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379Relativism and externalismIn Martin Kusch (ed.), Routledge Handbook to Relativism, Routledge. pp. 301-309. 2019.Internalists in epistemology think that whether one possesses epistemic statuses such as knowledge or justification depends on factors that are internal to one; externalists think that whether one possesses these statuses can depend on factors that are external to one. In this chapter we focus on the relationship between externalism and epistemic relativism. Externalism isn’t straightforwardly incompatible with epistemic relativism but, as we’ll see, it is very common to hold that key externalis…Read more
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40Intellectual humility and assertionIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. pp. 335-345. 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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309RelativismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.Relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. Defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. Detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. Debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. From ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theor…Read more
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604Understanding a communicated thoughtSynthese 198 (12): 12137-12151. 2020.The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a species of what contemporary epistemologists characterise as objectual understanding. Second, we demonstrate that even though this type of understanding differs from linguistic understanding, in many instances of successful communication, these two types of understanding jointly contribute to understanding a communicated thought.
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1021The Ethics and Epistemology of TrustInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about wha…Read more
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532The Epistemology of Group Disagreement: An IntroductionIn Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & J. Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement, Routledge. pp. 1-8. 2020.This is an introduction to the volume The Epistemology of Group Disagreement (Routledge, forthcoming), (eds.) F. Broncano-Berrocal and J.A. Carter.
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697Deliberation and Group DisagreementIn Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & J. Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement, Routledge. pp. 9-45. 2020.Suppose an inquiring group wants to let a certain view stand as the group's view. But there’s a problem: the individuals in that group do not initially all agree with one another about what the correct view is. What should the group do, given that it wants to settle on a single answer, in the face of this kind of intragroup disagreement? Should the group members deliberate and exchange evidence and then take a vote? Or, given the well-known ways that evidence exchange can go wrong, e.g., by exac…Read more
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519Varieties of (Extended) Thought ManipulationIn Mark Blitz & Christoph Bublitz (eds.), The Future of Freedom of Thought: Liberty, Technology, and Neuroscience, Palgrave Macmillan. 2020.Our understanding of what exactly needs protected against in order to safeguard a plausible construal of our ‘freedom of thought’ is changing. And this is because the recent influx of cognitive offloading and outsourcing—and the fast-evolving technologies that enable this—generate radical new possibilities for freedom-of-thought violating thought manipulation. This paper does three main things. First, I briefly overview how recent thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science recognis…Read more
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628Collective (Telic) Virtue EpistemologyIn Mark Alfano, Jeroen de Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alet…Read more
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600Epistemic Autonomy and ExternalismIn Kirk Lougheed & Jonathan Matheson (eds.), Epistemic Autonomy, Routledge. 2020.The philosophical significance of attitudinal autonomy—viz., the autonomy of attitudes such as beliefs—is widely discussed in the literature on moral responsibility and free will. Within this literature, a key debate centres around the following question: is the kind of attitudinal autonomy that’s relevant to moral responsibility at a given time determined entirely by a subject’s present mental structure at that time? Internalists say ‘yes’, externalists say ’no’. In this essay, I motivate a kin…Read more
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22On behalf of a bi-level account of trustPhilosophical Studies 177 (8): 2299-2322. 2020.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 Sosa, in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfull…Read more
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1The value of knowledgeStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as justification or under…Read more
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43Epistemic pluralismIn A. Bitoni, P. Harris, C. S. Fleisher & A. K. Binderkrantz (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs, . 2020.Epistemic pluralism is a form of pluralism whose object is knowledge, a sub- stantial component or prerequisite of knowledge, or a process of knowledge acquisition. It assumes that this target notion can be realised in not one, but many ways, and that this plurality is non-trivial.
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19Epistemology and RelativismInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2016.Epistemology and Relativism Epistemology is, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope. What is the status of epistemological claims? Relativists regard the status of epistemological claims as, in some way, relative— that is to say, that the truths which epistemological claims aspire to are … Continue reading Epistemology and Relativism →
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38Introduction to special issue: knowledge, virtue and action—eastern and western perspectivesSynthese 197 (6): 2291-2294. 2020.No abstract available.
