Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Revue | Volume | Article

234475

The peculiar case of Lehrer's lawyer

Kevin Wallbridge

pp. 1615-1630

Résumé

The peculiar case of Lehrer’s lawyer purports to describe a scenario in which a subject has a justified belief, indeed knowledge, despite the fact that their belief is not causally or counterfactually sustained by any good reasons for it. The case has proven controversial. While some agree with Lehrer’s assessment of the case, others disagree, leading to a schism among accounts of the basing relation. In this paper I aim to reconcile these camps and put simple causal and counterfactual accounts of the basing relation back on the table, by arguing that Lehrer’s case is probably metaphysically impossible, but even if it isn’t, it is ambiguous between a psychologically implausible and a psychologically plausible reading, and this can account for the diverging intuitions that it generates.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

McFarland Andrew (2018) Causation in the metaphysics of science. Synthese 195 (4).

Pages: 1615-1630

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-016-1285-8

Citation complète:

Wallbridge Kevin, 2018, The peculiar case of Lehrer's lawyer. Synthese 195 (4), Causation in the metaphysics of science, 1615-1630. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1285-8.