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43How Confident Should the Religious Believer Be in the Face of Religious Pluralism?In Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism, Oxford University Press. pp. 65-90. 2021.
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33Brown on infallibilism’s problem with testimonyPhilosophical Studies 179 (8): 2655-2663. 2022.In this review I focus on one of Brown’s arguments against infallibilism. While Brown argues that the infallibilist cannot vindicate testimonial knowledge, I argue that her case makes assumptions that the infallibilist should reject. The upshot is two-fold: this criticism of infallibilism does not succeed, and certain assumptions about testimonial knowledge should be rejected by the fallibilist and the infallibilist alike.
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70Can the Demands of Justice Always Be Reconciled with the Demands of Epistemology? Testimonial Injustice and the Prospects of a Normative ClashInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4): 537-558. 2021.ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality in friendship, and arguments that motivate…Read more
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83On the epistemic significance of practical reasons to inquireSynthese 199 (1-2): 1641-1658. 2020.In this paper I explore the epistemic significance of practical reasons to inquire. I have in mind the range of practical reasons one might have to do such things as collect (additional) evidence, consult with various sources, employ certain methods or techniques, double-check one’s answer to a question, etc. After expanding the diet of examples in which subjects have such reasons, I appeal to features of these sorts of reason in order to question the motivation for pragmatic encroachment in epi…Read more
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125Self-Trust and Extended Trust: A Reliabilist AccountRes Philosophica 90 (2): 277-292. 2013.Where most discussions of trust focus on the rationality of trust, in this paper I explore the doxastic justification of beliefs formed through trust. I examine two forms of trust: the self-trust that is involved when one trusts one’s own basic cognitive faculties, and the interpersonal trust that is involved when one trusts another speaker. Both cases involve regarding a source of information as dependable for the truth. In thinking about the epistemic significance regarding a source in this wa…Read more
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295The Division of Epistemic LaborEpisteme 8 (1): 112-125. 2011.In this paper I formulate the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor as a thesis of epistemic dependence, illustrate several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition, and draw conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition
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117Epistemic Entitlement and LuckPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (2): 273-302. 2014.The aim of this paper is to defend a novel characterization of epistemic luck. Helping myself to the notions of epistemic entitlement and adequate explanation, I propose that a true belief suffers from epistemic luck iff an adequate explanation of the fact that the belief acquired is true must appeal to propositions to which the subject herself is not epistemically entitled. The burden of the argument is to show that there is a plausible construal of the notions of epistemic entitlement and adeq…Read more
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28Review of Katalin Farkas, The Subject's Point of View (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (5). 2009.
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165A novel (and surprising) argument against justification internalismAnalysis 72 (2): 239-243. 2012.A variant 'evil demon' case is used to argue against internalism about doxastic justification. The argument is not merely novel but surprising, since evil demon cases have long been used by internalists against externalist accounts of doxastic justification
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80Telling and the reasons of testimonyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (3): 708-714. 2021.
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62The Promise and Pitfalls of Online ‘Conversations’Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 89 177-193. 2021.Good conversations are one of the great joys of life. Online ‘conversations’ rarely seem to make the grade. In this paper I use some tools from philosophy in an attempt to illuminate what might be going wrong.
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44Skepticism and InquiryInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (3-4): 304-324. 2020.In this paper, I am interested in skepticism’s downstream effects on further inquiry. To account for these downstream effects, we need to distinguish the reasons for doubting whether p, one’s other background beliefs bearing on the prospects that further inquiry would improve one’s epistemic position on p, and the value one assigns to determining whether p. I advance two claims regarding skepticism’s downstream effects on inquiry. First, it is characteristic of “radical” forms of skepticism that…Read more
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44Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech ExchangesOxford University Press. 2020.Sanford C. Goldberg explores the source, nature, and scope of the normative expectations we have of one another as we engage in conversation. He examines two fundamental types of expectation -- epistemic and interpersonal -- that are generated by the performance of speech acts themselves.
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79Social Epistemic Normativity: The ProgramEpisteme 17 (3): 364-383. 2020.In this paper I argue that epistemically normative claims regarding what one is permitted or required to believe are sometimes true in virtue of what we owe one another as social creatures. I do not here pursue a reduction of these epistemically normative claims to claims asserting one or another interpersonal obligation, though I highlight some resources for those who would pursue such a reduction.
