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156How to defeat belief in the external worldPacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (2). 2006.I defend the view that there is a privileged class of propositions – that there is an external world, among other such 'hinge propositions'– that possess a special epistemic status: justified belief in these propositions is not defeated unless one has sufficient reason to believe their negation. Two arguments are given for this conclusion. Finally, three proposals are offered as morals of the preceding story: first, our justification for hinge propositions must be understood as defeatable, secon…Read more
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162A Luxury of the Understanding: On the Value of True BeliefOxford University Press. 2013.Allan Hazlett challenges the philosophical assumption of the value of true belief. He critiques the view that true belief is better for us than false belief, and the view that truth is "the aim of belief". An alternative picture is provided, on which the fact that some people love truth is all there is to "the value of true belief".
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799Towards Social Accounts of Testimonial AsymmetriesNoûs 51 (1). 2017.there seems to be some kind of asymmetry, at least in some cases, between moral testimony and non-moral testimony, between aesthetic testimony and non-aesthetic testimony, and between religious testimony and non-religious testimony. In these domains, at least in some cases, we object to deference, and for this reason expect people to form their beliefs on non-testimonial grounds, in a way that we do not object to deference in paradigm cases of testimonial knowledge. Our philosophical puzzle is t…Read more
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1905Authenticity and Self‐KnowledgeDialectica 67 (2): 157-181. 2013.We argue that the value of authenticity does not explain the value of self-knowledge. There are a plurality of species of authenticity; in this paper we consider four species: avoiding pretense (section 2), Frankfurtian wholeheartedness (section 3), existential self-knowledge (section 4), and spontaneity (section 5). Our thesis is that, for each of these species, the value of (that species of) authenticity does not (partially) explain the value of self-knowledge. Moreover, when it comes to spont…Read more
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31Review of Joseph Keim Campbell and Michael O'Rourke, Harry S. Silverstein (eds.), Knowledge and Skepticism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (1). 2011.
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25Review of S. Soames, _Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 50 (1): 131-136. 2010.
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1073Expressivism and Convention-Relativism about Epistemic DiscourseIn A. Fairweather & O. Flanagan (eds.), Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.Consider the claim that openmindedness is an epistemic virtue, the claim that true belief is epistemically valuable, and the claim that one epistemically ought to cleave to one’s evidence. These are examples of what I’ll call “ epistemic discourse.” In this paper I’ll propose and defend a view called “convention-relativism about epistemic discourse.” In particular, I’ll argue that convention-relativismis superior to its main rival, expressivism about epistemic discourse. Expressivism and convent…Read more
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481Unrealistic FictionsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 48 (1): 33--46. 2011.In this paper, we develop an analysis of unrealistic fiction that captures the everyday sense of ‘unrealistic’. On our view, unrealistic fictions are a species of inconsistent fictions, but fictions for which such inconsistency, given the supporting role we claim played by genre, needn’t be a critical defect. We first consider and reject an analysis of unrealistic fiction as fiction that depicts or describes unlikely events; we then develop our own account and make an initial statement of it: un…Read more
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Review of Brown and Cappelen, Assertion (Oxford University Press) (review)Mind 121 (483): 784-788. 2012.
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157The maturation of the Gettier problemPhilosophical Studies 172 (1): 1-6. 2015.Edmund Gettier’s paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” first appeared in an issue of Analysis , dated June of 1963, and although it’s tempting to wax hyperbolic when discussing the paper’s importance and influence, it is fair to say that its impact on contemporary philosophy has been substantial and wide-ranging. Epistemology has benefited from 50 years of sincere and rigorous discussion of issues arising from the paper, and Gettier’s conclusion that knowledge is not justified true belief …Read more
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16Realism and RelativismIn John Turri (ed.), Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa, Springer. pp. 33--53. 2013.
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29New Waves in Metaphysics (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2010.Introduction; A.Hazlett Quantification, Naturalness, and Ontology; R.P.Cameron Two Problems of Composition in Collective Action; S.R.Chant Another Look at the Reality of Race, By Which I Mean Racef; J.Glasgow Bringing Things About; N.Judisch Interpretation: Its Scope and Limits; U.Kriegel Empirical Analyses of Causation; D.Kutach Brutal Individuation; A.Hazlett Ghosts in the World Machine? Humility and Its Alternatives; R.Langton& C.Robichaud Is Everything Relative? Anti-Realism, Truth, and Femi…Read more
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109How to defend response moralismBritish Journal of Aesthetics 49 (3): 241-255. 2009.Here I defend response moralism, the view that some emotional responses to fi ctions are morally right, and others morally wrong, from the objection that responses to merely fi ctional characters and events cannot be morally evaluated. I defend the view that emotional responses to fi ctions can be morally evaluated only to the extent that said responses are responses to real people and events.
