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23On Cappelen and Hawthrone’s “Relativism and Monadic Truth”ProtoSociology 28 231-242. 2011.Review of Herman Cappelenand John Hawthorne, Relativism and Monadic Truth, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009.
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66Higher-order defeat in collective moral epistemologyIn Michael Klenk (ed.), Higher Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.This chapter discusses methodology in epistemology. It argues that settling the facts, even the epistemic facts, fails to settle the questions of intellectual policy at the centre of our epistemic lives. One upshot is that the standard methodology of analysing concepts like knowledge, justification, rationality, and so on is misconceived. More generally, any epistemic method that seeks to issue in intellectual policy by settling the facts, whether by way of abductive theorizing or empirical inve…Read more
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894Well-Founded Belief: An IntroductionIn Joseph Adam Carter & Patrick Bondy (eds.), Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation, Routledge. 2019.This is the Editor's Introduction to "Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation" (Routledge, 2020).
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472The Superstitious Lawyer's InferenceIn Joseph Adam Carter & Patrick Bondy (eds.), Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation, Routledge. 2019.In Lehrer’s case of the superstitious lawyer, a lawyer possesses conclusive evidence for his client’s innocence, and he appreciates that the evidence is conclusive, but the evidence is causally inert with respect to his belief in his client’s innocence. This case has divided epistemologists ever since Lehrer originally proposed it in his argument against causal analyses of knowledge. Some have taken the claim that the lawyer bases his belief on the evidence as a data point for our theories to ac…Read more
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150This is EpistemologyWiley. 2013.We have written an introduction to epistemology that is accessible, engaging, and up to date. (We hope.) Introduction Chapter 1: The Regress Problem Chapter 2: Perception Chapter 3: The Apriori Chapter 4: Inference Chapter 5: On Knowing the Truth Chapter 6: Memory Chapter 7: Testimony Chapter 8: Kinds of Knowledge Chapter 9: Internalism vs. Externalism Chapter 10: The Ethics of Belief Chapter 11: Skepticism
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569On Behalf of a Bi-Level Account of TrustPhilosophical Studies 1-24. 2019.A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Ernest Sosa (2009; 2015; 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativ…Read more
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634Radical Scepticism and the Epistemology of ConfusionInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism (3): 1-15. 2019.The lack of knowledge—as Timothy Williamson (2000) famously maintains—is ignorance. Radical sceptical arguments, at least in the tradition of Descartes, threaten universal ignorance. They do so by attempting to establish that we lack any knowledge, even if we can retain other kinds of epistemic standings, like epistemically justified belief. If understanding is a species of knowledge, then radical sceptical arguments threaten to rob us categorically of knowledge and understanding in one fell swo…Read more
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541Exercising AbilitiesSynthese (3): 1-15. 2019.According to one prominent view of exercising abilities (e.g., Millar 2009), a subject, S, counts as exercising an ability to ϕ if and only if S successfully ϕs. Such an ‘exercise-success’ thesis looks initially very plausible for abilities, perhaps even obviously or analytically true. In this paper, however, I will be defending the position that one can in fact exercise an ability to do one thing by doing some entirely distinct thing, and in doing so I’ll highlight various reasons (epistemologi…Read more
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820Varieties of Cognitive IntegrationNoûs (4): 867-890. 2019.Extended cognition theorists argue that cognitive processes constitutively depend on resources that are neither organically composed, nor located inside the bodily boundaries of the agent, provided certain conditions on the integration of those processes into the agent’s cognitive architecture are met. Epistemologists, however, worry that in so far as such cognitively integrated processes are epistemically relevant, agents could thus come to enjoy an untoward explosion of knowledge. This paper d…Read more
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86Inference to the best explanation and epistemic circularityIn Kevin McCain & Ted Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, Oxford University Press. 2017.Inference to the best explanation—or, IBE—tells us to infer from the available evidence to the hypothesis which would, if correct, best explain that evidence. As Peter Lipton puts it, the core idea driving IBE is that explanatory considerations are a guide to inference. But what is the epistemic status of IBE, itself? One issue of contemporary interest is whether it is possible to provide a justification for IBE itself which is non- objectionably circular. We aim to carve out some new space in t…Read more
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43Intellectual humility and assertionIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. 2021.Recent literature suggests that intellectual humility is valuable to its possessor not only morally, but also epistemically-viz., from a point of view where epistemic aims such as true belief, knowledge and understanding are what matters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, epistemologists working on intellectual humility have focused almost exclusively on its ramifications for how we go about forming, maintaining and evaluating our own beliefs, and by extension, ourselves as inquirers. Less explored by con…Read more
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40Virtue Perspectivism, Externalism, and Epistemic CircularityIn Michela Massimi (ed.), Knowledge From a Human Point of View, Springer Verlag. pp. 123-140. 2019.Virtue perspectivism is a bi-level epistemology according to which there are two grades of knowledge: animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can then use these same competences to gain a second-order assuring perspective, one through which we may appreciate those faculties as reliable and in doing so place our first-order knowledge in a competent second-order perspective. Virtue perspectivism has considerable theoretical power, es…Read more
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1238Educating for Intellectual Virtue: a critique from action guidanceEpisteme 1-23. 2019.Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2006; Baehr 2011) – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists (most notably Baehr, 2013) have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover t…Read more
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673Epistemic Perceptualism, Skill, and the Regress ProblemPhilosophical Studies 1-26. 2019.A novel solution is offered for how emotional experiences can function as sources of immediate prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs, and in such a way that suffices to halt a justificatory regress. Key to this solution is the recognition of two distinct kinds of emotional skill (what I call generative emotional skill and doxastic emotional skill) and how these must be working in tandem when emotional experience plays such a justificatory role. The paper has two main parts, the first …Read more
