one's body of evidence best supports belief in P (as opposed to disbelief or suspension of judgment). One objection to evidentialism is that sometimes one ought to get more evidence for the belief in question. A case which is supposed to illustrate this involves someone knowing a movie time from the previous day's paper, but who we feel intuitively should check that day's paper in order to know what time the movie is. A standard evidentialist response to this objection (apart from adopting some "Get The Evidence" principle) is to draw a distinction between what one is justified in believing and what one is justified in doing. Perhaps the agent is justified in believing the film will start at 8:00, but ought to check the paper anyways (since the cost of checking the paper is low for a potentially large gain- seeing the movie).
• Defeaters again: Another defeater case is one in which the police are investigating a crime and the mother of the primary suspect lies and implicates a fictional twin. The case breaks into two parts, one in which one would have other reason to doubt what the mother says, and one in which they wouldn't. In one case the mother's utterance functions as a defeater, but not in the other one. Since one doesn't know about the utterance in either situation, it seems odd that it defeats in one scenario but not the other.
• Truth-Tracking: One theory about knowledge requires that our beliefs track the truth. If we are good truth-trackers, then we are justified in our beliefs. One trouble with truth tracking has to do with what sense experience we happen to get. If a clown runs around my block every four minutes, and is only in view for five seconds, there is a five second window such that my looking up will induce me to believe there is a clown circling the block. Otherwise, my running-clown beliefs don't track the truth. But this means my vision isn't a good truth tracking faculty, even though, we generally would want it to be one.
• Epistemic Safety: One can normally tell a barn when they see it. So, seeing a barn is usually good justification for believing there is a barn. But, there are a series of cases involving, for instance, odd arrangements of fake barns. If one is in an area where many barns have been replaced by convincingly faked barn facades, it is more problematic to decide if one is justified in concluding that what they see is a barn. However, if one is actually looking at a real barn, surrounded by fake barns, it seems odd that a normally good faculty becomes unsuitable in virtue of a number of things you aren't looking at. The cases get complicated, often involving situations where some class of barns is entirely fake (yellow barns) and none of another barn is fake (red barns) and the barn in question is in the class of non-fake barns.
• Foundational Sensory Evidence: Descartes is often associated with two particular issues in epistemology, skepticism and foundationalism. Descartes begins with a systematic skepticism, but espouses also a strong foundationalism, meaning that one can acquire certainty about many beliefs justified in virtue of foundational or 'basic' beliefs. These beliefs are not justified in virtue of other beliefs. Many foundationalists focus on sensory evidence as the origin for justification for such basic beliefs. Discussion takes place as to whether or not one's sense evidence is infallible, in the sense that one cannot be wrong about feeling pain or heat, or the like. Some argue that one can expect to feel something to a point where they confusedly take themselves to feel it, even if they don't. This would undercut arguments for this type of foundationalism allowing for certainty with respect to the beliefs they justify.
• Practical Reasoning: There is a distinction between practical justification and epistemic justification. One might be faced with a scenario in which some action must be taken, but it is not reasonable to prefer any action over the others. A powerful example of this would be an agent stranged on an island with two fruits, greenfruit and redfruit. The agent knows one fruit is poisonous, but has no evidence as to which fruit it would be (and no good background evidence about some colors having associations with poison in nature or the like). One will die if they don't eat anything, but they have no reason to eat greenfruit that isn't equally good for eating redfruit. So, a rational being would have no way to prefer red to green or vice versa, but must eat exactly one of the two to be rational. So there is a difference between what is practical to do, and what is justified to believe.
• Reasonable Disagreement: Can reasonable disagreement exist? There are some ways of spelling out the question where the answer is trivially, "yes". For instance, if two people have very different evidence, and both reasonably interpret their evidence, and come to different conclusions. This seems fine. The question is, if two people share all evidence (or all shareable evidence) can they reasonably disagree? If one thinks that given a body of evidence only one of the epistemic positions will be justified, then, they cannot maintain the existence of reasonable disagreements for two people with the same evidence. One might argue that there is a body of unshareable evidence. Private evidence that cannot be exchanged. This would, it is argued, allow for two people to share the rest of their evidence and still disagree. It has been argued that if one is justified in believing the other party to the dispute is being reasonable, then they have evidence of the other parties private evidence. In that case, they have good reason to believe there is good evidence opposing their own private evidence, and the parties would be justified not in disagreeing, but on both suspending their judgment until new evidence comes to light.

If you have questions or notice errors, please let me know: