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199IIA, rationality, and the individuation of optionsPhilosophical Studies 173 (1): 205-221. 2016.The independence of irrelevant alternatives is a popular and important axiom of decision theory. It states, roughly, that one’s choice from a set of options should not be influenced by the addition or removal of further, unchosen options. In recent debates, a number of authors have given putative counterexamples to it, involving intuitively rational agents who violate IIA. Generally speaking, however, these counterexamples do not tend to move IIA’s proponents. Their strategy tends to be to indiv…Read more
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192Cryptonormative JudgmentsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 25 (1): 3-24. 2017.A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non-normative, but that is in fact normative. The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from e…Read more
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182Compromising with the Uncompromising: Political Disagreement under Asymmetric ComplianceJournal of Political Philosophy 31 (3): 337-357. 2023.It is fairly uncontroversial that when you encounter disagreement with some view of yours, you are often epistemically required to become at least somewhat less confident in that view. This includes political disagreements, where your level of confidence might in various ways affect your voting and other political behavior. But suppose that your opponents don’t comply with the epistemic norms governing disagreement – that is, they never reduce their confidence in their views in response to disag…Read more
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151Disagreement as Interpersonal IncoherenceRes Philosophica 96 (2): 245-268. 2019.In a narrow sense of ‘disagreement,’ you and I disagree iff we believe inconsistent propositions. But there are numerous cases not covered by this definition that seem to constitute disagreements in a wider sense: disagreements about what to do, disagreements in attitude, disagreements in credence, etc. This wider sense of disagreement plays an important role in metaethics and epistemology. But what is it to disagree in the wider sense? On the view I’ll defend, roughly, you and I disagree in the…Read more
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95Resisting Relativistic Contextualism: On Finlay's Confusion of TonguesAnalysis 80 (1): 122-131. 2020.Stephen Finlay’s book Confusion of Tongues is extraordinarily sophisticated, ambitious and thought-provoking. I highly commend it to those who haven’t read it yet. I will begin this commentary with a summary of which big-picture issues Finlay and I agree on and which we disagree on.
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92Benjamin Kiesewetter, The Normativity of Rationality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2018.
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80Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural RationalityOxford University Press. 2021.Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" …Read more
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74From Impossibility to Evidentialism?Episteme 18 (3): 384-406. 2021.It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to th…Read more
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Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |