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94Moorean absurdities and the nature of assertionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1). 1996.I argue that Moore's propositions, for example, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' cannot be rationally believed. Their assertors either cannot be rationally believed or cannot be believed to be rational. This analysis is extended to Moorean propositions such as God knows that I am an atheist and I believe that this proposition is false. I then defend the following definition of assertion: anyone asserts that p iff that person expresses a belief that p with the …Read more
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86Justified Belief And The Infinite Regress ArgumentAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1): 85-88. 1981.The background to this paper is the question of how rational belief is possible in the light of the commonly presented infinite regress in reasons. The paper investigates the neglected question of whether this regress is vicious. I argue that given the genuine requirements of rational belief, The regress would require the rational believer to hold an infinity of beliefs, Which is impossible. The regress would not entail the rational believer holding an infinitely complex belief, Which, Admittedl…Read more
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80An Introduction to Critical and Creative Thinking: Analyzing and Evaluating Ordinary Language ReasoningInstitutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. 2015.The book aims at equipping you with 21st Century Skills key life skills that will drive your future employability, promotion and career success. These are required for effective reasoning, writing and decision-making in changing, evolving environments. You give reasons for what you do and think every day. You argue. You often argue about things that matter to you. For example you might argue that you are the best candidate for promotion, about whether your company should invest in China, about t…Read more
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75Not knowing you know: a new objection to the defeasibility theory of knowledgeAnalysis 75 (2): 213-217. 2015.Foley and Turri have recently given objections to the defeasibility theory of propositional knowledge. Here, I give an objection of a quite different stripe by looking at what the theory must say about knowing that you know. I end with some remarks on how this objection relates to rival theories and how this might be a worry for some of these
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62Inconsistency and contradictionMind 90 (360): 600-602. 1981.Inconsistency and contradiction are important concepts. Unfortunately, they are easily confused. A proposition or belief which is inconsistent is one which is self- contradictory and vice-versa. Moreover two propositions or beliefs which are contradictories are inconsistent with each other. Nonetheless it is a mistake to suppose that inconsistency is the same as contradiction.
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52Ontological disproof of God's existenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (2). 1992.An initial reading of Hume's Principle is that no necessary truth can be denied without contradiction, whereas all existential propositions can. Therefore it is self-contradictory to say,that any existential claim is necessarily true, since it follows that this claim both can and cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Thus any claim of the form 'X necessarily exists' is a self-contradiction, even if X is God
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51'p, and I have Absolutely no Justification for Believing that p': The Necessary Falsehood of Orthodox BayesianismResearch Collection School of Social Sciences. 2006.Orthodox Bayesianism tells a story about the epistemic trajectory of an ideally rational agent. The agent begins with a ‘prior’ probability function; thereafter, it conditionalizes on its evidence as it comes in. Consider, then, such an agent at the very beginning of its trajectory. It is ideally rational, but completely ignorant of which world is actual. Call this agent ‘Superbaby’.1 Superbaby personifies the Bayesian story. We argue that it must believe ‘Moorish’ propositions of the form.
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48Defining the 'social' in 'social entrepreneurship': Altruism and entrepreneurshipInternational Entrepreneurship and Management Journal 1 353-365. 2005.What is social entrepreneurship? In, particular, what’s so social about it? Understanding what social entrepreneurship is enables researchers to study the phenomenon and policy-makers to design measures to encourage it. However, such an understanding is lacking partly because there is no universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship as yet. In this paper, we suggest a definition of social entrepreneurship that intuitively accords with what is generally accepted as entrepreneurship and that…Read more
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43In “Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research,” Lee and Baskerville try to clarify generalization and classify it into four types. Unfortunately, their account is problematic. We propose repairs. Central among these is our balance-of-evidence argument that we should adopt the view that Hume’s problem of induction has a solution, even if we do not know what it is. We build upon this by proposing an alternative classification of induction. There are five types of generalization…Read more
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40Valuable Asymmetrical FriendshipsPhilosophy 92 (1): 51-76. 2016.Aristotle distinguishes friendships of pleasure or utility from more valuable ‘character friendships’ in which the friend cares for the other qua person for the other’s own sake. Aristotle and some neo-Aristotelians require such friends to be fairly strictly symmetrical in their separateness of identity from each other, in the degree to which they identify with each other, and in the degree to which they are virtuous. We argue that there is a neglected form of valuable friendship–neither of frie…Read more
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40Once you think you’re wrong, you must be right: new versions of the preface paradoxSynthese 198 (Suppl 7): 1801-1825. 2018.I argue that there are living and everyday case in which rationality requires you, as a non-idealized human thinker, to have inconsistent beliefs while recognizing the inconsistency. I defend my argument against classical and insightful objections by Doris Olin, as well as others. I consider three versions of the preface paradox as candidate cases, including Makinson’s original version. None is free from objection. However, there is a fourth version, Modesty, that supposes that you believe that …Read more
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39Moore's paradox, Evans's principle, and iterated beliefsIn Mitchell S. Green & John N. Williams (eds.), Moore's Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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36Moore’s Paradox for GodPhilosophia 47 (1): 265-270. 2019.I argue that ‘Moore’s paradox for God’. I do not believe this proposition shows that nobody can be both omniscient and rational in all her beliefs. I then anticipate and rebut three objections to my argument.
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34Assertion and Its Many NormsManuscrito 40 (4): 39-76. 2017.ABSTRACT Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content. I show that these fail to support it and that the emptiness of the knowledge account renders mysterious why breaking the knowledge rule should be a source of criticism. I argue that focussing exclusively on the sincerity of the speech-act of letting one know engenders a …Read more
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34In defence of an argument for Evans's principle: a rejoinder to VahidAnalysis 66 (2): 167-170. 2006.
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32'p, And I Have Absolutely No Justification for Believing that p': The Incoherence of BayesianismResearch Collection School of Social Sciences. 2005.Bayesianism tells a story about the epistemic trajectory of an ideally rational agent. The agent begins with a ‘prior’ probability function; thereafter, it conditionalizes on its evidence as it comes in. Consider, then, such an agent at the very beginning of its trajectory. It is ideally rational, but completely ignorant of which world is actual. Let us call this agent ‘superbaby’. We show that superbaby is committed to sincerely asserting propositions of the form [p and I am not justified in be…Read more
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27An Introduction to Historical Epistemology [book review] (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1): 312-314. 1996.
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25A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox: Belief, Knowledge, Assertion and RationalityOxford University Press. 2023.A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with Moore's paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams. The book offers a comprehensive account of Moore's paradox in thought and speech, both in its comissive and omissive forms. Williams argues that Moorean absurdity comes in degrees, and shows that contrary to one tradition in the literature on Moore's Paradox, we cannot explain Moorean absurdity in speech in terms of M…Read more
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24Still Stuck on the Backward ClockLogos and Episteme 8 (2): 243-269. 2017.Neil Sinhababu and I presented Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge. In their latest defence of the truth-tracking theories, “Methods Matter: Beating the Backward Clock,” Fred Adams, John A. Barker and Murray Clarke try again to defend Nozick’s and Fred Dretske’s early analysis of propositional knowledge against Backward Clock. They allege failure of truth-adherence, mistakes on my part about methods, and appeal to chari…Read more
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24Classifying Generalization: Paradigm War or Abuse of Terminology?Journal of Information Technology 30 (1): 18-19. 2015.Lee and Baskerville (2003) attempted to clarify the concept of generalization and classify it into four types. In Tsang and Williams (2012) we objected to their account of generalization as well as their classification and offered repairs. Then we proposed a classification of induction, within which we distinguished five types of generalization. In their (2012) rejoinder, they argue that their classification is compatible with ours, claiming that theirs offers a ‘new language.’ Insofar as we res…Read more
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23Fact-tracking belief and the backward clock: A reply to Adams, Barker and ClarkeManuscrito 41 (3): 29-50. 2018.In “The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety”, Neil Sinhababu and I gave Backward Clock, a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of knowledge. In “Knowledge as Fact-Tracking True Belief”, Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke propose that a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. They argue that their analysis evades Ba…Read more
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22Further Reflection on True Successors and TraditionsSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (9): 12-16. 2013.In his “Reply to Williams” (2013), a response to my “David-Hillel Ruben’s ‘Traditions and True Successors’: A Critical Reply.” (2013), David Ruben reports that there is much that we disagree about concerning the nature of true succession. I am not entirely persuaded by what he says of these disagreements.
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22Confucius, mencius, and the notion of true successionPhilosophy East and West 38 (2): 157-171. 1988.
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21True Succession and Inheritance of Traditions: Looking Back on the DebateSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3 (9): 15-19. 2014.Starting with my (1988) and largely continued by David Ruben’s instructive (2013a), a lively debate has occurred over how one is to analyze the concepts of true succession and membership of a tradition in order to identify the source of the intractability typically found in disputes in which two groups each claim that it, but not its rival, is in the tradition of some earlier group. This debate was initially between myself (2013a, 2013b) and Ruben (2013b, 2013c) but later involved Samuel Lebens …Read more
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21David-Hillel Ruben’s 'Traditions and True Successors': A Critical ReplySocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (7): 40-45. 2013.
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17Knowledge Puzzles: An Introduction to Epistemology [book review] (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (4): 562. 1997.
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Areas of Specialization
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Applied Ethics, Miscellaneous |
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Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Knowledge |
Applied Ethics, Miscellaneous |