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1224Philosophical intuitions: Their target, their source, and their epistemic statusGrazer Philosophische Studien 74 (1): 1-26. 2007.Intuitions play a critical role in analytical philosophical activity. But do they qualify as genuine evidence for the sorts of conclusions philosophers seek? Skeptical arguments against intuitions are reviewed, and a variety of ways of trying to legitimate them are considered. A defense is offered of their evidential status by showing how their evidential status can be embedded in a naturalistic framework.
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77Social Routes to Belief and KnowledgeThe Monist 84 (3): 346-367. 2001.Many of the cognitive and social sciences deal with the question of how beliefs or belief-like states are produced and transmitted to others. Let us call any account or theory of belief-formation and propagation a doxology. I don’t use that term, of course, in the religious or theological sense. Rather, I borrow the Greek term ‘doxa’ for belief or opinion, and use ‘doxology’ to mean the study or theory of belief-forming processes. How is doxology related to epistemology? Epistemology is the theo…Read more
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266Epistemology and the evidential status of introspective reports IJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8): 1-16. 2004.The question of trusting introspective reports is a question about evidential warrant or justification. It is therefore a question of epistemology, and it behoves us to approach it within the framework of epistemology, which addresses evidential warrant across a broad spectrum of topics and sources. This paper examines the scientific status of introspective reports from the vantage point of general epistemological theorizing
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27Social epistemics and social psychologySocial Epistemology 5 (2). 1991.J. Angelo Corlett suggests a revision in the scope of social epistemics as I have depicted it. Specifically, he suggests that social epistemics should encompass questions about certain psychological processes – viz. social cognitive processes – whereas my original proposal assigned the task of evaluating psychological processes to individual epistemics only. How compelling is this suggestion, and how consonant is it with the general program of epistemics?
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22Desire, intention, and the simulation theoryIn Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses & Dare A. Baldwin (eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, Mit Press. pp. 207-225. 2001.
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385Why social epistemology is real epistemologyIn Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-29. 2008.
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28Commentary on Jack Lyons’s Perception and Basic BeliefsPhilosophical Studies 153 (3): 457-466. 2011.This book deserves kudos. It presents one of the more novel versions of reliabilism to appear in recent years. The style is fast-paced and energetic, with no sacrifice in philosophical precision. It applies original interpretations of perceptual science to central issues in traditional epistemology, and should thereby earn itself a prominent place in the naturalistic epistemology literature. Finally, the book is more comprehensive than its title suggests. It illuminates a great many issues of tr…Read more
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38Varieties of cognitive appraisalNoûs 13 (1): 23-38. 1979.The aim of this paper is to advance a certain non-traditional approach to epistemology. My method of introducing this approach is to compare and contrast it with more familiar epistemological orientations. Thus, the format of the paper is a survey – admittedly not exhaustive – of a variety of tasks and perspectives that epistemologists have undertaken and might undertake.
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8Innate knowledgeIn Stephen P. Stich (ed.), Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 111-120. 1975.
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93Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (edited book)MIT Press. 1993.This collection of readings shows how cognitive science can influence most of the primary branches of philosophy, as well as how philosophy critically examines the foundations of cognitive science. Its broad coverage extends beyond current texts that focus mainly on the impact of cognitive science on philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, to include materials that are relevant to five other branches of philosophy: epistemology, philosophy of science (and mathematics), metaphysics, lang…Read more
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279Group Knowledge Versus Group Rationality: Two Approaches to Social EpistemologyEpisteme 1 (1): 11-22. 2004.Social epistemology is a many-splendored subject. Different theorists adopt different approaches and the options are quite diverse, often orthogonal to one another. The approach I favor is to examine social practices in terms of their impact on knowledge acquisition . This has at least two virtues: it displays continuity with traditional epistemology, which historically focuses on knowledge, and it intersects with the concerns of practical life, which are pervasively affected by what people know…Read more
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29Précis of Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of MindreadingPhilosophical Studies 144 (3): 431-434. 2009.In the second half of the twentieth-century, the traditional problem of other minds was re-focused on special problems with propositional attitudes and how we attribute them to others. How do ordinary people, with no education in scientific psychology, understand and ascribe such complex, unobservable states? In different terminology, how do they go about "interpreting" their peers?
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120Argumentation and Interpersonal JustificationArgumentation 11 (2): 155-164. 1997.There are distinct but legitimate notions of both personal justification and interpersonal justification. Interpersonal justification is definable in terms of personal justification. A connection is established between good argumentation and interpersonal justification
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834Toward a synthesis of reliabilism and evidentialism? Or: evidentialism's troubles, reliabilism's rescue packageIn Trent Dougherty (ed.), Evidentialism and its Discontents, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 254-280. 2011.For most of their respective existences, reliabilism and evidentialism (that is, process reliabilism and mentalist evidentialism) have been rivals. They are generally viewed as incompatible, even antithetical, theories of justification.1 But a few people are beginning to re-think this notion. Perhaps an ideal theory would be a hybrid of the two, combining the best elements of each theory. Juan Comesana (forthcoming) takes this point of view and constructs a position called “Evidentialist Reliabi…Read more
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127Empathy, Mind, and MoralsProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66 (3): 17-41. 1992.Early Greek philosophers doubled as natural scientists; that is a common-place. It is equally true, though less often remarked, that numerous historical philosophers doubled as cognitive scientists. They constructed models of mental faculties in much the spirit of modern cognitive science, for which they are widely cited as precursors in the cognitive science literature. Today, of course, there is more emphasis on experiment, and greater division of labor. Philosophers focus on theory, foundatio…Read more
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41Psychology and Philosophical AnalysisProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 89 (1): 195-209. 1989.It is often said that philosophical analysis is an a priori enterprise. Since it prominently features thought experiments designed to elicit the meaning, or semantic properties, of words in one's own language, it seems to be a purely reflective inquiry, requiring no observational or empirical component. I too have sometimes acquiesced in this sort of view. While arguing that certain phases of epistemology require input from psychology and other cognitive sciences, I have granted that the more 'c…Read more
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120Ethics and cognitive scienceEthics 103 (2): 337-360. 1993.Findings and theories in cognitive science have been increasingly important in many areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The time is ripe to examine its potential applications to moral theory as well. This article does not aspire to a comprehensive treatment of the subject. It merely aims to illustrate the ways in which research in cognitive science can bear on the concerns of moral philosophers. For present purposes the label 'cognitive s…Read more
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38Legal evidenceIn Martin P. Golding & William A. Edmundson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 163-175. 2004.This chapter contains section titled: Scope of the Topic A Unified Theory: The Search for Truth The Adversary System and the Search for Truth Truth, Reliability, and Bayesianism Applications of Quasi‐objective Bayesianism References Further Reading.
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364Strong and weak justificationPhilosophical Perspectives 2 51-69. 1987.It is common in recent epistemology to distinguish different senses, or conceptions, of epistemic justification. The proposed oppositions include the objective/subjective, internalist/externalist, regulative/nonregulative, resource-relative/resource-independent, personal/verific, and deontological/evaluative conceptions of justification. In some of these cases, writers regard both members of the contrasting pair as legitimate; in other cases only one member. In this paper I want to propose anoth…Read more
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89Chisholm's theory of actionPhilosophia 7 (3-4): 583-596. 1978.In any generation there are relatively few people who make major original contributions to even a single area of philosophy. But the man whose work is the topic of this conference has made such contributions not only in a single field, but in several. This morning and afternoon we have devoted our attention to Chisholm's epistemology, the breadth and significance of which is evident. Equally deserving of our attention, however, are his contributions to the theory of action and metaphysics, and w…Read more
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109What Is Democracy (and What Is Its Raison D’Etre)?Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2): 233-256. 2015.This article aims to say what democracy is or what the predicate ‘democratic’ means, as opposed to saying what is good, right, or desirable about it. The basic idea—by no means a novel one—is that a democratic system is one that features substantial equality of political power. More distinctively it is argued that ‘democratic’ is a relative gradable adjective, the use of which permits different, contextually determined thresholds of democraticness. Thus, a system can be correctly called ‘democra…Read more
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35Replies to Perner and Brandl, Saxe, Vignemont, and CarruthersPhilosophical Studies 144 (3): 477-491. 2009.
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89Two Routes to Empathy: Insights from Cognitive NeuroscienceIn Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie (eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 31-44. 2011.
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1055Internalism exposedJournal of Philosophy 96 (6): 271-293. 1999.In recent decades, epistemology has witnessed the development and growth of externalist theories of knowledge and justification. Critics of externalism have focused a bright spotlight on this approach and judged it unsuitable for realizing the true and original goals of epistemology. Their own favored approach, internalism, is defended as a preferable approach to the traditional concept of epistemic justification. I shall turn the spotlight toward internalism and its most prominent rationale, re…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |