The Evil Demon Inside

Abstract:
In the “new evil demon” scenario, it seems that we could still have justified beliefs about the external world, even if we failed to be reliable about the external world. My own goal is to examine how new evil demon problems arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. In the first part of the talk, I argue that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. In the second part of the paper, I argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use the scenarios to defend a properly formulated internalist view about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of self-knowledge need to talk—each has much to learn from each other.

Date: 1 March 2018
Time: 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3-05-23)

About the Speaker:
Professor Silins is Associate Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. He did his graduate work in Philosophy at Oxford University, where he received his PhD in 2004 and his BPhil in 2001. Professor Silins developed his interest in philosophy by studying literature and philosophy at Princeton University, where he received his BA, magna cum laude, in Comparative Literature in 1999. He works in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He has special interests in the epistemology of perception, self-knowledge, and the interplay between views in epistemology and views about mental content and mental causation. He joined the Sage School in Fall 2006, after completing a Bersoff Fellowship at New York University. He has also held a fellowship at the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

All are welcome