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110How 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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156The 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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575A 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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31Review of Pylyshyn, Things and Places (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (4): 544-546. 2008.
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5288Factive 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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15Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: The Dawn of AnalysisInternational Philosophical Quarterly 50 (1): 131-136. 2010.
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139Knowledge 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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770David 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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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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1193Fitting 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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74On 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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208How 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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204What's Bad About Bad Faith?European Journal of Philosophy 21 (1): 50-73. 2013.: Contemporary common sense holds that authenticity is an ethical ideal: that there is something bad about inauthenticity, and something good about authenticity. Here we criticize the view that authenticity is bad because it detracts from the wellbeing of the inauthentic person, and propose an alternative moral account of the badness of inauthenticity, based on the idea that inauthentic behaviour is potentially misleading
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182Color 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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27Things and Places: How Mind Connects with the World (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (4): 544-546. 2008.
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2555Higher-Order Epistemic Attitudes and Intellectual HumilityEpisteme 9 (3): 205-223. 2012.This paper concerns would-be necessary connections between doxastic attitudes about the epistemic statuses of your doxastic attitudes, or ‘higher-order epistemic attitudes’, and the epistemic statuses of those doxastic attitudes. I will argue that, in some situations, it can be reasonable for a person to believe p and to suspend judgment about whether believing p is reasonable for her. This will set the stage for an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, on which humility is a matter of…Read more
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72Possible evilsRatio 19 (2). 2006.I consider an objection to Lewisian modal realism: the view entails that there are a great many real evils that we ought to care about, but in fact we shouldn’t care about these evils. I reply on behalf of the modal realist – we should and do care about possible evils, and this is shown in our reactions to fictions about evils, which (plausibly, for the modal realist) are understood as making certain possible evils salient.
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199Knowledge AscriptionsBy Jessica Brown and Mikkel Gerken (review)Analysis 73 (4): 807-809. 2013.
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168Grice's razorMetaphilosophy 38 (5): 669-690. 2007.Grice’s Razor is a principle of parsimony which states a preference for linguistic explanations in terms of conversational implicature, to explanations in terms of semantic context-dependence. Here I propose a Gricean theory of knowledge attributions, and contend on the basis of Grice’s Razor that it is superior to contextualism about ‘knows’.
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82A Critical Introduction to SkepticismBloomsbury Academic. 2014.Skepticism remains a central and defining issue in epistemology, and in the wider tradition of Western philosophy. To better understand the contemporary position of this important philosophical subject, Allan Hazlett introduces a range of topics, including: • Ancient skepticism • skeptical arguments in the work of Hume and Descartes • Cartesian skepticism in contemporary epistemology • anti-skeptical strategies, including Mooreanism, nonclosure, and contextualism • additional varieties of skepti…Read more
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43Review of J. David Velleman, How We Get Along (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (11). 2009.
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43Book Review: In Praise of Reason. By Michael P. Lynch.International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 4 (1): 75-79. 2014.
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1401Understanding and StructureIn Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.In the Phaedrus, Socreates sympathetically describes the ability “to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do.” (265e) In contemporary philosophy, Ted Sider (2009, 2011) defends the same idea. As I shall put it, Plato and Sider’s idea is that limning structure is an epistemic goal. My aim in this paper is to articulate and defend this idea. First, I’ll articulate the notion of a structural proposition…Read more
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