•  643
    The Normative Force of Promising
    Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 6 77-101. 2016.
    Why do promises give rise to reasons? I consider a quadruple of possibilities which I think will not work, then sketch the explanation of the normativity of promising I find more plausible—that it is constitutive of the practice of promising that promise-breaking implies liability for blame and that we take liability for blame to be a bad thing. This effects a reduction of the normativity of promising to conventionalism about liability together with instrumental normativity and desire-based reas…Read more
  •  562
    Mathematics, Morality, and Self‐Effacement
    Noûs 52 (1): 47-68. 2016.
    I argue that certain species of belief, such as mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, are insulated from a form of Harman-style debunking argument whereas moral beliefs, the primary target of such arguments, are not. Harman-style arguments have been misunderstood as attempts to directly undermine our moral beliefs. They are rather best given as burden-shifting arguments, concluding that we need additional reasons to maintain our moral beliefs. If we understand them this way, then we can …Read more
  •  862
    Failures of Categoricity and Compositionality for Intuitionistic Disjunction
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (4): 281-291. 2012.
    I show that the model-theoretic meaning that can be read off the natural deduction rules for disjunction fails to have certain desirable properties. I use this result to argue against a modest form of inferentialism which uses natural deduction rules to fix model-theoretic truth-conditions for logical connectives.