Working Without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology

By Richard Foley

In this new book, Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief as a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon from the rationality of decision or action. His approach generates promising suggestions about a wide range of issues--e.g., the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons for belief; the question of what aspects of the Cartesian project are still worth doing; the significance of simplicity and other theoretical virtues; the relevance of skeptical hypotheses; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of knowledge; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of rational degrees of belief; and the limits of idealization in epistemology.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195076990
• ISBN13: 9780195076998
• Release Date: December 1992
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"