charge sheet against linda zagzebski (with date of her paper corrected and both of my papers supplied; should be much clearer now; sorry!). originally my concern was more to show that i invented the swamping problem. i won't be accusing anyone else of plagiarism, but i do intend to show that this paper (section III) and this one (section IV) state the problem quite clearly in very much the terms in which it came to be expressed, in terms of epistemological instrumentalism, the ultimacy of knowledge as an epistemic value, and the truth-conduciveness of justification, as well as the use of it to attack reliabilism.
the clearest appropriations are from the earlier paper in the american philosophical quarterly, 1991: "knowledge is merely true belief."
zagzebski uses the argument to motivate virtue epistemology construed as a theory of justification, and actually i think that is a good use of it and a good argument for virtue epistemology (though i still will argue for k=tb). i was getting to be close friends with james montmarquet at that point, though i can't really remember the order of the writing and the friendship. seems like we should have realized this? or perhaps we did but never really did anything about it. but at any rate, in my taxonomy, virtue epistemology qua theory of justification would be a 'deontological' as opposed to a 'teleological' or 'intstrumental' conception of justification. i held that the swamping problem refuted instrumental conceptions of justification - first and obviously reliabilism - and that there were no plausible deontological conceptions (that is, conceptions on which justification is not criterially truth-conducive). but in that sense virtue epistemology does answer the problem.
i think it is a worthwhile or even ingenious application of the argument; in my opinion it tends to show that virtue epistemology (still on the horizon as i wrote) is the most or even only going plausible conception of justification, and hence the only known way to hold on to a justification condition against my attack. it would have been easy to credit it instead of doing what almost amounts to a cut and paste, with a paper she says she had read. i don't know why people do things like that.
to correct leiter (who may have already corrected it himself), i am not charging nehamas directly with plagiarism, but i am identifying a series of coincidences that strike me as suggestive of unseemly appropriations. but that's all i have there (scroll down). and then i think that nehamas's response, to say nothing of zagzebski's, has been damning rather than exculpating.
