Peirce’s pragmatist theory of truth posits that truth is the eventual outcome of an indefinitely extensive amount of scientific research. The minima trivialia objection challenges this theory by pointing to common sense truths, such as what one had for breakfast, which are not the result of prolonged collective scientific effort. However, this objection fails if we adopt Sellars’s distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of humanity in the world, along with the associated scientific realism. In this Sellarsian framework, minima trivialia are viewed as akin to claims defended from the perspective of the manifest image, like the existence and persistence of material objects, and not as genuine truths, which are recognised only from the scientific image’s viewpoint. But the myth of the categorial given, according to Sellars, entails that the views from the manifest image are essentially naïve realist claims about the categorial dimension of reality. Hence, only claims that properly belong to the scientific image—explanatorily and empirically adequate—are good candidates for satisfying categorial truths. So, in the end, embracing this distinction, which aligns well with Peirce’s framework, circumvents the minima trivialia objection.

Der Vortrag argumentiert dafür, dass sich personale Selbstverständnisse kohärenztheoretisch konzeptionieren lassen und damit wahrheitsfähig sind. Um dieser These nachzugehen, wird exemplarisch Linda M. Alcoffs kohärenztheoretischer Ansatz aus Real Knowing (1996|2018) herangezogen und auf personale Selbstverständnisse angewendet werden. Das Konzept des Selbstverständnisses entspringt der narrativistischen Debatte und bezeichnet das Verständnis einer Person davon, wer sie ist. Während in dieser Debatte implizit angenommen wird, dass es richtige und ‚falsche‘ Selbstverständnisse gebe, bleibt fraglich, woran sich der Wahrheitswert von Selbstverständnissen bemessen lässt. Denn es gibt mindestens zwei Herausforderungen für eine erkenntnistheoretische Konzeption von Selbstverständnissen: Die Fehleranfälligkeit autobiografischer Erinnerungen und die Produktivität des Selbstverstehens. Der Vortrag zeigt, dass sich diese Herausforderungen jedoch bewältigen lassen, wenn man eine Kohärenztheorie wie die von Alcoff nutzt. Alcoff schlägt mit dem „Immanenten Realismus“ einen Ansatz vor, der abzubilden vermag, wie Wissen in einem politisierten Kontext tatsächlich produziert wird. Sie begreift Wahrheit dabei als emergente Eigenschaft aller Elemente, die in einem spezifischen Kontext involviert sind. In diesem Sinne lassen sich personale Selbstverständnisse nach Alcoff als Kohärenzmenge beschreiben, die aus der Interaktion zwischen Realität und Menschen entsteht. Der Vortrag konkludiert damit, dass es mit Alcoffs Ansatz prinzipiell möglich ist, Selbstverständnisse als wahrheitsfähig zu konzipieren.

Inquiry and its relation to knowledge have recently gained significant philosophical attention. Some theorists argue for a close connection between knowledge and inquiry, while others think that they are more distinct. The existing discussions, however, ignore the question of whether knowledge and inquiry are co-extensive, that is whether everything that we can know we can also successfully inquire into and vice versa. In this paper, I will argue that they are not co-extensive, discussing several kinds of propositions that, even though they can be known, we cannot properly inquire into whether they are true. I will introduce rationality requirements for suspension of judgment that limit the possibilities of rational inquiry but not of other potential procedures of knowledge acquisition. As I will show, we cannot rationally inquire in cases where new and independent information is required that is not available. This limitations concern inquiry via bootstrapping and inquiry into the truth of indications that can only be delivered by a single source at a single occasion. However, we can clearly know in this latter case and, arguably, we can also know via bootstrapping. Hence, there are propositions that we can know but into which we cannot rationally inquire.

An agent simplifies her reasoning when she deliberates using only a subset of the available information. Sometimes, simplification is motivated by environmental pressures, other times by default, and other times by the express intention to do so. Doxastic states play a simplification role because they serve as inputs to deliberation. This means that the causal role they play, in part, explains why they help to simplify. In the literature, it has been objected that beliefs can play this role because they are involuntary doxastic states while simplification can be voluntary. This presentation pushes back against this argument by showing that the voluntary nature of a doxastic state is separable from the voluntary nature of their formation process and therefore from the causal roles they can play. I conclude by showing that belief voluntarism can still be attacked on the intuitive grounds that beliefs are involuntary.

The aim of this talk is to explore some of the relations between argument and virtue. In particular, I explore the prospects of an account of virtuous argument along the lines of Ernest Sosa's AAA framework in virtue epistemology. I start with a brief critical assessment of virtue argumentation theory, a field which draws on virtue epistemology and applies it to argumentation, and show how a more nuanced picture of the relations between argument and virtue is called for. As a step in this direction, I propose to give an account of virtuous argument acts in terms of apt argument acts, i.e. argument acts that are accurate because they are adroit. I close with reflections on the merits and flaws of the AAA framework in its application to argumentation and the analogy with its application to the case of knowledge.