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574A Problem For Relational Theories of ColorPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 140-145. 2010.We argue that relationalism entails an unacceptable claim about the content of visual experience: that ordinary ‘red’ objects look like they look like they look like they’re red, etc.
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155The Social Value of Non-Deferential BeliefAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1): 131-151. 2016.We often prefer non-deferential belief to deferential belief. In the last twenty years, epistemology has seen a surge of sympathetic interest in testimony as a source of knowledge. We are urged to abandon ‘epistemic individualism’ and the ideal of the ‘autonomous knower’ in favour of ‘social epistemology’. In this connection, you might think that a preference for non-deferential belief is a manifestation of vicious individualism, egotism, or egoism. I shall call this the selfishness challenge to…Read more
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5261Factive Presupposition and the Truth Condition on KnowledgeActa Analytica 27 (4): 461-478. 2012.In “The Myth of Factive Verbs” (Hazlett 2010), I had four closely related goals. The first (pp. 497-99, p. 522) was to criticize appeals to ordinary language in epistemology. The second (p. 499) was to criticize the argument that truth is a necessary condition on knowledge because “knows” is factive. The third (pp. 507-19) – which was the intended means of achieving the first two – was to defend a semantics for “knows” on which <S knows p> can be true even if p isn’t true. The fourth (Ibid.) – w…Read more
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31Review of Pylyshyn, Things and Places (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (4): 544-546. 2008.
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15Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: The Dawn of AnalysisInternational Philosophical Quarterly 50 (1): 131-136. 2010.
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137Knowledge and ConversationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (3). 2009.You are clever, Thrasymachus, I said, for you know very well that if you asked anyone how much is twelve, and as you asked him you warned him: "Do not, my man, say that twelve is twice six, or three times four, or six times two, or four times three, for I will not accept such nonsense," it would be quite clear to you that no one can answer a question asked in those terms. (Republic 337b).
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156Epistemic conceptions of begging the questionErkenntnis 65 (3): 343-363. 2006.A number of epistemologists have recently concluded that a piece of reasoning may be epistemically permissible even when it is impossible for the reasoning subject to present her reasoning as an argument without begging the question. I agree with these epistemologists, but argue that none has sufficiently divorced the notion of begging the question from epistemic notions. I present a proposal for a characterization of begging the question in purely pragmatic terms.
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768David Lewis maintained that epistemological contextualism (on which the truth-conditions for utterances of “S knows p” change in different contexts depending on the salient “alternative possibilities”) could solve the problem of skepticism as well as the Gettier problem. Contextualist approaches to skepticism have become commonplace, if not orthodox, in epistemology. But not so for contextualist approaches to the Gettier problem: the standard approach to this has been to add an “anti-luck” condi…Read more
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1175Fitting Inconsistency and Reasonable IrresolutionIn Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds, Routledge. 2020.The badness of having conflicting emotions is a familiar theme in academic ethics, clinical psychology, and commercial self-help, where emotional harmony is often put forward as an ideal. Many philosophers give emotional harmony pride of place in their theories of practical reason.1 Here we offer a defense of a particular species of emotional conflict, namely, ambivalence. We articulate an conception of ambivalence, on which ambivalence is unresolved inconsistent desire (§1) and present a case o…Read more
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23Review of christoper Grau (ed.), Philosophers Explore the Matrix (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (1). 2006.
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73On the special insult of refusing testimonyPhilosophical Explorations 20 (sup1): 37-51. 2017.In this paper, I defend the claim, made by G. E. M. Anscombe and J. L. Austin, that you can insult someone by refusing her testimony. I argue that refusing someone’s testimony can manifest doubt about her credibility, which in the relevant cases is offensive to her, given that she presupposed her credibility by telling what she did. I conclude by sketching three applications of my conclusion: to the issue of valuable false belief, to the issue of testimonial injustice, and to the issue of skepti…Read more
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207How the past depends on the futureRatio 24 (2): 167-175. 2011.It is often said that, according to common sense, there is a fundamental asymmetry between the past and future; namely, that the past is closed and the future is open. Eternalism in the ontology of time is often seen as conflicting with common sense on this point. Here I argue against the claim that common sense is committed to this fundamental asymmetry between the past and the future, on the grounds that facts about the past often depend on facts about the future.1
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181Color objectivism and color projectivismPhilosophical Psychology 24 (6). 2011.Objectivism and projectivism are standardly taken to be incompatible theories of color. Here we argue that this incompatibility is only apparent: objectivism and projectivism, properly articulated so as to deal with basic objections, are in fundamental agreement about the ontology of color and the phenomenology of color perception
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