Extended Rationality ― A Hinge Epistemology

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 scepticism, 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, as well as 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.

Annalisa Coliva is Associate Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Deputy Director of COGITO Research Centre at Bologna University. A Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, she is the author of Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense (2010) and the editor of The Self and Self-Knowledge (2012), Mind, Meaning and Knowledge: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright (2012), and (with D. Moyal-Sharrock and V. Munz) Language, Mind and Action (2015).