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227Moderate Epistemic Relativism and Our Epistemic GoalsEpisteme 4 (1): 66-92. 2007.Although radical forms of relativism are perhaps beyond the epistemological pale, I argue here that a more moderate form may be plausible, and articulate the conditions under which moderate epistemic relativism could well serve our epistemic goals. In particular, as a result of our limitations as human cognizers, we find ourselves needing to investigate the dappled and difficult world by means of competing communities of highly specialized researchers. We would do well, I argue, to admit of the …Read more
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142Jesse J. Prinz, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002 (review)Metascience 12 (3): 279-303. 2003.
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Bealer, G. (1998). “Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy,” in M. DePaul & W. Ramsey, eds., Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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502Knowledge, Noise, and Curve-Fitting: A methodological argument for JTB?In Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida & Peter David Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem, Oxford University Press. 2017.The developing body of empirical work on the "Gettier effect" indicates that, in general, the presence of a Gettier-type structure in a case makes participants less likely to attribute knowledge in that case. But is that a sufficient reason to diverge from a JTB theory of knowledge? I argue that considerations of good model selection, and worries about noise and overfitting, should lead us to consider that a live, open question. The Gettier effect is perhaps so transient, and so sensitive to ot…Read more
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58Naturalism and intuitions: Commentary on Steven Hales, relativism and the foundations of philosophyInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (2). 2008.This Article does not have an abstract
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3Configuring the Cognitive ImaginationIn Kathleen Stock & Katherine Thomsen-Jones (eds.), New Waves in Aesthetics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 203-223. 2008.
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148Competence: What's in? What's out? Who knows?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 329-330. 2010.Knobe's argument rests on a way of distinguishing performance errors from the competencies that delimit our cognitive architecture. We argue that other sorts of evidence than those that he appeals to are needed to illuminate the boundaries of our folk capacities in ways that would support his conclusions.
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175Jackson’s Empirical Assumptions (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 637-643. 2001.Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be maki…Read more
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627The Methodological Necessity of Experimental PhilosophyDiscipline Filosofiche 25 (1): 23-42. 2015.Must philosophers incorporate tools of experimental science into their methodological toolbox? I argue here that they must. Tallying up all the resources that are now part of standard practice in analytic philosophy, we see the problem that they do not include adequate resources for detecting and correcting for their own biases and proclivities towards error. Methodologically sufficient resources for error- detection and error-correction can only come, in part, from the deployment of specific me…Read more
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64Naturalism’s Perils, Naturalism’s Promises: A Comment on Appiah’s Experiments in EthicsNeuroethics 3 (3): 215-222. 2010.In his Experiments in Ethics, Appiah focuses mostly on the dimension of naturalism as a naturalism of deprivation - naturalism’s apparent robbing us of aspects of the world that we had held dear. The aim of this paper is to remind him of that naturalism has a dimension of plenitude as well - its capacity to enrich our conception of the world as well. With regard to character, we argue that scientific psychology can help provide a conception of character as dynamic, in a way that may preserve man…Read more
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32Experimentalist Rationalism, or Why It's OK if the A Priori Is Only 99.44 Percent Empirically PureIn Albert Casullo & Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), The a Priori in Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 92. 2013.
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121Thinking about the Liar, Fast and SlowIn Bradley Armour-Garb (ed.), Reflections on the Liar, Oxford University Press. pp. 39-70. 2017.The liar paradox is widely conceived as a problem for logic and semantics. On the basis of empirical studies presented here, we suggest that there is an underappreciated psychological dimension to the liar paradox and related problems, conceived as a problem for human thinkers. Specific findings suggest that how one interprets the liar sentence and similar paradoxes can vary in relation to one’s capacity for logical and reflective thought, acceptance of certain logical principles, and degree of …Read more
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28What is evaluative normativity, that we (maybe) should avoid it?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 274-275. 2011.Elqayam & Evans (E&E) argue that we should avoid evaluative normativity in our psychological theorizing. But there are two crucial issues lacking clarity in their presentation of evaluative normativity. One of them can be resolved through disambiguation, but the other points to a deeper problem: Evaluative normativity is too tightly-woven in our theorizing to be easily disentangled and discarded
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129Loose Constitutivity and Armchair PhilosophyStudia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2): 177-195. 2009.Standard philosophical methodology which proceeds by appeal to intuitions accessible "from the armchair" has come under criticism on the basis of empirical work indicating unanticipated variability of such intuitions. Loose constitutivity---the idea that intuitions are partly, but not strictly, constitutive of the concepts that appear in them---offers an interesting line of response to this empirical challenge. On a loose constitutivist view, it is unlikely that our intuitions are incorrect acro…Read more
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49Jackson's Empirical AssumptionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 637-643. 2001.Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be maki…Read more
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621Analytic epistemology and experimental philosophyPhilosophy Compass 2 (1). 2006.It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement—experimental philosophy—has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introd…Read more
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181On doing better, experimental-style (review)Philosophical Studies 145 (3). 2009.Timothy Williamson devotes significant effort in his The Philosophy of Philosophy to arguing against skepticism about judgment. One might think that the recent “experimental philosophy” challenge to the philosophical practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence is a possible target of those arguments. However, this is not so. The structure of that challenge is radically dissimilar from that of traditional skeptical arguments, and the aims of the challenge are entirely congruent with the spiri…Read more
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552How to challenge intuitions empirically without risking skepticismMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1). 2007.Using empirical evidence to attack intuitions can be epistemically dangerous, because various of the complaints that one might raise against them (e.g., that they are fallible; that we possess no non-circular defense of their reliability) can be raised just as easily against perception itself. But the opponents of intuition wish to challenge intuitions without at the same time challenging the rest of our epistemic apparatus. How might this be done? Let us use the term “hopefulness” to refer to t…Read more
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128Innateness as Closed Process InvariancePhilosophy of Science 73 (3): 323-344. 2006.Controversies over the innateness of cognitive processes, mechanisms, and structures play a persistent role in driving research in philosophy as well as the cognitive sciences, but the appropriate way to understand the category of the innate remains subject to dispute. One venerable approach in philosophy and cognitive science merely contrasts innate features with those that are learned. In fact, Jerry Fodor has recently suggested that this remains our best handle on innateness
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726Experimental Philosophy, Noisy Intuitions, and Messy InferencesIn Jennifer Nado (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy & Philosophical Methodology, Bloomsbury Academic. 2016.Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's…Read more
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40Living with innateness (and environmental dependence too)Philosophical Psychology 21 (3). 2008.Griffiths and Machery contend that the concept of innateness should be dispensed with in the sciences. We contend that, once that concept is properly understood as what we have called 'closed process invariance', it is still of significant use in the sciences, especially cognitive science.
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116Cappelen between rock and a hard placePhilosophical Studies 171 (3): 545-553. 2014.In order for Herman Cappelen to argue in his Philosophy Without Intuitions that philosophers have been on the whole mistaken in thinking that we actually use intuitions much at all in our first-order philosophizing, he must attempt the task of characterizing what something must be, in order to be an intuition.My discussion here is focused on the latter half of the book concerning the “argument from philosophical practice. I am in wholehearted agreement with the first half’s thesis that the usage…Read more
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445Accentuate the NegativeReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 297-314. 2010.Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.
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