•  491
    Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    Human beings naturally desire knowledge. But what is knowledge? Is it the same as having an opinion? Highlighting the major developments in the theory of knowledge from Ancient Greece to the present day, Jennifer Nagel uses a number of simple everyday examples to explore the key themes and current debates of epistemology.
  •  458
    Contemporary scepticism and the cartesian God
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 465-497. 2005.
    Descartes claims that God is both incomprehensible and yet clearly and distinctly understood. This paper argues that Descartes’s development of the contrast between comprehension and understanding makes the role of God in his epistemology more interesting than is commonly thought. Section one examines the historical context of sceptical arguments about the difficulty of knowing God. Descartes describes the recognition of our inability to comprehend God as itself a source of knowledge of him; sec…Read more
  •  441
    Review of Albert Casullo, A Priori Justification (review)
    Philosophical Review 115 (2): 251-255. 2006.
    At any given time, an individual has certain beliefs and certain procedures or methods for modifying those beliefs. In The Realm of Reason, as in his previous book, Being Known (1999), Christopher Peacocke is concerned with the elusive question of what it is for someone to be “entitled” to a given belief or procedure.1..
  •  371
    Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of thinking about error
    Philosophical Quarterly 60 (239): 286-306. 2010.
    Epistemologists generally agree that the stringency of intuitive ascriptions of knowledge is increased when unrealized possibilities ofenor are mentioned. Non-sceptical invanantists (Williamson, Hawthorne) think it a mistake to yield in such cases to the temptation to be more stringent, but they do not deny that we feel it. They contend that the temptation is best explained as the product of a psychological bias known as the availability heuristic. I argue against the availability explanation, a…Read more
  •  341
    Epistemic authority, episodic memory, and the sense of self
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
    The distinctive feature of episodic memory is autonoesis, the feeling that one’s awareness of particular past events is grounded in firsthand experience. Autonoesis guides us in sharing our experiences of past events, not by telling us when our credibility is at stake, but by telling us what others will find informative; it also supports the sense of an enduring self.
  •  291
    Michael Bergmann’s important new book on scepticism is attractively systematic and thorough. He places familiar ideas under an exceptionally bright spotlight, e.
  •  249
    Seeking safety in knowledge
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 97 186-214. 2023.
    Knowledge demands more than accuracy: epistemologists are broadly agreed that those who know are non-accidentally right, satisfying some kind of safety condition. However, it is hard to formulate any adequate account of safety, and harder still to explain exactly why we care about it. This paper approaches the problem by looking at a concrete human cognitive capacity, face recognition, to see where epistemic safety shows up in it. Drawing on new models in artificial intelligence, and making a ca…Read more
  •  192
    The Empiricist Conception of Experience
    Philosophy 75 (293). 2000.
    One might think that a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience would require us to give up any claim to nontrivial a priori knowledge. One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge -- if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as, say, a memory or daydream. This paper argues that, surprisingly enough, we can f…Read more
  •  43
    Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1): 151-178. 2013.
    Do epistemic intuitions tell us anything about knowledge? Stich has argued that we respond to cases according to our contingent cultural programming, and not in a manner that tends to reveal anything significant about knowledge itself. I’ve argued that a cross-culturally universal capacity for mindreading produces the intuitive sense that the subject of a case has or lacks knowledge. This paper responds to Stich’s charge that mindreading is cross-culturally varied in a way that will strip epis…Read more
  •  36
    Albert Casullo, A Priori Justification (review)
    Philosophical Review 115 (2): 251-255. 2006.
  •  31
    Contemporary Skepticism and the Cartesian God
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 465-497. 2005.
    Although Descartes presents himself as an adversary of skepticism, in contemporary epistemology he is celebrated much more for his presentation of the skeptical problem than for his efforts to solve it. The ‘Cartesian skepticism’ of the evil genius argument remains a Standard starting point for current discussions, a starting point that is seen to provide such a powerful challenge to knowledge that while one as much as contemplates such arguments one loses the right to ascribe knowledge to anyon…Read more
  •  9
    Knowledge and Reliability
    In Brian P. McLaughlin & Hilary Kornblith (eds.), Goldman and His Critics, Wiley. 2016.
    This chapter examines the best‐known intuitive counterexamples that have been pressed against Alvin Goldman's reliabilist theory of knowledge, and argues that something is wrong with them. It discusses the possibility that these intuitions might accord equally well with a more extreme externalist view, Williamson's “knowledge‐first” approach. Reliabilism has been examined largely in contrast to internalism, but its strengths and weaknesses arguably come into sharper focus if compare it with more…Read more
  •  5
    Many critics of Locke have worried that restricting knowledge to relationships among ideas would bar knowledge from extending to the outer reality which "corresponds to" these ideas. The question of how well Locke can answer such concerns leads us into a number of peculiar and intriguing passages on knowledge and the relationships between perception, reality, pain, and pleasure. This chapter examines what John Locke has to say about sensitive knowledge, to investigate several ways in which his r…Read more