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376Epistemic CourageOxford University Press. 2024.Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.
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340Herman Cappelen, Philosophy Without Intuitions (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (1). 2013.Review of Herman Cappelen's book
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336Modals and Modal EpistemologyIn Amy Kind & Peter Kung (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination, Oxford University Press. pp. 124-144. 2016.I distinguish (§1) two projects in modal epistemology—one about how we come to know modal truths, and one about why we have the ability so to come to know. The latter, I suggest, (§§2–3) is amenable to an evolutionary treatment in terms of general capacities developed to evaluate quotidian modal claims. I compare (§4) this approach to a recent suggestion in a similar spirit by Christopher Hill and Timothy Williamson, emphasizing counterfactual conditionals instead of quotidian modals; I argue th…Read more
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330Quantifiers, Knowledge, and CounterfactualsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2). 2010.Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive 'all cases', in the spirit of David Lewis's contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view explains intuitive data, resolves a puzzle parallel to the skeptical paradox, and renders safety and sensitivity, construed as counterfactuals, necessary conditions on knowledge
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315Quantifiers and epistemic contextualismPhilosophical Studies 155 (3): 383-398. 2011.I defend a neo-Lewisean form of contextualism about knowledge attributions. Understanding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions in terms of the context-sensitivity of universal quantifiers provides an appealing approach to knowledge. Among the virtues of this approach are solutions to the skeptical paradox and the Gettier problem. I respond to influential objections to Lewis’s account.
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311Justification is potential knowledgeCanadian Journal of Philosophy 44 (2): 184-206. 2014.This paper will articulate and defend a novel theory of epistemic justification; I characterize my view as the thesis that justification is potential knowledge . My project is an instance of the ‘knowledge-first’ programme, championed especially by Timothy Williamson. So I begin with a brief recapitulation of that programme
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280Knowledge Norms and Acting WellThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 49-55. 2012.I argue that evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning is less straightforward than is often assumed in the literature. In particular, cases in which knowledge is intuitively present, but action is intuitively epistemically unwarranted, provide no traction against the knowledge norm. The knowledge norm indicates what it is appropriately to hold a particular content as a reason for action; it does not provide a theory of what reasons are sufficient for what actions. Absent a general th…Read more
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271Experimentalist pressure against traditional methodologyPhilosophical Psychology 25 (5). 2012.According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics’ arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism in general. More recently, some experimentalist critics have attempted to articulate a critique that is especially tailored to affect traditional methods, without generalizing …Read more
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232Pragmatic Encroachment and Belief-Desire PsychologyAnalytic Philosophy 53 (4): 327-343. 2012.We develop a novel challenge to pragmatic encroachment. The significance of belief-desire psychology requires treating questions about what to believe as importantly prior to questions about what to do; pragmatic encroachment undermines that priority, and therefore undermines the significance of belief-desire psychology. This, we argue, is a higher cost than has been recognized by epistemologists considering embracing pragmatic encroachment.
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231Hybrid Virtue Epistemology and the A PrioriIn Dylan Dodd & Elia Zardini (eds.), The A Priori: Its Significance, Sources, and Extent, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.How should we understand good philosophical inquiry? Ernest Sosa has argued that the key to answering this question lies with virtue-based epistemology. According to virtue-based epistemology, competences are prior to epistemic justification. More precisely, a subject is justified in having some type of belief only because she could have a belief of that type by exercising her competences. Virtue epistemology is well positioned to explain why, in forming false philosophical beliefs, agents are o…Read more
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226Explaining Away IntuitionsStudia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2): 94-116. 2009.What is it to explain away an intuition? Philosophers regularly attempt to explain intuitions away, but it is often unclear what the success conditions for their project consist in. I attempt to articulate some of these conditions, taking philosophical case studies as guides, and arguing that many attempts to explain away intuitions underestimate the challenge the project of explaining away involves. I will conclude, therefore, that explaining away intuitions is a more difficult task than has so…Read more
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220Basic Knowledge and Contextualist “E = K”Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (4): 282-292. 2013.Timothy Williamson (2000) makes a strong prima facie case for the identification of a subject's total evidence with the subject's total knowledge (E = K). However, as Brian Weatherson (Ms) has observed, there are intuitively problematic consequences of E = K. In this article, I'll offer a contextualist implementation of E = K that provides the resources to respond to Weatherson's argument; the result will be a novel approach to knowledge and evidence that is suggestive of an unexplored contextua…Read more
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220Knowing the intuition and knowing the counterfactualPhilosophical Studies 145 (3). 2009.I criticize Timothy Williamson's characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The fragility of these counterfactuals makes them too easily false, and too difficult to know
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198Keith DeRose, The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 1 (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (12). 2009.
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187Book review of Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics.
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172Imagination and epistemologyDissertation, Rutgers University. 2008.Among the tools the epistemologist brings to the table ought to be, I suggest, a firm understanding of the imagination--one that is informed by philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. In my dissertation, I highlight several ways in which such an understanding of the imagination can yield insight into traditional questions in epistemology. My dissertation falls into three parts. In Part I, I argue that dreaming should be understood in imaginative terms, and that this has impor…Read more
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160Prescriptive and Evaluative Norms of AssertionAnalysis Reviews. forthcoming.Critical notice of Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion's _Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion_.
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159Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained in a way indepen…Read more
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158The rules of thoughtOxford University Press. 2013.Ichikawa and Jarvis offer a new rationalist theory of mental content and defend a traditional epistemology of philosophy. They argue that philosophical inquiry is continuous with non-philosophical inquiry, and can be genuinely a priori, and that intuitions do not play an important role in mental content or the a priori.
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152The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism (edited book)Routledge. 2017.Epistemic contextualism is a recent and hotly debated topic in philosophy. Contextualists argue that the language we use to attribute knowledge can only be properly understood relative to a specified context. How much can our knowledge depend on context? Is there a limit, and if so, where does it lie? What is the relationship between epistemic contextualism and fundamental topics in philosophy such as objectivity, truth, and relativism? The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism is an out…Read more
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145Imagination, Dreaming, and HallucinationIn Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 149-62. 2016.
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139Ignorance and PresuppositionsMind 124 (496): 1207-1219. 2015.I develop a class of counterexamples to Blome-Tillmann’s ‘Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism’. There are cases in which subjects are ignorant of key propositions that are inconsistent with the pragmatic presuppositions in conversational contexts in which they are discussed; in such contexts, PEC wrongly predicts the subjects to satisfy certain ‘knows’ attributions
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83Dreaming, Philosophical IssuesIn Tim Bayne, Patrick Wilken & Axel Cleeremans (eds.), Oxford Companion to Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2009.Having fascinated some of the greatest philosophers from the earliest times, dreaming figures importantly in the history of philosophy, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, Augustine’s Confessions, and, perhaps most famously, Descartes’s Mediations. By far the greatest philosophical focus on dreaming has been epistemic: Socrates suggests to Theaetetus that since he cannot tell whether he is dreaming, he cannot trust his senses to know contingent facts about the world around him. And a similar worry drives …Read more
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62Chris Daly, An Introduction to Philosophical Methods (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011. 2011.
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36Peter Baumann, Epistemological Contextualism: A Defense (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1. 2018.
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Epistemic Contextualism |
Contextualist Replies to Skepticism |
Metaphilosophy |
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