Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology

by Annalisa Coliva (Author)

About the Book
Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology provides a novel account of the structure of epistemic justification. Its central claim builds upon Wittgenstein's idea in On Certainty that epistemic justifications hinge on some basic assumptions and that epistemic rationality extends to these very hinges. It exploits these ideas to address major problems in epistemology, such as the nature of perceptual justifications, external world skepticism, epistemic relativism, the epistemic status of basic logical laws, of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, of our belief in the existence of the past and of other minds, and the nature of testimonial justification. Along the way, further technical issues, such as the scope of the Principle of Closure of epistemic operators under known entailment, the notion of transmission failure, and the existence of entitlements are addressed in new and illuminating ways.

About the Author
Annalisa Coliva is Associate Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Deputy Director of COGITO Research Center in Philosophy, Italy. Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, her publications include several monographs and papers in Italian and English. Among them Moore and Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense, I modi del relativismo, Scetticismo. Dubbio, paradosso, conoscenza. As editor, she has published Mind, Meaning and Knowledge. Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright, The Self and Self-Knowledge. Her forthcoming publications include The Varieties of Self-Knowledge and (with M. Baghramian) Relativism.