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182Knowledge-how, Understanding-why and Epistemic Luck: an Experimental StudyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (4): 701-734. 2019.Reductive intellectualists about knowledge-how hold, contra Ryle, that knowing how to do something is just a kind of propositional knowledge. In a similar vein, traditional reductivists about understanding-why insist, in accordance with a tradition beginning with Aristotle, that the epistemic standing one attains when one understands why something is so is itself just a kind of propositional knowledge—viz., propositional knowledge of causes. A point that has been granted on both sides of these d…Read more
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48Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation (edited book)Routledge. 2019.Epistemological theories of knowledge and justification draw a crucial distinction between one's simply havinggood reasons for some belief, and one's actually basingone's belief on good reasons. While the most natural kind of account of basing is causal in nature--a belief is based on a reason if and only if the belief is properly caused by the reason--there is hardly any widely-accepted, counterexample-free account of the basing relation among contemporary epistemologists. Further inquiry into …Read more
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86A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-HowBloomsbury Academic. 2018.We know facts, but we also know how to do things. To know a fact is to know that a proposition is true. But does knowing how to ride a bike amount to knowledge of propositions? This is a challenging question and one that deeply divides the contemporary landscape. A Critical Introduction to Knowledge-How introduces, outlines, and critically evaluates various contemporary debates surrounding the nature of knowledge-how. Carter and Poston show that situating the debate over the nature of knowledge-…Read more
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63Extended Self-KnowledgeIn Julie Kirsch Patrizia Pedrini (ed.), Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative, Springer Verlag. pp. 31-49. 2018.We aim to move the externalism and self-knowledge debate forward by exploring two novel sceptical challenges to the prospects of self-knowledge of a paradigmatic sort, both of which result from ways in which our thought content, cognitive processes and cognitive successes depend crucially on our external environments. In particular, it is shown how arguments from extended cognition ; Clark A. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press ) and…Read more
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44Cognitive goods, open futures and the epistemology of educationIn David Bakhurst (ed.), Ethics and Epistemology of Education, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Feinberg’s observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child’s right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to run in to problems. A promising alternative is then proposed and defended, one that is inspired in…Read more
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1101Technological Seduction and Self-RadicalizationJournal of the American Philosophical Association (3): 298-322. 2018.Many scholars agree that the Internet plays a pivotal role in self-radicalization, which can lead to behaviours ranging from lone-wolf terrorism to participation in white nationalist rallies to mundane bigotry and voting for extremist candidates. However, the mechanisms by which the Internet facilitates self-radicalization are disputed; some fault the individuals who end up self-radicalized, while others lay the blame on the technology itself. In this paper, we explore the role played by technol…Read more
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52Autonomy, Cognitive Offloading, and EducationEducational Theory 68 (6): 657-673. 2018.If we want our intellectual lives to go as well as possible, should we be ‘delegating’ as many information-gobbling tasks to our gadgets as we can? If not, then how much cognitive outsourcing is too much, and relatedly, what kinds of considerations are relevant to determining this? I submit that one particular dimension of intellectual flourishing that will be helpful for the purpose of exploring such questions is that of intellectual autonomy, and in particular, what I’ll describe as the value …Read more
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112New humans? Ethics, trust, and the extended mindIn J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Extended Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 331-351. 2018.The possibility of extended cognition invites the possibility of extended knowledge. We examine what is minimally required for such forms of technologically extended knowledge to arise and whether existing and future technologies can allow for such forms of epistemic extension. Answering in the positive, we explore some of the ensuing transformations in the ethical obligations and personal rights of the resulting ‘new humans.’
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70Extended Epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Extended Cognition examines the way in which features of a subject's cognitive environment can become constituent parts of the cognitive process itself. This volume explores the epistemological ramifications of this idea, bringing together academics from a variety of different areas, to investigate the very idea of an extended epistemology.
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37Are theism and atheism totally opposed? Can they learn from each other?In Mark Harris & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Philosophy, Science and Religion for Everyone, Routledge. pp. 82-92. 2017.One very natural dividing line that—for better or worse—is often used to distinguish those who believe in God from those who do not is that between theism and atheism, where ‘theism’ is used to mark the believers and ‘atheism’ the non-believers. Such contrastive labels can serve many practical functions even when the terms in question are not clearly defined. Individuals are often, on the basis of their beliefs and values, attracted toward one such label more so than the other. However, once a c…Read more
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12Review of Tim Henning and David P. Schweikard (Eds) Knowledge, Virtue and Action: Essays on Putting Epistemic Virtues to Work (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2014. 2014.No abstract available.
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7The Moral Psychology of Pride (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield International. 2017.This book demonstrates pride's unique profile in philosophical theory as both an emotion and an element of human virtue, and includes a range of represented perspectives: psychology; philosophy; sociology; and anthropology.
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112According to Paul Boghossian (2006, 73) a core tenet of epistemic relativism is what he calls epistemic pluralism, according to which (i) ‘there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems’, but (ii) ‘no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others’. Embracing the former claim is more or less uncontroversial–viz., a descriptive fact about epistemic diversity. The latter claim by contrast is very controversial. Interestingly, t…Read more
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University of GlasgowProfessor
Glasgow, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
PhilPapers Editorships
Epistemic Luck |