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95Internalism and Externalism in Meliorative EpistemologyErkenntnis 76 (1): 59-72. 2012.This paper addresses the meta-epistemological dispute over the basis of epistemic evaluation from the standpoint of meliorative epistemology. Meliorative epistemology aims at guiding our epistemic practice to better results, and it comprises two levels of epistemic evaluation. At the social level (meliorative social epistemology) appropriate experts conduct evaluation for the community, so that epistemic evaluation is externalist since each epistemic subject in the community need not have access…Read more
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19Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 292-296. 2008.
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49The Role of Coherence of Evidence in the Non-Dynamic Model of ConfirmationErkenntnis 63 (3): 317-333. 2005.This paper examines the role of coherence of evidence in what I call the non-dynamic model of confirmation. It appears that other things being equal, a higher degree of coherence among pieces of evidence raises to a higher degree the probability of the proposition they support. I argue against this view on the basis of three related observations. First, we should be able to assess the impact of coherence on any hypothesis of interest the evidence supports. Second, the impact of coherence among t…Read more
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67Mediated ConfirmationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3): 847-874. 2017.ABSTRACT This article aims to achieve two things: to identify the conditions for transitivity in probabilistic support in various settings, and to uncover the components and structure of the mediated probabilistic relation. It is shown that when the probabilistic relation between the two propositions, x and z, is mediated by multiple layers of partitions of propositions, the impact x has on z consists of the purely indirect impact, the purely bypass impact, and the mixed impact. It is also shown…Read more
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22The Problem of Rule‐Following in Compositional SemanticsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 97-107. 2010.
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54Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, Justification (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 292-296. 2008.Erik Olsson’s Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification is an important contribution to the growing literature on Bayesian coherentism. The book applies the formal theory of probability to issues of coherence in two contexts. One is the philosophical debate over radical skepticism, and the other is common sense and scientific reasoning. As the title of the book suggests, Olsson’s view about coherence is negative on both accounts. With regard to radical skepticism, Olsson states th…Read more
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128Why does coherence appear truth-conducive?Synthese 157 (3). 2007.This paper aims to reconcile (i) the intuitively plausible view that a higher degree of coherence among independent pieces of evidence makes the hypothesis they support more probable, and (ii) the negative results in Bayesian epistemology to the effect that there is no probabilistic measure of coherence such that a higher degree of coherence among independent pieces of evidence makes the hypothesis they support more probable. I consider a simple model in which the negative result appears in a st…Read more
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300The degree of epistemic justification and the conjunction fallacySynthese 184 (1): 29-48. 2012.This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmati…Read more
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102Modest scepticism about rule-followingAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4): 486-500. 1993.This Article does not have an abstract