Working without a Net : A Study of Egocentric Epistemology PDF

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.