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54The Asymmetry Thesis and the Doctrine of Normative DefeatAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 339-352. 2017.It is widely considered a truism that the only evidence that can provide justification for one's belief that p is evidence in one's possession. At the same time, a good many epistemologists accept another claim seemingly in tension with this "truism," to the effect that evidence not in one's possession can defeat or undermine the justification for one's belief that p. Anyone who accepts both of these claims accepts what I will call the asymmetry thesis: while evidence in one's possession can eit…Read more
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99II- Arrogance, Silence, and SilencingAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90 (1): 93-112. 2016.Alessandra Tanesini’s insightful paper explores the moral and epistemic harms of arrogance, particularly in conversation. Of special interest to her is the phenomenon of arrogance-induced silencing, whereby one speaker’s arrogance either prevents another from speaking altogether or else undermines her capacity to produce certain speech acts such as assertions. I am broadly sympathetic to many of Tanesini’s claims about the harms associated with this sort of silencing. In this paper I propose to …Read more
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376Defending Philosophy in the Face of Systematic DisagreementIn Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Disagreement and Skepticism, Routledge. pp. 277-294. 2013.I believe that the sort of disagreements we encounter in philosophy—disagreements that often take the form that I have elsewhere called system- atic peer disagreements—make it unreasonable to think that there is any knowledge, or even justified belief, when the disagreements themselves are systematic. I readily acknowledge that this skeptical view is quite controversial; I suspect many are unconvinced. However, I will not be defending it here. Rather, I will be exploring a worry, or set of worri…Read more
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129Epistemically engineered environmentsSynthese 197 (7): 2783-2802. 2020.In other work I have defended the claim that, when we rely on other speakers by accepting what they tell us, our reliance on them differs in epistemically relevant ways from our reliance on instruments, when we rely on them by accepting what they “tell” us. However, where I have explored the former sort of reliance at great length, I have not done so with the latter. In this paper my aim is to do so. My key notions will be those of our social practices, the normative expectations that are sancti…Read more
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38Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification * By SANFORD C. GOLDBERG (review)Analysis 69 (3): 582-585. 2009.Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them …Read more
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36Testimonial Knowledge in Early Childhood, Revisited1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1): 1-36. 2008.Many epistemologists agree that even very young children sometimes acquire knowledge through testimony. In this paper I address two challenges facing this view. The first (building on a point made in Lackey (2005)) is the defeater challenge, which is to square the hypothesis that very young children acquire testimonial knowledge with the fact that children (whose cognitive immaturity prevents them from having or appreciating reasons) cannot be said to satisfy the No‐Defeaters condition on knowle…Read more
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15Anti‐Individualism and Knowledge (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 515-518. 2007.
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41Word-ambiguity, world-switching, and knowledge of content: reply to BruecknerAnalysis 59 (3): 212-217. 1999.
