forum 2: week of 16 Jan - Lewis

In response to question 1, I feel Lewis' set rules not arbitrary. I feel as if he is more explaining in detail how people think and not necessarily how we ought to, even though he does produce a theory of how we ought to. I feel his comment on how epistemology and skepticism is too strict for any agent to fully obtain knowledge leaves agents open to fallacious reasoning. Beyond that his suggestions of ignoring and contextualizing your perceptions also leaves the agents open to fallacious reasoning. So for me he removes the hard rock of fallibilism and replaces it with an abyss, pitting the agent in between too strict skepticism and too weak contextualism.

Thoughts?

I agree with this. Although Lewis' rules are an interesting thing to think about, they do not accomplish Lewis' goal of "just barely" dodging both skepticism and fallibilism. As mentioned above they are an insight into how we manage to claim we have knowledge with so many strange possibilities that we are wrong (like the Gettier cases or the evil demon). However, we are still wrong about what we claim to be knowledge all the time. If my professor tells me that he drives the red car in the parking lot I would immediately run home and tell all my friends that I finally found out which car was his. Later I would learn that my professor lied because he was embarrassed of his gross, old brown car and wanted to impress me. We already know that we are right about our knowledge most of the time, the problem is we still don't really know at what point can we claim we have knowledge. Lewis' rules still contain the possibility that we will ignore something important accidentally and thus make our "knowledge" false.