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22Cognitive Goods, Open Futures and the Epistemology of EducationJournal of Philosophy of Education 54 (2): 449-466. 2020.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 Joel 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 inspi…Read more
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30Epistemic perceptualism, skill and the regress problemPhilosophical Studies 177 (5): 1229-1254. 2020.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 and how these must be working in tandem when emotional experience plays such a justificatory role. The paper has two main parts, the first negative and the second positive. The negative part criticises the epi…Read more
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1554Just the Right Thickness: A Defense of Second-Wave Virtue EpistemologyPhilosophical Papers 37 (3): 413-434. 2008.Abstract Do the central aims of epistemology, like those of moral philosophy, require that we designate some important place for those concepts located between the thin-normative and the non-normative? Put another way, does epistemology need "thick" evaluative concepts and with what do they contrast? There are inveterate traditions in analytic epistemology which, having legitimized a certain way of viewing the nature and scope of epistemology's subject matter, give this question a negative verdi…Read more
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887Skepticism Motivated: On the Skeptical Import of Motivated ReasoningCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (6): 702-718. 2020.Empirical work on motivated reasoning suggests that our judgments are influenced to a surprising extent by our wants, desires and preferences (Kahan 2016; Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979; Molden and Higgins 2012; Taber and Lodge 2006). How should we evaluate the epistemic status of beliefs formed through motivated reasoning? For example, are such beliefs epistemically justified? Are they candidates for knowledge? In liberal democracies, these questions are increasingly controversial as well as polit…Read more
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1632Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: The case of YouTube’s recommender systemSynthese (1-2): 1-24. 2020.YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served t…Read more
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362De Minimis Normativism: a New Theory of Full AptnessPhilosophical Quarterly 71 (1): 16-36. 2021.Full aptness is the most important concept in performance-based virtue epistemology. The structure of full aptness, in epistemology and elsewhere, is bi-levelled. At the first level, we evaluate beliefs, like performances, on the basis of whether they are successful, competent, and apt – viz., successful because competent. But the fact that aptness itself can be fragile – as it is when an apt performance could easily have been inapt – points to a higher zone of quality beyond mere aptness. To br…Read more
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83Is searching the internet making us intellectually arrogant?In M. P. Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), Arrogance and Polarisation, . forthcoming.In a recent and provocative paper, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu and Frank Keil (2015) have argued, on the basis of experimental evidence, that ‘searching the internet leads people to conflate information that can be found online with knowledge “in the head”’ (2015, 675), specifically, by inclining us to conflate mere access to information for personal knowledge (2015, 674). This chapter has three central aims. First, we briefly detail Fisher et al.’s results and show how, on the basis of recent …Read more
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11Review of E. Sosa's "Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge," Volumes I and IIProtoSociology 2010. 2010.No abstract available.
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55Vices of distrustSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (10): 25-32. 2019.One of the first things that comes to mind when we think of the special issue’s theme, “Trust in a Social and Digital World” is the epidemic of ‘fake news’ and a cluster of trust- relevant vices we commonly associate with those who share it, click on it, and believe it. Fake news consumers are, among other things, gullible and naïve. Many are also dogmatic: intellectually and/or emotionally tied to a view point, and as a result, too quick to uncritically trust whatever aligns with it. Gullibilit…Read more
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102Group polarization—roughly, the tendency of groups to incline towards more extreme positions than initially held by their individual members— has been rigorously studied by social psychol- ogists, though in a way that has overlooked important philosophical questions about this phenomenon which remain unexplored. Two such salient questions are metaphysical and epistemological, respectively. From a metaphysical point of view, can group polarization, understood as an epistemic feature of a group, b…Read more
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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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879Well-Founded Belief: An IntroductionIn J. 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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University of GlasgowProfessor
Glasgow, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
PhilPapers Editorships
Epistemic Luck |