Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The next 20 pages or so

If all goes well, much of this week will be spent writing 20 pages or so of material, focusing on Cuneo's work. Unless I lose faith in these arguments between now and then, here's a first outline of what I hope to do:

I. Cuneo's Core Argument
A. Limitations of Companions in Guilt style arguments
B. Doubts about explanatory argument
C. Doubts about argument from disagreement
D. Diagnose his successes--normativity of epistemology

II. Cuneo's Backup Argument (The Normative Web)
A. Reconstruct (Chap 2 and Chap 8)
B. Proves too much? Other hybrid statements from science
C. Does epistemology hybridize with many other discourses?
D. Differences between ethics and epistemology
E. I do see what he's saying though, and it is attractive. It does work nicely, so maybe I could patch up these arguments and defend Cuneo's web.

Then, my hope is to have a brilliant insight that allows me to write a third part:

III. My brilliant insight on Ethics, Epistemology, and Everything
A. Hmmm...what could this brilliant insight be?
B. What would it mean if epistemology is normative but unlike ethics in other ways?
C. Like an existence theorem in math, you really wanna be able to construct the object whose existence you've proven. Likewise, this sort of argument shows that there is a flaw in our arguments that poke holes in normative existants, and we have to figure out where that went wrong. Maybe?
D. Maybe there's another way to argue for Cuneo's Normative Web?

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