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9When a speaker is reported as having said soIn Alessandro Capone, Una Stojnic, Ernie Lepore, Denis Delfitto, Anne Reboul, Gaetano Fiorin, Kenneth A. Taylor, Jonathan Berg, Herbert L. Colston, Sanford C. Goldberg, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Cliff Goddard, Anna Wierzbicka, Magdalena Sztencel, Sarah E. Duffy, Alessandra Falzone, Paola Pennisi, Péter Furkó, András Kertész, Ágnes Abuczki, Alessandra Giorgi, Sona Haroutyunian, Marina Folescu, Hiroko Itakura, John C. Wakefield, Hung Yuk Lee, Sumiyo Nishiguchi, Brian E. Butler, Douglas Robinson, Kobie van Krieken, José Sanders, Grazia Basile, Antonino Bucca, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Kobie van Krieken (eds.), Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages, Springer Verlag. pp. 133-147. 2018.What do speech reports tell us about the act being reported? When such a question is pursued in connection with reports of the form ‘S said that p,’ answers typically focus on the semantic content of the speech act. Indeed, there is a familiar line of research that aims to exploit our understanding of speech reports, in order to reach conclusions about the semantic content of sentences or expressions. In this chapter I want to focus attention on another matter: the illocutionary force of the act…Read more
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72Stakes, Practical Adequacy, and the Epistemic Significance of Double-CheckingOxford Studies in Epistemology 6. 2019.In their chapter “Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes,” Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne present several challenges to the doctrine of pragmatic encroachment. In this brief reply to their chapter two things are aimed at. First, the chapter argues that there is a sense in which their case against pragmatic encroachment is a bit weaker, and another sense in which that case is much stronger, than Anderson and Hawthorne’s own argument would suggest. Second, the chapter highlights and then b…Read more
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26Doxastic Responsibility is Owed to OthersJournal of Philosophical Research 44 63-77. 2019.In this paper I argue that Rik Peels’s account of doxastic responsibility is too subjectivist, as it fails to deliver the correct verdicts in some cases in which one’s responsibilities derive from a social role and where one has misleading higher-order evidence about the first-order evidence. The take-home point is that the notion of responsibility in doxastic responsibility is something that is owed to others.
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46A normative account of epistemic luckPhilosophical Issues 29 (1): 97-109. 2019.This paper develops a normative account of epistemic luck, according to which the luckiness of epistemic luck is analyzed in terms of the expectations a subject is entitled to have when she satisfies the standards of epistemic justification. This account enables us to distinguish three types of epistemic luck—bad, good, and sheer—and to model the roles they play e.g. in Gettierization. One controversial aspect of the proposed account is that it is non‐reductive. While other approaches analyze ep…Read more
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Some Notes on the Possibility of Foundationalist JustificationIn Cherie Braden, Rodrigo Borges & Branden Fitelson (eds.), Themes From Klein, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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66Anti‐reductionism and Expected TrustPacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4): 952-970. 2019.According to anti‐reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasible) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological …Read more
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12The Oxford Handbook of Assertion (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has incre…Read more
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120What we owe each other, epistemologically speaking: ethico-political values in social epistemologySynthese 197 (10): 4407-4423. 2020.The aim of this paper is to articulate and defend a particular role for ethico-political values in social epistemology research. I begin by describing a research programme in social epistemology—one which I have introduced and defended elsewhere. I go on to argue that by the lights of this research programme, there is an important role to be played by ethico-political values in knowledge communities, and an important role in social epistemological research in describing the values inhering in pa…Read more
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113The Impossibility of Mere Animal Knowledge for Reflective SubjectsErkenntnis 85 (4): 829-840. 2020.In this paper we give reasons to think that reflective epistemic subjects cannot possess mere animal knowledge. To do so we bring together literature on defeat and higher-order evidence with literature on the distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. We then defend our argument from a series of possible objections.
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252Against epistemic partiality in friendship: value-reflecting reasonsPhilosophical Studies 176 (8): 2221-2242. 2019.It has been alleged that the demands of friendship conflict with the norms of epistemology—in particular, that there are cases in which the moral demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief :329–351, 2004; Stroud in Ethics 116:498–524, 2006; Hazlett in A luxury of the understanding: on the value of true belief, Oxford University Press, Oxfor…Read more
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46Recent Work on AssertionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 52 (4): 365-380. 2015.This paper reviews recent philosophical work on assertion, with a special focus on work exploring the theme of assertion's norm. It concludes with a brief section characterizing several open questions that might profitably be explored from this perspective.
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53To the Best of Our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic Normativity (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Sandford C. Goldberg puts forward a theory of epistemic normativity that is grounded in the things we properly expect of one another as epistemic subjects. This theory has far-reaching implications not only for the theory of epistemic normativity, but also for the nature of epistemic assessment itself.
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31The Oxford Handbook of Assertion (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has incre…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |