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18Review of Lucy O'Brien, Self-Knowing Agents (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (3). 2008.
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146The skeptic, the content externalist, and the theistInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 69 (3): 173-180. 2011.Some philosophers argue that content externalism can provide the foundations of an argument against the traditional epistemological skeptic. I maintain that if such an argument is available, it seems there is also an a priori argument against the possibility of a creationist god. My suspicion is that such a strong consequence is not desirable for the content-externalists, and that the availability of this argument therefore casts doubt on the anti-skeptical position. I argue that all content ext…Read more
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143Sensations, swatches, and speckled hensPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4): 371-383. 2003.We argue that there is a interesting connection between the old problem of the Speckled Hen and an argument that can be traced from Russell to Armstrong to Putnam that we call the “gradation argument.” Both arguments have been used to show that there is no “Highest Common Factor” between appearances we judge the same – no such thing as “real” sensations. But, we argue, both only impugn the assumption of epistemic certainty regarding introspective reports.
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146The Physicalist's Tight Squeeze: A Posteriori Physicalism vs. A Priori PhysicalismPhilosophy Compass 10 (12): 905-913. 2015.Both a priori physicalism and a posteriori physicalism combine a metaphysical and an epistemological thesis. They agree about the metaphysical thesis: our world is wholly physical. Most agree that this requires everything that there is must be necessitated by the sort of truths described by physics. If we call the conjunction of the basic truths of physics P, all physicalists agree that P entails for any truth Q. Where they disagree is whether or not this entailment can be known a priori. The a …Read more
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48Review of mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, Dan Zahavi (eds.), Self, No-Self? Perspectives From Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (7). 2011.
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13Make your self scarce: The Ego Trick: What Does it Mean to be You? by Julian Baggini (Granta)£ 14.99 (review)The Philosophers' Magazine 55 100-101. 2011.
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211Emergentism and supervenience physicalismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (1). 2009.A purely metaphysical formulation of physicalism is surprisingly elusive. One popular slogan is, 'There is nothing over and above the physical'. Problems with this arise on two fronts. First, it is difficult to explain what makes a property 'physical' without appealing to the methodology of physics or to particular ways in which properties are known. This obviously introduces epistemic features into the core of a metaphysical issue. Second, it is difficult to cash out 'over-and-aboveness' in a w…Read more
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201The knowledge argument and objectivityPhilosophical Studies 135 (2): 145-177. 2007.In this paper I argue that Frank Jackson
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149Immunity to error and subjectivityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (4): 581-604. 2007.Since Sydney Shoemaker published his seminal article ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentification’ has received much attention. It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James. The precise significance of IEM is often unspecified in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether it constitu…Read more
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93A Puzzle for PragmatismAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 42 (2): 131-136. 2005.It is an intuitively attractive view that the importance of a proposition affects the amount of evidence a subject needs in order to know that proposition—the more important the proposition is to the subject, the more evidence the subject must have in order for her to count as knowing the proposition. This paper argues that because unimportant propositions entail the falsity of very important propositions this position either results in the lack of closure of knowledge under known implication, o…Read more
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228The Russellian monist’s problems with mental causationPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (258): 22-39. 2015.
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246Subjectivity and the Elusiveness of the SelfCanadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (3): 459-483. 2010.'Where am I?' This is something we might expect to hear from hapless explorers or academics with no sense of direction. If we can, we'll explain to our inquirer that he is east of East St. Louis and hope he can find his way from there. If he persists, insisting that he is not really lost, but only cannot find himself no matter how hard he looks, we might reasonably suspect that we are dealing with that peculiarly incorrigible academic explorer, the philosopher. When we hesitantly point to his bo…Read more