Keith Lehrer
American philosopher (born 1936)
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Education and career
Lehrer received his PhD in philosophy from Brown University where he studied under Richard Clyde Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. He joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1973, where he helped build a major graduate program. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Rochester.
His research interests include epistemology, free will, rational consensus, Thomas Reid and, recently, aesthetics.
Lehrer is a former president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) and also served as the APA executive director for a number of years. He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lehrer, and his wife Adrienne Lehrer, are also artists. Their work has been on display at the Vincent Gallery in Coconut Grove, Florida, concurrent with his stay at the University of Miami, where he was a visiting professor.
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Philosophical work
Lehrer is best known for his defense of a coherentist theory of knowledge. According to Lehrer, "a person is justified in accepting a proposition just in case that proposition coheres with the relevant part of her cognitive system."
Lehrer's work, "Why Not Scepticism?" (WNS) is used in many introductory philosophy courses as a coherent and readable introduction to the subject (1971 Philosophical Forum, vol. II, pp. 283–298). In part VI he critiques Wittgenstein's view that philosophical skepticism is “disguised nonsense” (Philosophical Investigations §464). In Lehrer's textbook, Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction 4th ed. (PPA), he distinguishes two kinds of nonsense, “epistemic” and “semantic,” and presents examples of each. Lehrer argues that skepticism appears to be preposterously false and therefore is nonsense only in the epistemic sense. Yet the skeptic's sentences are perfectly well-formed and meaningful in the semantic sense (PPA pp 59–60). A Wittgensteinian would respond that the skeptic's well-formed syntax is deceptive. By misusing everyday epistemic language, Lehrer creates the illusion that skepticism is also semantically meaningful. If we cannot know anything for certain as Lehrer claims, then according to Wittgenstein we cannot be certain of the meaning of our words either (On Certainty §114). In Wittgenstein's view, both skepticism and its negation (realism) are epistemic nonsense cloaked in the well-formed syntax of ordinary language. The mistake according to Wittgenstein lies in the assumption that well-formed sentences are semantically meaningful regardless of how one uses them in philosophical contexts. Lehrer on the other hand argues that philosophers have an “extraordinary” linguistic dispensation that allows them to meaningfully engage in epistemic nonsense (WNS p 289). (See also Nonsense § Disguised Epistemic Nonsense)
He has authored seven books on philosophical subjects, and over 170 scholarly articles. Lehrer is perhaps best known for his defense of the coherence theory of justification in epistemology. He is the originator of the widely discussed TrueTemp example Archived 2012-04-25 at the Wayback Machine.