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16Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2007.To what extent are meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, determined by aspects of the 'outside world'? Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents twelve specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and the connections between them. In so doing, it examines how issues connected with the nature of mind and language bear on issues about the nature of knowledge and justification. Topics discussed include the compatibility o…Read more
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1Transparency as Avowability: An Essay on Intentional Self-KnowledgeDissertation, Columbia University. 1995.My dissertation presents an argument for and defense of the doctrine of transparency about mental content. This doctrine holds that for any thought a thinker knows the content of her thought in an immediate and non-inferential way; and that for any thoughts a thinker can discriminate between thoughts with different contents. ;In the opening chapter I give an argument in support of the doctrine of transparency. The suggestion is that Crispin Wright's argument for a "minimalist" realism about inte…Read more
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64Comments on Miranda Fricker's Epistemic InjusticeEpisteme 7 (2): 138-150. 2010.Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony…Read more
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113Radical interpretation, understanding, and the testimonial transmission of knowledgeSynthese 138 (3). 2004.In this paper I argue that RadicalInterpretation (RI), taken to be a methodological doctrine regarding the conditions under which an interpretation of an utterance is both warranted and correct, has unacceptable implications for the conditions on (ascriptions of) understanding. The notion of understanding at play is that which underwrites the testimonial transmission of knowledge. After developing this notion I argue that, on the assumption of RI, hearers will fail to have such understanding in …Read more
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105Inclusiveness in the face of anticipated disagreementSynthese 190 (7): 1189-1207. 2013.This paper discusses the epistemic outcomes of following a belief-forming policy of inclusiveness under conditions in which one anticipates systematic disagreement with one’s interlocutors. These cases highlight the possibility of distinctly epistemic costs of inclusiveness, in the form of lost knowledge of or a diminishment in one’s rational confidence in a proposition. It is somewhat controversial whether following a policy of inclusiveness under such circumstances will have such costs; this w…Read more
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25Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Skepticism: New Essays (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. The chapters examine a wide range of topics in the p…Read more
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126Testimonially based knowledge from false testimonyPhilosophical Quarterly 51 (205): 512-526. 2001.Philosophical Quarterly 51:205, 512-26 (October 2001).
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Department of Philosophy 1427 Paterson Office Tower University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0027Communication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 33 (3/4): 249-286. 2000.
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41Reported Speech and the Epistemology of TestimonyProtoSociology 17 59-77. 2002.Speech reports of the form ‘A said that p’ are sometimes used by a speaker S as a reason in support of S’s own claim to know that p – in particular, when S’s claim to know is made on the basis of A’s testimony. In this paper I appeal to intuitions regarding the epistemology of testimony to argue that such ‘testimonial’ uses of speech reports ought to be ascribed their strict de dicto truth conditions. This result is then used as the basis for the claim that, no matter how they are used, all spee…Read more
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172The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflection on Hilary Putnam’s “the Meaning of ”Meaning’ ‘ (edited book)M. E. Sharpe. 1996.This volume will acquaint novice philosophers with one of the most important debates in twentieth-century philosophy, and will provide seasoned readers with a ...
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110Belief and its linguistic expression: Toward a belief box account of first-person authorityPhilosophical Psychology 1 (1): 65-76. 2002.In this paper I characterize the problem of first-person authority as it confronts the proponent of the belief box conception of belief, and I develop the groundwork for a belief box account of that authority. If acceptable, the belief box account calls into question (by undermining a popular motivation for) the thesis that first-person authority is not to be traced to a truth-tracking relation between first-person opinions themselves and the beliefs which they are about.
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97The social virtues: Two accounts (review)Acta Analytica 24 (4): 237-248. 2009.Social (epistemic) virtues are the virtues bound up with those forms of inquiry involved in social routes to knowledge. A thoroughly individualistic account of the social virtues endorses two claims: (1) we can fully characterize the nature of the social virtues independent of the social factors that are typically in play when these virtues are exemplified, and (2) even when a subject’s route to knowledge is social, the only epistemic virtues that are relevant to her acquisition of knowledge are…Read more
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131Anti-individualism, conceptual omniscience, and skepticismPhilosophical Studies 116 (1): 53-78. 2003.Given anti-individualism, a subject might have a priori (non-empirical)knowledge that she herself is thinking that p, have complete and exhaustive explicational knowledge of all of the concepts composing the content that p, and yet still need empirical information (e.g. regarding her embedding conditions and history) prior to being in a position to apply her exhaustive conceptual knowledge in a knowledgeable way to the thought that p. This result should be welcomed by anti-individualists: it squ…Read more
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8Mentalistic explanation and mental causationManuscrito 25 (3): 199-216. 2002.In this paper I present an internal difficulty for the hypothesis that mentalistic explanation is causal explanation. My thesis is that intuitively acceptable mentalistic explanations appear to violate constraints imposed by the mental causation hypothesis
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160Internalism and externalism in semantics and epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2007.Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents eleven specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and ...
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |