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10Review of John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa and His Critics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (12). 2004.
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``Epistemic Justification"In Sven Bernecker & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2010.
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3Nozickian Epistemology and the Question of ClosureCroatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (3): 351-364. 2004.Nozick’s contribution to the epistemology of the last half of the twentieth century includes addressing the question of whether knowledge is closed under known implication. I argue that the question of closure provides a serious obstacle to Nozickian approaches to epistemology.
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122“He who lapse last lapse best”: Plantinga on leibniz’s lapseSouthwest Philosophy Review 10 (1): 137-146. 1994.Alvin Plantinga thinks Leibniz made a mistake. Leibniz claimed that God could have created any possible world, but Plantinga thinks this view amounts to a lapse in judgment on Leibniz =s part. = Plantinga terms this mistake ALeibniz= Lapse,@ and his rejection of this Leibuizian claim plays an important role in Plantinga =s free wili defense against the problem of evil. I will argue that Plantinga fails to show that Leibniz lapsed in thinking about which worlds are actualizable by God; in particu…Read more
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The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose.
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82Justification and Proper BasingIn Erik Olsson (ed.), The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer, Kluwer Publishing Co.. pp. 43-62. 2003.
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``Plantinga's Proper Function Theory of Warrant"In Warrant and Contemporary Epistemology, Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 281-306. 1996.
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62``Coherentism: Misconstrual and Misapprehension"Southwest Philosophy Review 11 (1): 159-169. 1995.Some critics of coherentism have depicted it so that it founders on the distinction between warrant for the content of a belief and warrant for the believing itself. This distinction has to do with the basing relation: one might have warrant for the content of what one believes without basing one's belief properly, without holding the belief because of what warrants it. When the first kind of warrant obtains, I will say that a belief is propositionally warranted.
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89Two approaches to epistemic defeatIn Deane-Peter Baker (ed.), Alvin Plantinga, Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-124. 2007.There are two different kinds of theories of the concept of epistemic defeat. One theory begins with propositional relationships, only by implication describing what happens in the context of a noetic system. Such a theory places inforrmation about defeat up front, not informing us of how the defeat relationships play out in the context of actual belief, at least not initially. The other theory takes a back door to the concept of defeat, assuming a context of actual belief and an entire noetic s…Read more
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98In Defense of CoherentismJournal of Philosophical Research 22 299-306. 1997.Alvin Plantinga and John Pollock both think that coherentism is a mistaken theory of justification, and they do so for different reasons. In spite of these differences, there are remarkable connections between their criticisms. Part of my goal here is to show what these connections are. I will show that Plantinga’s construal of coherentism presupposes Pollock’s arguments against that view, and I will argue that coherentists need not breathe their last in response to the contentions of either. Co…Read more
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128Propositionalism and the metaphysics of experiencePhilosophical Issues 17 (1). 2007.The view I've been defending in the theory of justification I have termed ‘propositionalism’. It counsels beginning inquiry into the nature of justification by adopting a particular form of evidentialism, according to which the first task is to describe the abstract relation of evidencing that holds between propositional contents. Such an approach has a variety of implications for the theory of justification itself, and many of the motivations for the view are of a standard internalist variety. …Read more
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272Swain on the basing relationAnalysis 45 (3): 153. 1985.Suppose we want to know whether a person justifiably believes a certain claim. Further, suppose that our interest in this question is because we take such justification to be necessary for knowledge. To justifiably believe a claim requires more than there being a justification for that claim. Presumably, there is a justification for accepting all sorts of scientific theories of which I have no awareness; because of my lack of awareness, I do not justifiably believe those theories. Further, even …Read more
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``Heaven and Hell"In Philip L. Quinn & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 562-568. 1997.
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124The Value of UnderstandingIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 95-112. 2009.
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14Of Reflective AscentIn T. Dougherty (ed.), Evidentialism and its Discontents, Oxford University Press. pp. 34. 2011.
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85What is wrong with minimal foundationalism?Erkenntnis 21 (2): 175-184. 1984.attacks new defenders of foundationalism. Some simply took on the critics, 2 but others attempted to argue that even if the critics were right, only one form of foundationalism was suspect, not foundationalism itself. For, according to these defenders, foundationalism is not to be identified with the view of Classical Foundationalism (CE) that all of our knowledge rests on incorrigible beliefs. Rather foundationalism is the view that all of our knowledge rests on beliefs that are self-warranting…Read more
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1494Coherentism and justified inconsistent beliefs: A solutionSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1): 21-41. 2012.The most pressing difficulty coherentism faces is, I believe, the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs. In a nutshell, there are cases in which our beliefs appear to be both fully rational and justified, and yet the contents of the beliefs are inconsistent, often knowingly so. This fact contradicts the seemingly obvious idea that a minimal requirement for coherence is logical consistency. Here, I present a solution to one version of this problem.
St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |