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329Knowledge and Skepticism (review)International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1 (2): 155-157. 2011.A review of the collection "Knowledge and Skepticism" edited by Joseph Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and Harry Silverstein.
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484The Radicalism of Truth‐insensitive Epistemology: Truth's Profound Effect on the Evaluation of BeliefPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2): 348-367. 2015.Many philosophers claim that interesting forms of epistemic evaluation are insensitive to truth in a very specific way. Suppose that two possible agents believe the same proposition based on the same evidence. Either both are justified or neither is; either both have good evidence for holding the belief or neither does. This does not change if, on this particular occasion, it turns out that only one of the two agents has a true belief. Epitomizing this line of thought are thought experiments abo…Read more
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521Skeptical Appeal: The Source‐Content BiasCognitive Science 38 (5): 307-324. 2014.Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two factors. …Read more
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385Infinitism, finitude and normativityPhilosophical Studies 163 (3): 791-795. 2013.I evaluate two new objections to an infinitist account of epistemic justification, and conclude that they fail to raise any new problems for infinitism. The new objections are a refined version of the finite-mind objection, which says infinitism demands more than finite minds can muster, and the normativity objection, which says infinitism entails that we are epistemically blameless in holding all our beliefs. I show how resources deployed in response to the most popular objection to infinitism,…Read more
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364Selfless assertions: some empirical evidenceSynthese 192 (4): 1221-1233. 2015.It is increasingly recognized that knowledge is the norm of assertion. As this view has gained popularity, it has also garnered criticism. One widely discussed criticism involves thought experiments about “selfless assertion.” Selfless assertions are said to be intuitively compelling examples where agents should assert propositions that they don’t even believe and, hence, don’t know. This result is then taken to show that knowledge is not the norm of assertion. This paper reports four experiment…Read more
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89EpistemologyIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, . forthcoming.An overview of contemporary debates and topics in epistemology.
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493Epistemic Contextualism: An Idle HypothesisAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1): 141-156. 2017.Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to spea…Read more
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345Perceptions of Philosophical Inquiry: a SurveyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4): 805-816. 2016.Six hundred three people completed a survey measuring perceptions of traditional areas of philosophical inquiry and their relationship to empirical science. The ten areas studied were: aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and political philosophy. For each area, participants rated whether it is currently central to philosophy, whether its centrality depends on integration with science, and …Read more
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422A Puzzle about withholdingPhilosophical Quarterly 62 (247): 355-364. 2012.This paper presents a puzzle about justification and withholding. The puzzle arises in a special case where experts advise us to not withhold judgment. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is genuinely a puzzle, and so leads us to rethink some common assumptions in epistemology, specifically assumptions about the nature of justification and doxastic attitudes. Section 1 introduces the common assumptions. Section 2 presents the puzzle case. Section 3 assesses the puzzle case. Section 4 explai…Read more
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1442Manifest Failure: The Gettier Problem SolvedPhilosophers' Imprint 11. 2011.This paper provides a principled and elegant solution to the Gettier problem. The key move is to draw a general metaphysical distinction and conscript it for epistemological purposes. Section 1 introduces the Gettier problem. Sections 2–5 discuss instructively wrong or incomplete previous proposals. Section 6 presents my solution and explains its virtues. Section 7 answers the most common objection.
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28Appendix: Ernest Sosa: Selected BibliographyIn John Turri (ed.), Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa, Springer. pp. 16--225. 2013.A select bibliography of Ernest Sosa's publications.
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156Virtue EpistemologyIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. pp. 427-440. 2013.In my remarks, I discuss Sosa's attempt to deal with the sceptical threat posed by dreaming. Sosa explores two replies to the problem of dreaming scepticism. First, he argues that, on the imagination model of dreaming, dreaming does not threaten the safety of our beliefs. Second, he argues that knowledge does not require safety, but a weaker condition which is not threatened by dreaming skepticism. I raise questions about both elements of his reply.
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215Iffy predictions and proper expectationsSynthese 191 (8): 1857-1866. 2014.What individuates the speech act of prediction? The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We argue against this view and two successor views. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor. We suggest that prediction is individuated normatively and has a special connection to the epistemic standards of expectation. In the process, we…Read more
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397Knowledge and assertion in “Gettier” casesPhilosophical Psychology 29 (5): 759-775. 2016.Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. By asserting we share knowledge, coordinate behavior, and advance collective inquiry. Accordingly, assertion is of considerable interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists, and philosophers. This paper advances our understanding of the norm of assertion. Prior evidence suggests that knowledge is the norm of assertion, a view known as “the knowledge account.” In its strongest form, the knowledge account says that knowle…Read more
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268That's OutrageousTheoria 79 (2): 167-171. 2013.I show how non-presentists ought to respond to a popular objection originally due to Arthur Prior and lately updated by Dean Zimmerman. Prior and Zimmerman say that non-presentism cannot account for the fittingness of certain emotional responses to things past. But presentism gains no advantage here, because it is equally incapable of accounting for the fittingness of certain other emotional responses to things past, in particular moral outrage.
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427Knowledge GuaranteedNoûs 47 (3): 602-612. 2011.What is the relationship between saying ‘I know that Q’ and guaranteeing that Q? John Austin, Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars all agreed that there is some important connection, but disagreed over what exactly it was. In this paper I discuss each of their accounts and present a new one of my own. Drawing on speech-act theory and recent research on the epistemic norms of speech acts, I suggest that the relationship is this: by saying ‘I know that Q’, you represent yourself as having the aut…Read more
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382Epistemic situationism and cognitive abilityIn Mark Alfano & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Epistemic Situationism, Oxford University Press. pp. 158-167. 2017.Leading virtue epistemologists defend the view that knowledge must proceed from intellectual virtue and they understand virtues either as refned character traits cultivated by the agent over time through deliberate effort, or as reliable cognitive abilities. Philosophical situationists argue that results from empirical psychology should make us doubt that we have either sort of epistemic virtue, thereby discrediting virtue epistemology’s empirical adequacy. I evaluate this situationist challen…Read more
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186Refutation by eliminationAnalysis 70 (1): 35-39. 2010.This paper refutes two important and influential views in one fell stroke. The first is G.E. Moore’s view that assertions of the form ‘Q but I don’t believe that Q’ are inherently “absurd.” The second is Gareth Evans’s view that justification to assert Q entails justification to assert that you believe Q. Both views run aground the possibility of being justified in accepting eliminativism about belief. A corollary is that a principle recently defended by John Williams is also false, namely, that…Read more
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1599Contingent A Priori KnowledgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (2): 327-344. 2010.I argue that you can have a priori knowledge of propositions that neither are nor appear necessarily true. You can know a priori contingent propositions that you recognize as such. This overturns a standard view in contemporary epistemology and the traditional view of the a priori, which restrict a priori knowledge to necessary truths, or at least to truths that appear necessary
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University of WaterlooDepartment of PhilosophyCanada Research Chair In Philosophy and Cognitive Science
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Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
3 more
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Moral Psychology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Other Academic Areas |