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697General Rules and the Justification of Probable Belief in Hume’s TreatiseHume Studies 27 (2): 247-278. 2001.An examination of the role played by general rules in Hume's positive (nonskeptical) epistemology. General rules for Hume are roughly just general beliefs. The difference between justified and unjustified belief is a matter of the influence of good versus bad general rules, the good general rules being the "extensive" and "constant" ones.
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293Clades, Capgras, and Perceptual KindsPhilosophical Topics 33 (1): 185-206. 2005.I defend a moderate (neither extremely conservative nor extremely liberal) view about the contents of perception. I develop an account of perceptual kinds as perceptual similarity classes, which are convex regions in similarity space. Different perceivers will enjoy different perceptual kinds. I argue that for any property P, a perceptual state of O can represent something as P only if P is coextensive with some perceptual kind for O. 'Dog' and 'chair' will be perceptual kinds for most normal pe…Read more
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2004Goldman on Evidence and ReliabilityIn H. Kornblith & B. McLaughlin (eds.), Goldman and his Critics, Blackwell. 2016.Goldman, though still a reliabilist, has made some recent concessions to evidentialist epistemologies. I agree that reliabilism is most plausible when it incorporates certain evidentialist elements, but I try to minimize the evidentialist component. I argue that fewer beliefs require evidence than Goldman thinks, that Goldman should construe evidential fit in process reliabilist terms, rather than the way he does, and that this process reliabilist understanding of evidence illuminates such impor…Read more
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706Unencapsulated Modules and Perceptual JudgmentIn A. Raftopoulos J. Zeimbekis (ed.), Cognitive Penetrability, Oxford University Press. pp. 103-122. 2015.To what extent are cognitive capacities, especially perceptual capacities, informationally encapsulated and to what extent are they cognitively penetrable? And why does this matter? Two reasons we care about encapsulation/penetrability are: (a) encapsulation is sometimes held to be definitional of modularity, and (b) penetrability has epistemological implications independent of modularity. I argue that modularity does not require encapsulation; that modularity may have epistemological implicatio…Read more
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126Perception and virtue reliabilismActa Analytica 24 (4): 249-261. 2009.In some recent work, Ernest Sosa rejects the “perceptual model” of rational intuition, according to which intuitions (beliefs formed by intuition) are justified by standing in the appropriate relation to a nondoxastic intellectual experience (a seeming-true, or the like), in much the way that perceptual beliefs are often held to be justified by an appropriate relation to nondoxastic sense experiential states. By extending some of Sosa’s arguments and adding a few of my own, I argue that Sosa is …Read more
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667Experiential evidence?Philosophical Studies 173 (4): 1053-1079. 2015.Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at th…Read more
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1075Sosa 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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748Critical 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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237In 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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1266Inferentialism 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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486What 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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130Representational 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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199Evidence, 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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1302Should 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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49The 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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68Lesion 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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1755Circularity, 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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642Perception 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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727The 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 |