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272Sensory Modality and Perceptual ReasonsEpisteme 1-7. forthcoming.Perception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder’s account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both externalism and inte…Read more
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77Reasons FirstOxford University Press. 2021.Reasons First explores the hypothesis that reasons have a basic explanatory role in ethics and epistemology. While widely accepted concerning moral worth, Schroeder argues that this idea also illuminates some long-standing puzzles to do with knowledge.
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41Expressing Our Attitudes: Explanation and Expression in Ethics, Volume 2Oxford University Press. 2015.When the logical positivists espoused emotivism as a theory of moral discourse, they assumed that their general theories of meaning could be straightforwardly applied to the subject of metaethics. The philosophical research program of expressivism, emotivism's contemporary heir, has called this assumption into question. In this volume Mark Schroeder argues that the only plausible ways of developing expressivism or similar views require us to re-think what we may have thought that we knew about p…Read more
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338Treating like a childAnalytic Philosophy 63 (2): 73-89. 2020.Analytic Philosophy, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 73-89, June 2022.
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The Humean Theory of ReasonsIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume Ii, Clarendon Press. 2007.
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148Sins of ThoughtFaith and Philosophy 37 (3): 273-293. 2020.According to the Book of Common Prayer, we have sinned against God “in thought, word, and deed.” In this paper I’ll explore one way of understanding what it might mean to sin against God in thought—the idea that we can at least potentially wrong God by what we believe. I will be interested in the philosophical tenability of this idea, and particularly in its potential consequences for the epistemology of religious belief and the problem of evil.
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855Desiring under the Proper GuiseOxford Studies in Metaethics 14 121-143. 2019.According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of content determinat…Read more
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197The Importance of Being in a Position to KnowPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2): 457-462. 2020.
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1Value and the Right Kind of ReasonIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 5, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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494Attributing error without taking a standPhilosophical Studies 176 (6): 1453-1471. 2019.Moral error theory is the doctrine that our first-order moral commitments are pervaded by systematic error. It has been objected that this makes the error theory itself a position in first-order moral theory that should be judged by the standards of competing first-order moral theories :87–139, 1996) and Kramer. Kramer: “the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. It is not something that can adequately be contested or confirmed through n…Read more
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24Being Realistic About Reasons, by T.M. Scanlon: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. x + 132, US$35 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 195-198. 2015.
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182Willing BeliefBrill. forthcoming._ Source: _Page Count 22 In _Unbelievable Errors_, Bart Streumer offers resourceful arguments against each of non-reductive realism, reductive realism, and non-cognitivism, in order to motivate his version of the normative error theory, according to which normative predicates ascribe properties that do not exist. In this contribution, I argue that none of the steps of this master argument succeed, and that Streumer’s arguments leave puzzles about what it means to ascribe a property at all.
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37Ensuring a Future for Open-Access PublishingJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12 (1). 2017.
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303When Beliefs WrongPhilosophical Topics 46 (1): 115-127. 2018.Most philosophers find it puzzling how beliefs could wrong, and this leads them to conclude that they do not. So there is much philosophical work to be done in sorting out whether I am right to say that they do, as well as how this could be so. But in this paper I will take for granted that beliefs can wrong, and ask instead when beliefs wrong. My answer will be that beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. This answer has three parts: that beliefs wrong only when they are false, that beliefs w…Read more
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4942Doxastic WrongingIn Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 181-205. 2019.In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of raci…Read more
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48Book Reviews Horty , John F . Reasons as Defaults . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 272. $65.00 (cloth)Ethics 123 (1): 162-167. 2012.
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203Getting Perspective on Objective ReasonsEthics 128 (2): 289-319. 2018.This article considers two important problems for the idea that what we ought to do is determined by the balance of competing reasons. The problems are distinct, but the object of the article is to explore how they admit of a single solution. It is a consequence of this solution that objective reasons—facts that count in favor—are in an important sense less objective than they have consistently been assumed to be. This raises but does not answer the question as to what evidence we ever had that …Read more
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53The Epistemic Consequences of Forced ChoiceLogos and Episteme 8 (3): 365-374. 2017.In “Stakes, Withholding, and Pragmatic Encroachment on Knowledge,” I used a variety of cases, including cases of forced choice, to illustrate my explanation of how and why some pragmatic factors, but not others, can affect whether an agent knows. In his recent contribution, Andy Mueller argues that cases of forced choice actually pose a dilemma for my account. In this paper I reply.
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48Being for: Evaluating the semantic program of expressivism * by mark Schroeder * clarendon press, 2008. XVI + 198 pp. 27.50: Summary (review)Analysis 70 (1): 101-104. 2010.My project in Being For is both constructive and negative. The main aim of the book is to take the core ideas of meta-ethical expressivism as far as they can go, and to try to develop a version of expressivism that solves many of the more straightforward open problems that have faced the view without being squarely confronted. In doing so, I develop an expressivist framework that I call biforcated attitude semantics, which I claim has the minimal structural features required in order to solve so…Read more
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69Ought, Agents, and ActionsPhilosophical Review 119 (3): 1-41. 2010.According to a naive view sometimes apparent in the writings of moral philosophers, 'ought' often expresses a relation between agents and actions—the relation that obtains between an agent and an action when that action is what that agent ought to do. It is not part of this naive view that 'ought' always expresses this relation—adherents of the naive view are happy to allow that 'ought' also has an evaluative sense, on which it means, roughly, that were things ideal, some proposition would be th…Read more
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105Cudworth and Normative ExplanationsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (3): 1-28. 2005.Moral theories usually aspire to be explanatory – to tell us why something is wrong, why it is good, or why you ought to do it. So it is worth knowing how moral explanations differ, if they do, from explanations of other things. This paper uncovers a common unarticulated theory about how normative explanations must work – that they must follow what I call the Standard Model. Though the Standard Model Theory has many implications, in this paper I focus primarily on only one. It plays a crucial ro…Read more
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197Being for: evaluating the semantic program of expressivismOxford University Press. 2008.Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitment…Read more
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229Slaves of the passionsOxford University Press. 2007.Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record straight, by advancing a…Read more
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6Normative Ethics and MetaethicsIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 674-686. 2017.
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195In this paper I will be concerned with the question of the extent to which semantics can be thought of as a purely formal exercise, which we can engage in in a way that is neutral with respect to how our formal system is to be interpreted. I will be arguing, to the contrary, that the features of the formal systems which we use to do semantics are closely linked, in several different ways, to the interpretation that we give to those formal systems. The occasion for this question, and the main exa…Read more
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266Value theoryStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.The term “value theory” is used in at least three different ways in philosophy. In its broadest sense, “value theory” is a catch-all label used to encompass all branches of moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and sometimes feminist philosophy and the philosophy of religion — whatever areas of philosophy are deemed to encompass some “evaluative” aspect. In its narrowest sense, “value theory” is used for a relatively narrow area of normative ethical theory of particular …Read more
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |