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219Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of TestimonyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3). 2006.One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony--whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to,' other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argues by appeal to the need for the hearer to monitor…Read more
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151Brown on self-knowledge and discriminability1Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (3): 301-314. 2006.In her recent book Anti-Individualism and Knowledge, Jessica Brown has presented a novel answer to the self-knowledge achievement problem facing the proponent of anti-individualism. She argues that her answer is to be preferred to the traditional answer (based on Burge, 1988a). Here I present three objections to the claim that her proposed answer is to be preferred. The significance of these objections lies in what they tell us about the nature of the sort of knowledge that is in dispute. Perhap…Read more
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147Anti-Individualism, Content Preservation, and Discursive JustificationNoûs 41 (2): 178-203. 2007.Most explorations of the epistemic implications of Semantic Anti- Individualism (SAI) focus on issues of self-knowledge (first-person au- thority) and/or external-world skepticism. Less explored has been SAIs implications forthe epistemology of reasoning. In this paperI argue that SAI has some nontrivial implications on this score. I bring these out by reflecting on a problem first raised by Boghossian (1992). Whereas Boghos- sians main interest was in establishing the incompatibility of SAI and…Read more
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136Metaphysical Realism and ThoughtAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 45 (2). 2008.In this paper I argue that the implications of semantic externalism (SE) are even more far-reaching than has heretofore been acknowledged. If SE is true, then it is possible that a thinker's mental reality has joints that cannot in principle be discerned by the thinker herself.
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83The very idea of computer self-knowledge and self-deceptionMinds and Machines 7 (4): 515-529. 1997.Do computers have beliefs? I argue that anyone who answers in the affirmative holds a view that is incompatible with what I shall call the commonsense approach to the propositional attitudes. My claims shall be two. First,the commonsense view places important constraints on what can be acknowledged as a case of having a belief. Second, computers – at least those for which having a belief would be conceived as having a sentence in a belief box – fail to satisfy some of these constraints. This s…Read more
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2Internalism, externalism and the epistemology of linguistic understandingCommunication and Cognition. Monographies 41 (3-4): 191-216. 2008.
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64Epistemic Justification RevisitedJournal of Philosophical Research 41 (9999): 1-16. 2016.In his Beyond Justification, Bill Alston argued that there is no single property picked out by ‘epistemic justification,’ and that instead epistemological theory should investigate the range of epistemic desiderata that beliefs may enjoy (as well as the nature of and interconnections among the various epistemic good-making properties). In this paper I argue that none of his arguments taken singly, nor the collection as a group, gives us a reason to abandon the traditional idea that there is a pr…Read more
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110Testimony as EvidencePhilosophica 78 (2). 2006.Regarding testimony as evidence fails to predict the sort of epistemic support testimony provides for testimonial belief. As a result, testimony-based belief should not be assimilated into the category of epistemically inferential, evidence-based belief.
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54Review of Maria Frapolli (ed.), Esther Romero (ed.), Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind: Essays on Tyler Burge (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (1). 2004.
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73Assertion, Testimony, and the Epistemic Significance of SpeechLogos and Episteme 1 (1): 59-65. 2010.Whether or not all assertion counts as testimony (a matter not addressed here), it is argued that not all testimony involves assertion. Since many views in theepistemology of testimony assume that testimony requires assertion, such views are (at best) insufficiently general. This result also points to what we might call the epistemic significance of assertion as such.
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235On the Epistemic Significance of Evidence You Should Have HadEpisteme 13 (4): 449-470. 2016.Elsewhere I and others have argued that evidence one should have had can bear on the justification of one's belief, in the form of defeating one's justification. In this paper, I am interested in knowing how evidence one should have had (on the one hand) and one's higher-order evidence (on the other) interact in determinations of the justification of belief. In doing so I aim to address two types of scenario that previous discussions have left open. In one type of scenario, there is a clash betw…Read more
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57The Social Diffusion of Warrant and RationalitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1): 118-138. 2006.Many people agree that a proper epistemological treatment of testimonial knowledge will regard testimonial warrant—the total truth-conducive support enjoyed by a belief grounded on a piece of testimony —as socially diffuse, in the sense that it is not something that supervenes on the proper functionality of the hearer’s cognitive resources together with the reasons she has for accepting the testimony. After arguing for such a view, I go on to identify a challenge many people think flows from an …Read more
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140How lucky can you get?Synthese 158 (3): 315-327. 2007.In this paper, I apply Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck epistemology to the case of knowledge through testimony. I claim that Pritchard’s distinction between veritic and reflective luck provides a nice taxonomy of testimony cases, that the taxonomic categories that emerge can be used to suggest precisely what epistemic statuses are transmissible through testimony, and that the resulting picture can make clear how testimony can actually be knowledge-generating
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8The Epistemology of SilenceIn Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 243--261. 2008.
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116Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and BeyondJournal of Philosophy of Education 47 (2): 168-186. 2013.The process of education, and in particular that involving very young children, often involves students' taking their teachers' word on a good many things. At the same time, good education at every level ought to inculcate, develop, and support students' ability to think for themselves. While these two features of education need not be regarded as contradictory, it is not clear how they relate to one another, nor is it clear how (when taken together) these features ought to bear on educational p…Read more
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669Should have knownSynthese 194 (8): 2863-2894. 2017.In this paper I will be arguing that there are cases in which a subject, S, should have known that p, even though, given her state of evidence at the time, she was in no position to know it. My argument for this result will involve making two claims. The uncontroversial claim is this: S should have known that p when another person has, or would have, legitimate expectations regarding S’s epistemic condition, the satisfaction of these expectations would require that S knows that p, and S fails to…Read more
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123The Psychology and Epistemology of Self-KnowledgeSynthese 118 (2). 1999.In this paper I argue, first, that the most influential (and perhaps only acceptable) account of the epistemology of self-knowledge, developed and defended at great length in Wright (1989b) and (1989c) (among other places), leaves unanswered a question about the psychology of self-knowledge; second, that without an answer to this question about the psychology of self-knowledge, the epistemic account cannot be considered acceptable; and third, that neither Wright's own answer, nor an interpretati…Read more
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84Can Asserting that p Improve the Speaker's Epistemic Position (And Is That a Good Thing)?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1): 157-170. 2017.In this paper I argue that there are cases in which a speaker S's observation of the fact that her assertion that p is accepted by another person enhances the strength of S's own epistemic position with respect to p, as compared to S's strength of epistemic position with respect to p prior to having made the assertion. I conclude by noting that the sorts of consideration that underwrite this possibility may go some distance towards explaining several aspects of our group life as epistemic subjec…Read more
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3Putting the Norm of Assertion to Work: the Case of TestimonyIn Jessica Brown & Herman Cappelen (eds.), Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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5An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (review)Teaching Philosophy 22 (1): 84-87. 1999.
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37What do you know when you know your own thoughts?In Susana Nuccetelli (ed.), New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge, Mit Press. 2003.
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143Interpersonal epistemic entitlementsPhilosophical Issues 24 (1): 159-183. 2014.In this paper I argue that the nature of our epistemic entitlement to rely on certain belief-forming processes—perception, memory, reasoning, and perhaps others—is not restricted to one's own belief-forming processes. I argue as well that we can have access to the outputs of others’ processes, in the form of their assertions. These two points support the conclusion that epistemic entitlements are “interpersonal.” I then proceed to argue that this opens the way for a non-standard version of anti-…Read more
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98The metasemantics of memoryPhilosophical Studies 153 (1): 95-107. 2011.In Sven Bernecker’s excellent new book, Memory, he proposes an account of what we might call the “metasemantics” of memory: the conditions that determine the contents of the mental representations employed in memory. Bernecker endorses a “pastist externalist” view, according to which the content of a memory-constituting representation is fixed, in part, by the “external” conditions prevalent at the time of the tokening of the original representation. Bernecker argues that the best version of a p…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |