Pints With Aquinas

Can You Actually Know Anything? Epistemology for Normal People (Dr. Trent Dougherty) | Ep. 571

60 snips
Mar 23, 2026
Guest
Trent Dougherty
Dr. Trent Dougherty, Catholic philosopher and epistemologist known for work on evidentialism and philosophy of religion, joins to explore what it means to know something. The conversation hits Descartes, Gettier puzzles, degrees of belief, and how experience grounds knowledge. Personal struggles, burnout, recovery, and faith weave through rigorous philosophical debate.
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ADVICE

Proportion Your Belief To The Weight Of Reasons

  • Weigh reasons probabilistically: add independent reasons to raise your credence.
  • Dougherty explains treating reasons like additive units yields a natural Bayesian structure for everyday justification.
INSIGHT

'Do You Know' Changes With Conversation Rules

  • Language use and conversational context change what 'know' expresses, so skeptical probing often shifts the game.
  • Dougherty references Lewis’s scorekeeping: intonation and context raise standards and alter what's being asked.
INSIGHT

Evident Propositions Form Epistemic Bedrock

  • Some propositions are 'evident'—we cannot see them as false—and these form epistemic bedrock.
  • Examples include logical or conceptual truths (transitivity of equality) that resist skeptical overturning.
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