6 found
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  1.  89
    Epistemology and the law: why there is no epistemic mileage in legal cases.Marvin Backes - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (9):2759-2778.
    The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of objections. According to these objections, broadly speaking, the Lockean View ought to be abandoned because it is incompatible with, or difficult to square with, our judgments surrounding certain legal cases. I distinguish and explore three different versions of these objections—The Conviction Argument, the Argument from Assertion and Practical Reasoning, and the Comparative Probabilities (...)
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  2. A Bitter Pill for Closure.Marvin Backes - 2019 - Synthese 196:3773-3787.
    The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a new epistemic paradox that puts pressure on the claim that justification is closed under multi premise deduction. The first part of the paper will consider two well-known paradoxes—the lottery and the preface paradox—and outline two popular strategies for solving the paradoxes without denying closure. The second part will introduce a new, structurally related, paradox that is immune to these closure-preserving solutions. I will call this paradox, The Paradox of the Pill. (...)
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  3. Normalcy, justification, and the easy-defeat problem.Marvin Backes - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2877-2895.
    Recent years have seen the rise of a new family of non-probabilistic accounts of epistemic justification. According to these views—we may call them Normalcy Views—a belief in P is justified only if, given the evidence, there exists no normal world in which S falsely beliefs that P. This paper aims to raise some trouble for this new approach to justification by arguing that Normalcy Views, while initially attractive, give rise to problematic accounts of epistemic defeat. As we will see, on (...)
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  4. Should moral intuitionism go social?Marvin Backes, Matti Eklund & Eliot Michaelson - 2022 - Noûs 57 (4):973-985.
    In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult (...)
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  5.  69
    Can groups be genuine believers? The argument from interpretationism.Marvin Backes - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10311-10329.
    In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main arguments in support of the claim that groups can be genuine believers – the Argument From Interpretationism – and concludes that we have good reasons to be sceptical about the existence of group beliefs. According to the Argument From Interpretationism, roughly speaking, groups qualify as genuine believers because we (...)
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  6.  54
    Epistemic Justification: Probability, Normalcy, and the Functional Theory.Marvin Backes - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):65-81.
    This paper puts forward a novel pluralist theory of epistemic justification that brings together two competing views in the literature—probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts of justification. The first part of the paper motivates the new theory by arguing that neither probabilistic nor non-probabilistic accounts alone are wholly satisfactory. The second part puts forward what I call the Functional Theory of Justification. The key merit of the new theory is that it combines the most attractive features of both probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts (...)
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