Chapter 5 - A Second Philosophy of logic

Summary

In general, the Second Philosopher's epistemological investigations take the form of asking how human beings, as described in biology, physiology, psychology, linguistics, and so on come to have reliable beliefs about the world as described in physics, chemistry, botany, astronomy, and so on. Second Philosopher's focus is somewhat broader; not only does she study how people come to form beliefs about the world, she also takes it upon herself to match these beliefs up with what her other inquiries have told her about how the world actually is, and to assess which types of belief-forming processes, in which circumstances, are reliable. After all, even Second Philosophy and Second Philosopher are used to describe her and her behavior. In any case, philosophy or not, the Second Philosopher's investigations do tell us something about the nature of the inference about the foreign coin.