•  200
    Knowledge and suberogatory assertion
    Philosophical Studies (3): 1-11. 2013.
    I accomplish two things in this paper. First I expose some important limitations of the contemporary literature on the norms of assertion and in the process illuminate a host of new directions and forms that an account of assertional norms might take. Second I leverage those insights to suggest a new account of the relationship between knowledge and assertion, which arguably outperforms the standard knowledge account.
  •  328
    Epistemic Supervenience
    In Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa & Matthias Steup (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 2 ed, Blackwell. 2010.
    An encyclopedic article on epistemic supervenience in Blackwell companion to epistemology, 2 ed.
  •  509
    The Express Knowledge Account of Assertion
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (1): 37-45. 2011.
    Many philosophers favour the simple knowledge account of assertion, which says you may assert something only if you know it. The simple account is true but importantly incomplete. I defend a more informative thesis, namely, that you may assert something only if your assertion expresses knowledge. I call this 'the express knowledge account of assertion', which I argue better handles a wider range of cases while at the same time explaining the simple knowledge account's appeal. §1 introduces some …Read more
  •  364
    Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in Social Cognition
    Cognitive Science 41 (S3): 403-424. 2017.
    Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanc…Read more
  •  586
    Reasons, Answers, and Goals
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (4): 491-499. 2012.
    I discuss two arguments against the view that reasons are propositions. I consider responses to each argument, including recent responses due to Mark Schroeder, and suggest further responses of my own. In each case, the discussion proceeds by comparing reasons to answers and goals
  •  832
    On the regress argument for infinitism
    Synthese 166 (1). 2009.
    This paper critically evaluates the regress argument for infinitism. The dialectic is essentially this. Peter Klein argues that only an infinitist can, without being dogmatic, enhance the credibility of a questioned non-evident proposition. In response, I demonstrate that a foundationalist can do this equally well. Furthermore, I explain how foundationalism can provide for infinite chains of justification. I conclude that the regress argument for infinitism should not convince us.
  •  22
    It’s What’s on the Inside that Counts... Or is It? Virtue and the Psychological Criteria of Modesty
    with Sara Weaver and Mathieu Doucet
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3): 653-669. 2017.
    Philosophers who have written on modesty have largely agreed that it is a virtue, and that it therefore has an important psychological component. Mere modest behavior, it is often argued, is actually false modesty if it is generated by the wrong kind of mental state. The philosophical debate about modesty has largely focused on the question of which kind of mental state—cognitive, motivational, or evaluative—best captures the virtue of modesty. We therefore conducted a series of experiments to s…Read more
  •  78
    Infinitism in Epistemology
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.
    Infinitism in Epistemology. This article provides an overview of infinitism in epistemology. Infinitism is a family of views in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification. It contrasts naturally with coherentism and foundationalism. All three views agree that knowledge or justification requires an appropriately structured chain of reasons. What form may such a […]
  •  295
    Knowledge 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.
  •  454
    Skeptical Appeal: The Source‐Content Bias
    Cognitive 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
  •  346
    Infinitism, finitude and normativity
    Philosophical 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
  •  420
    The Radicalism of Truth‐insensitive Epistemology: Truth's Profound Effect on the Evaluation of Belief
    Philosophy 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
  •  73
    Epistemology
    In Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, . forthcoming.
    An overview of contemporary debates and topics in epistemology.
  •  429
    Epistemic Contextualism: An Idle Hypothesis
    Australasian 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
  •  311
    Selfless assertions: some empirical evidence
    Synthese 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
  •  375
    A Puzzle about withholding
    Philosophical 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
  •  306
    Perceptions of Philosophical Inquiry: a Survey
    Review 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