Empirical Reason and Sensory Experience

The volume offers a lively debate from five leading authors on the topic of Empirical Reason and Sensory Experience. It covers important ground, touching on such diverse topics as the epistemic internalism/externalism debate, epistemological disjunctivism, knowledge-first epistemology, perception-first philosophy of mind, skepticism about the external world, the logic of empirical inquiry, etc. that are discussed by the contributors. Although each of these contributions presents its author's unique view on the topic, each of the authors approaches the topic from a different perspective and the contributions communicate with each other. All five contributions struggle with the central problem of articulating the distinct epistemic roles of the internal and introspectable states of the inquiring subject, on the one hand, and the external and non-introspectable mind-independent items that the subject means to inquire after, on the other hand. All contributors explore this central problem, but each recommends a distinct way of making progress on it. This volume is of interest to scholars of epistemology and philosophy of perception.