Catherine Z. Elgin
Comments

• Barry Stroud: Seeing, Knowing, Understanding (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2018)
  Abstract: Seeing, Knowing, Understanding consists of a series of articles written between 2001 and 2017. Most were previously published. Apart from a couple of autobiographical pieces, they concern topics in epistemology and related fields that have preoccupied Stroud for many years - skepticism, perceptual knowledge, color, judgment. Several are Stroud's contributions to on-going debates. Stroud's epistemological position is complex. The papers on seemingly diverse topics are mutually illuminating and mutually reinforcing. Here I will focus on a line of argument that runs through the papers.
  
  
• Language, Partial Truth, and Logic (Analysis, 71, 2011, 313-322.)
  Abstract: In Hard Truths, Elijah Millgram maintains that rather than endorsing bivalence, we should recognize a plethora of partial truths. I argue that Millgram's reasons for recognizing partial truths rest on untenable conceptions of logic, truth, and language. He confuses logic with reasoning and truth with precision. Inductive, abductive, and analogical reasoning is often good reasoning. Imprecise sentences often have determinate, bivalent truth conditions. Rather than recognizing partial truths, we should consider how, when, and why sentences that are not true figure in good reasoning and contribute to understanding.
  
  
• The Legacy of 'Two Dogmas' (American Philosophical Quarterly, 48, 2011, 267-272.)
  Abstract: W. V. Quine's repudiation of the analytic/synthetic distinction is a lasting contribution to philosophy. By problematizing the notions of analyticity, a prioricity, and necessity, and the relations among them, it reconfigured the philosophical terrain and challenged philosophy's self-understanding. It argued for a holism in which philosophy is continuous with natural science, one in which scientific and philosophical desiderata trade off against one another. Even those who repudiate Quine's position frame their positions in terms of the challenges he raised.
  
  
• Keeping Things in Perspective (Philosophical Studies, 150, 2010, 439-447.)
  Abstract: Scientific realism holds that scientific representations are utterly objective. They describe the way the world is, independent of any point of view. In Scientific Representation, van Fraassen argues otherwise. If science is to afford an understanding of nature, it must be grounded in evidence. Since evidence is perspectival, science cannot vindicate its claims using only utterly objective representations. For science to do its job, it must involve perspectival representations. I explicate this argument and show its power.
  
  
• Is Understanding Factive? (Epistemic Value, ed. Duncan Pritchard, Allan Miller, Adrian Hadock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 322-330.)