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3Braving the Perils of an Uneventful WorldGrazer Philosophische Studien 31 (1): 179-186. 1988.Philosophers who advocate an ontology without events must show how sentences containing apparent reference to events can be systematically paraphrased, or "regimented," into sentences which avoid ontological commitment to these putative entities. Two alternative proposals are set forth for regimenting statements containing putatively event-denoting definite descriptions. Both proposals eliminate the apparent reference to events, while still preserving the validity of inferences sanctioned by the…Read more
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45Qualia Realism, Its Phenomenal Contents and DiscontentsIn Edmond Wright (ed.), The Case for Qualia, Mit Press. pp. 89--107. 2008.
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23Nonrigid event-designators and the modal individuation of eventsPhilosophical Studies 37 (4). 1980.
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69Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty Problem, IIErkenntnis. forthcoming.In “Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty Problem,” Anna Mahtani and I offer a new argument for thirdism that relies on what we call “generalized conditionalization.” Generalized conditionalization goes beyond conventional conditionalization in two respects: first, by sometimes deploying a space of synchronic, essentially temporal, candidate-possibilities that are not “prior” possibilities; and second, by allowing for the use of preliminary probabilities that arise by first brac…Read more
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102‘Could’, possible worlds, and moral responsibilitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 345-358. 1979.
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7What’s the Point?In David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 87-114. 2015.The chapter rehearses the main outlines of gatekeeping contextualism—the view that it is central to the concept of knowledge that attributions of knowledge function in a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for contextually salient communities. The case for gatekeeping contextualism is clarified within an extended discussion of the character of philosophical reflection. The chapter argues that normatively valenced, evaluative concepts constitute a broad class of concepts for which a sociolinguistic poi…Read more
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4Expressivism, yes! Relativism, no!In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 1, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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Computation and mental representationIn Stephen P. Stich (ed.), Mental Representation: A Reader, Blackwell. 1994.
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38The synthetic unity of truthIn Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen & Cory Wright (eds.), Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates, Oxford University Press. pp. 180. 2012.
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25Call for Papers for'SORITES'SORITES is a new refereed all-English electronic international quarterly of analytical philosophyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (2). 1995.
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149Truth as Mediated CorrespondenceThe Monist 89 (1): 28-49. 2006.We will here describe a conception of truth that is robust rather than deflationist, and that differs in important ways from the most familiar robust conceptions.' We will argue that this approach to truth is intrinsically and intuitively plausible, and fares very well relative to other conceptions of truth in terms of comparative theoretical benefits and costs.
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18Retreat from Non-Being: Graham Priest, Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, pp. xv + 190, £30 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (4): 615-627. 2006.
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The Exchange Continued: Response to Pust's Response to my ReplyIn Essays on Paradoxes, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 226-224. 2017.
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80Core and Ancillary Epistemic VirtuesActa Analytica 33 (3): 295-309. 2018.We argue, primarily by appeal to phenomenological considerations related to the experiential aspects of agency, that belief fixation is broadly agentive; although it is rarely voluntary, nonetheless, it is phenomenologically agentive because of its significant phenomenological similarities to voluntary-agency experience. An important consequence is that epistemic rationality, as a central feature of belief fixation, is an agentive notion. This enables us to introduce and develop a distinction be…Read more
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100Gripped by authorityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4): 313-336. 2018.Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose di…Read more
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56Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic, by Gila SherMind 127 (507): 881-890. 2018.© Mind Association 2018Gila Sher’s Epistemic Friction is a bold and ambitious book, with many interesting things to say not only about knowledge, truth, and logic but also about matters ontological. It often requires the reader to construe it hermeneutically, but repays the effort of doing so.She coins the expression ‘epistemic friction’ to refer to constraints on a system of knowledge, coming from both the world and the mind. She says, ‘The world as the object or target of our theories restrict…Read more
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34The Soritical CentipedeNoûs 53 (2): 491-510. 2017.Two philosophical questions arise about rationality in centipede games that are logically prior to attempts to apply the formal tools of game theory to this topic. First, given that the players have common knowledge of mutual rationality and common knowledge that they are each motivated solely to maximize their own profits, is there a backwards-induction argument that employs only familiar non-technical concepts about rationality, leads to the conclusion that the first player is rationally oblig…Read more
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193Troubles for Bayesian Formal EpistemologyRes Philosophica 94 (2): 1-23. 2017.I raise skeptical doubts about the prospects of Bayesian formal epistemology for providing an adequate general normative model of epistemic rationality. The notion of credence, I argue, embodies a very dubious psychological myth, viz., that for virtually any proposition p that one can entertain and understand, one has some quantitatively precise, 0-to-1 ratio-scale, doxastic attitude toward p. The concept of credence faces further serious problems as well—different ones depending on whether cred…Read more
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2The Phenomenology of Agency and Freedom: Lessons from Introspection and Lessons from Its LimitsHumana Mente 4 (15). 2011.
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Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of MindWalter de Gruyter. 2009.
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30Epistemic Virtues and Cognitive DispositionsIn Horgan Terry & Henderson David (eds.), Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 296-319. 2009.
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95Attention, Morphological Content and Epistemic JustificationCroatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 73-86. 2011.In the formation of epistemically justified beliefs, what is the role of attention, and what is the role (if any) of non-attentional aspects of cognition? We will here argue that there is an essential role for certain nonattentional aspects. These involve epistemically relevant background information that is implicit in the standing structure of an epistemic agent’s cognitive architecture and that does not get explicitly represented during belief-forming cognitive processing. Since such “morphol…Read more
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |