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299This is the introduction to my forthcoming book and the table of contents.
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267Is the ability to speak a language an acquired skill? Leading proponents of the generative approach to human language—notably Chomsky (2000) and Pinker (2003)—have argued that the thesis that language capacities are skills is hopelessly confused and at odds with a range of empirical evidence, which suggests that human language capacities are grounded in a biologically inherited set of language instincts or a Universal Grammar (UG). In this paper, we argue that resistance to the claim that human …Read more
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246Intelligence SocialismOxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind. forthcoming.From artistic performances in the visual arts and in music to motor control in gymnastics, from tool use to chess and language, humans excel in a variety of skills. On the plausible assumption that skillful behavior is a visible manifestation of intelligence, a theory of intelligence—whether human or not—should be informed by a theory of skills. More controversial is the question as to whether, in order to theorize about intelligence, we should study certain skills in particular. My target is th…Read more
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449Epistemic Luck, Knowledge-How, and Intentional ActionErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.Epistemologists have long believed that epistemic luck undermines propositional knowledge. Action theorists have long believed that agentive luck undermines intentional action. But is there a relationship between agentive luck and epistemic luck? While agentive luck and epistemic luck have been widely thought to be independent phenomena, we argue that agentive luck has an epistemic dimension. We present several thought experiments where epistemic luck seems to undermine both knowledge-how and in…Read more
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329Arguments, Suppositions, and ConditionalsSemantics and Linguistic Theory. forthcoming.Arguments and conditionals are powerful means language provides us to reason about possibilities and to reach conclusions from premises. These two kinds of constructions exhibit several affinities—e.g., they both come in different varieties depending on the mood; they share some of the same connectives (i.e., ‘then’); they allow for similar patterns of modal subordination. In the light of these affinities, it is not surprising that prominent theories of conditionals—old and new suppositionalisms…Read more
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290Factive Mindreading in the Folk Psychology of ActionIn Arturs Logins & Jacques-Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.In the recent literature, several authors have argued that the capacity to track factive mental states plays a central role in explaining our ability to understand and predict people’s behavior (Nagel 2013; Nagel 2017; Phillips & Norby 2019; Phillips et al. 2020; Westra & Nagel 2021). The topic of this chapter is whether this capacity also enters into an explanation of our ability to track skilled and intentional actions.
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371The Know-How Solution to Kraemer's PuzzleCognition 238 (C): 105490. 2023.In certain cases, people judge that agents bring about ends intentionally but also that they do not bring about the means that brought about those ends intentionally—even though bringing about the ends and means is just as likely. We call this difference in judgments the Kraemer effect. We offer a novel explanation for this effect: a perceived difference in the extent to which agents know how to bring about the means and the ends explains the Kraemer effect. In several experiments, we replicate …Read more
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538Meaning without Gricean IntentionsAnalysis. forthcoming.Gricean theories analyse meaning in terms of certain complex intentions on the part of the speaker—the intention to produce an effect on the addressee, and the intention to have that intention recognized by the addressee. By drawing an analogy with cases widely discussed in action theory, we propose a novel counterexample where the speaker lacks these intentions, but nonetheless means something, and successfully performs a speech act.
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52Knowledge and mentalityPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 359-382. 2021.This paper reexamines the case for mentality — the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states — and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful behavior (agentive control) is best understood in terms of knowledge. While psychological th…Read more
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747The Epistemology of SkillsIn Blackwell Companion of Epistemology, . forthcoming.I demarcate skills from other kinds of cognitive and bodily abilities and I discuss old and novel issues that arise for the epistemology of skills.
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671Practical knowledge firstSynthese 200 (5): 1-18. 2022.This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances (or at least of those intentional performances that amount to skilled actions) is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand…Read more
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562Skills as KnowledgeAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3): 609-624. 2023.1. What is the relation between skilful action and knowledge? According to most philosophers, the two have little in common: practical intelligence and theoretical intelligence are largely separate...
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755Reasoning and PresuppositionsPhilosophical Topics 49 (2): 203-224. 2021.It is a platitude that when we reason, we often take things for granted, sometimes even justifiably so. The chemist might reason from the fact that a substance turns litmus paper red to that substance being an acid. In so doing, they take for granted, reasonably enough, that this test for acidity is valid. We ordinarily reason from things looking a certain way to their being that way. We take for granted, reasonably enough, that things are as they look Although it is a platitude that we often t…Read more
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367Shape of Agency, by Joshua Shepherd (review)Mind 132 (526): 586-594. 2021.What makes an event an action rather than a mere happening? What makes us agents rather than non-agents? What does being in control amount to? And in virtue of
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809The Dynamics of Argumentative DiscourseJournal of Philosophical Logic 51 (2): 413-456. 2022.Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', …Read more
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863Practical Knowledge without LuminosityMind 131 (523): 917-934. 2021.According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a …Read more
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Knowledge-HowStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). forthcoming.SEP Entry
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959Practical concepts and productive reasoningSynthese 199 (3-4): 7659-7688. 2021.Can we think of a task in a distinctively practical way? Can there be practical concepts? In recent years, epistemologists, philosophers of mind, as well as philosophers of psychology have appealed to practical concepts in characterizing the content of know-how or in explaining certain features of skilled action. However, reasons for positing practical concepts are rarely discussed in a systematic fashion. This paper advances a novel argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts t…Read more
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466The Semantics and Pragmatics of ArgumentationIn Daniel Altshuler (ed.), Linguistics meets philosophy, . forthcoming.This paper overviews some recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of arguments.
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845Probabilistic Knowledge in ActionAnalysis 80 (2): 342-356. 2020.According to a standard assumption in epistemology, if one only partially believes that p , then one cannot thereby have knowledge that p. For example, if one only partially believes that that it is raining outside, one cannot know that it is raining outside; and if one only partially believes that it is likely that it will rain outside, one cannot know that it is likely that it will rain outside. Many epistemologists will agree that epistemic agents are capable of partial beliefs in additi…Read more
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995Lewis Carroll’s regress and the presuppositional structure of argumentsLinguistics and Philosophy 45 (1): 1-38. 2021.This essay argues that the main lesson of Lewis Carroll's Regress is that arguments are constitutively presuppositional.
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2433Il Concetto di Verità' di TarskiIn Guido Bonino, Carlo Gabbani & Paolo Tripodi (eds.), Biblioteca Analitica, . pp. 91-102. 2020.In questo capitolo racconto l'articolo classico sulla verità' di Tarski.
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588Introduction to Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and ExpertiseIn Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, Routledge. 2020.The diverse and breathtaking intelligence of the human animal is often embodied in skills. People, throughout their lifetimes, acquire and refine a vast number of skills. And there seems to be no upper limit to the creativity and beauty expressed by them. Think, for instance, of Olympic gymnastics: the amount of strength, flexibility, and control required to perform even a simple beam routine amazes, startles, and delights. In addition to the sheer beauty of skill, performances at the pinnacle o…Read more
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718Practical RepresentationIn Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, Routledge. 2020.This chapter discusses recent attempts to clarify the notion of practical representation and its theoretical fruitfulness. The ultimate goal is not just to show that intellectualists are on good grounds when they appeal to practical representation in their theories of know-how. Rather, it is to argue that any plausible theory of skill and know-how has to appeal to the notion of practical representation developed here. §1 explains the notion of a mode of presentation and introduces practical mo…Read more
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368Knowledge, Action, DefeasibilityIn Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, Oxford University Press. 2021.One can intentionally do something only if one knows what one is doing while they are doing it. For example, one can intentionally kill one’s neighbor by opening their gas stove overnight only if one knows that the gas is likely to kill the neighbor in their sleep. One can intentionally sabotage the victory of one’s rival by putting sleeping drugs in their drink only if one knows that sleeping drugs will harm the rival’s performance. And so on. In a slogan: Intentional action is action guided by…Read more
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56The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise (edited book)Routledge. 2020.Philosophical questions surrounding skill and expertise can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece, China, and India. In the twentieth century skilled action was an important factor in the work of phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and analytic philosophers including Gilbert Ryle. However, as a subject in its own right it has, until now, remained largely in the background. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise is an outstanding reference source and the fi…Read more
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948Modal Virtue EpistemologyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (1): 61-79. 2018.This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In…Read more
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80The psychological reality of practical representationPhilosophical Psychology 32 (5): 784-821. 2019.We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations: perceptual representation (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and conceptual representation. This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a furt…Read more
APA Eastern Division
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |