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1088Sosa on reflective knowledge and Knowing Full WellPhilosophical Studies 166 (3): 609-616. 2013.Part of a book symposium on Ernest Sosa's Knowing Full Well. An important feature of Sosa's epistemology is his distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. What exactly is reflective knowledge, and how is it superior to animal knowledge? Here I try to get clearer on what Sosa might mean by reflective knowledge and what epistemic role it is supposed to play.
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756Critical Notice: Seemings and Justification, ed. Chris Tucker (review)Analysis 75 (1): 153-164. 2014.A review of Chris Tucker's collection of papers on phenomenal conservatism
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238In defense of epiphenomenalismPhilosophical Psychology 19 (6): 76-794. 2006.Recent worries about possible epiphenomenalist consequences of nonreductive materialism are misplaced, not, as many have argued, because nonreductive materialism does not have epiphenomenalist implications but because the epiphenomenalist implications are actually virtues of the theory, rather than vices. It is only by showing how certain kinds of mental properties are causally impotent that cognitive scientific explanations of mentality as we know them are possible
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28Comments on Henry Jackman's "Transparency, Responsibility, and Self-Knowledge"Southwest Philosophy Review 25 (2): 41-44. 2009.
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1282Inferentialism and cognitive penetration of perceptionEpisteme 13 (1): 1-28. 2016.Cognitive penetration of perception is the idea that what we see is influenced by such states as beliefs, expectations, and so on. A perceptual belief that results from cognitive penetration may be less justified than a nonpenetrated one. Inferentialism is a kind of internalist view that tries to account for this by claiming that some experiences are epistemically evaluable, on the basis of why the perceiver has that experience, and the familiar canons of good inference provide the appropriate s…Read more
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493What we talk about when we talk about epistemic justificationInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (7-8): 867-888. 2016.Stewart Cohen argues that much contemporary epistemological theorizing is hampered by the fact that ‘epistemic justification’ is a term of art and one that is never given any serious explication in a non-tendentious, theory-neutral way. He suggests that epistemologists are therefore better off theorizing in terms of rationality, rather than in terms of ‘epistemic justification’. Against this, I argue that even if the term ‘epistemic justification’ is not broadly known, the concept it picks out i…Read more
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133Representational analyticityMind and Language 20 (4). 2005.The traditional understanding of analyticity in terms of concept containment is revisited, but with a concept explicitly understood as a certain kind of mental representation and containment being read correspondingly literally. The resulting conception of analyticity avoids much of the vagueness associated with attempts to explicate analyticity in terms of synonymy by moving the locus of discussion from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. The account provided here illustrates …Read more
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202Evidence, experience, and externalismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3). 2008.The Sellarsian dilemma is a famous argument that attempts to show that nondoxastic experiential states cannot confer justification on basic beliefs. The usual conclusion of the Sellarsian dilemma is a coherentist epistemology, and the usual response to the dilemma is to find it quite unconvincing. By distinguishing between two importantly different justification relations (evidential and nonevidential), I hope to show that the Sellarsian dilemma, or something like it, does offer a powerful argum…Read more
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1312Should Reliabilists Be Worried About Demon Worlds?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1): 1-40. 2012.The New Evil Demon Problem is supposed to show that straightforward versions of reliabilism are false: reliability is not necessary for justification after all. I argue that it does no such thing. The reliabilist can count a number of beliefs as justified even in demon worlds, others as unjustified but having positive epistemic status nonetheless. The remaining beliefs---primarily perceptual beliefs---are not, on further reflection, intuitively justified after all. The reliabilist is right to co…Read more
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50The epistemological import of morphological contentPhilosophical Studies 169 (3): 537-547. 2014.Morphological content (MC) is content that is implicit in the standing structure of the cognitive system. Henderson and Horgan claim that MC plays a distinctive epistemological role unrecognized by traditional epistemic theories. I consider the possibilities that MC plays this role either in central cognition or in peripheral modules. I argue that the peripheral MC does not play an interesting epistemological role and that the central MC is already recognized by traditional theories
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76Lesion studies, spared performance, and cognitive systemsCortex 39 (1): 145-7. 2003.A short discussion piece arguing that the neuropsychological phenomenon of double dissociations is most revealing of underlying cognitive architecture because of the capacities that are spared, more than the capacities that are lost.
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1764Circularity, reliability, and the cognitive penetrability of perceptionPhilosophical Issues 21 (1): 289-311. 2011.Is perception cognitively penetrable, and what are the epistemological consequences if it is? I address the latter of these two questions, partly by reference to recent work by Athanassios Raftopoulos and Susanna Seigel. Against the usual, circularity, readings of cognitive penetrability, I argue that cognitive penetration can be epistemically virtuous, when---and only when---it increases the reliability of perception.
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652Perception and Intuition of Evaluative PropertiesIn Anna Bergqvist & Robert Cowan (eds.), Evaluative Perception, Oxford University Press. 2018.Outside of philosophy, ‘intuition’ means something like ‘knowing without knowing how you know’. Intuition in this broad sense is an important epistemological category. I distinguish intuition from perception and perception from perceptual experience, in order to discuss the distinctive psychological and epistemological status of evaluative property attributions. Although it is doubtful that we perceptually experience many evaluative properties and also somewhat unlikely that we perceive many eva…Read more
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740The Disunity of Perception: An IntroductionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4): 443-445. 2015.
Glasgow, Glasgow City, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |