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12Knowledge Judgments in “Gettier” CasesIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.Knowledge sets the standard for appropriate assertion and recent evidence suggests that it might also set the standard for appropriate belief and decision‐making. Governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars to support the creation, transfer, and mobilization of knowledge. Philosophers have created a dizzying array of Gettier case thought experiments. In doing so, many have been guilty of experimenter bias. This includes some original players who helped set the agenda for decades to come. C…Read more
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29Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (edited book)Blackwell. 2013.Fully updated with new topics covering the latest developments and debates, the second edition of this highly influential text retains its unique combination of accessibility and originality. Second edition of a highly influential text that has already become a standard in the field, for students and professional researchers alike, due to its impressive line-up of contributors, and its unique combination of accessibility and originality Twenty-six essays in total, covering 13 essential topics Fe…Read more
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You gotta believeIn Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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27Pathways from inability to blamelessness in moral judgmentPhilosophical Psychology 35 (6): 777-792. 2022.
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3A Peculiar and Perpetual Tendency: An Asymmetry in Knowledge Attributions for Affirmations and NegationsErkenntnis 87 (4): 1795-1808. 2020.From antiquity through the twentieth century, philosophers have hypothesized that, intuitively, it is harder to know negations than to know affirmations. This paper provides direct evidence for that hypothesis. In a series of studies, I found that people naturally view negations as harder to know than affirmations. Participants read simple scenarios and made judgments about truth, probability, belief, and knowledge. Participants were more likely to attribute knowledge of an outcome when framed a…Read more
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45Abilism, Ableism, and Reliabilism’s Achievement Gap: A Normative Argument for A New Paradigm in EpistemologyPhilosophia 50 (3): 1495-1501. 2022.Reliabilism says that knowledge must be produced by reliable abilities. Abilism disagrees and allows that knowledge is produced by unreliable abilities. Previous research strongly supports the conclusion that abilism better describes how knowledge is actually defined in commonsense and science. In this paper, I provide a novel argument that abilism is ethically superior to reliabilism. Whereas reliabilism unethically discriminates against agents by excluding them from knowing, abilism virtuously…Read more
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66The value of knowledgeStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as justification or under…Read more
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16Evaluating objections to a factive norm of beliefSynthese 199 (1-2): 2245-2250. 2020.According to the non-factive hypothesis, espoused by contemporary epistemologists, our ordinary practice of evaluating belief is insensitive to the truth. In other words, on the ordinary view, there is no evaluative connection between what someone should believe and whether their belief would be true. Contrary to that, the factive hypothesis holds that our ordinary practice of evaluating belief is sensitive to the truth. Results from recent behavioral studies strongly support the factive hypothe…Read more
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20A Non-puzzle about Assertion and TruthLogos and Episteme 11 (4): 475-479. 2020.It was recently argued that non-factive accounts of assertoric norms gain an advantage from “a puzzle about assertion and truth.” In this paper, I show that this is a puzzle in name only. The puzzle is based on allegedly inconsistent linguistic data that are not actually inconsistent. The demonstration’s key points are that something can be (a) improper yet permissible, and (b) reproachable yet un-reproached. Assertion still has a factive norm.
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1141Knowledge before beliefBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide ra…Read more
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41Objective falsity is essential to lying: an argument from convergent evidencePhilosophical Studies 178 (6): 2101-2109. 2020.This paper synthesizes convergent lines of evidence to evaluate the hypothesis that objective falsity is essential to lying. Objective accounts of lying affirm this hypothesis; subjective accounts deny it. Evidence from history, logic, social observation, popular culture, lexicography, developmental psychology, inference, spontaneous description, and behavioral experimentation strongly supports the hypothesis. Studies show that the only apparent evidence against the hypothesis is due to task sub…Read more
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879In Gettier's WakeIn Stephen Cade Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, Continuum. 2012.A critical review of “Gettier” cases and theoretical attempts to solve “the” "Gettier" "problem".
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5Virtue epistemologyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2017.This entry introduces many of the most important results of the contemporary Virtue epistemology (hereafter 'VE') research program. These include novel attempts to resolve longstanding disputes, solve perennial problems, grapple with novel challenges, and expand epistemology’s horizons. In the process, it reveals the diversity within VE. Beyond sharing the two unifying commitments mentioned above, its practitioners diverge over the nature of intellectual virtues, which questions to ask, and whic…Read more
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1Introduction to Virtue EpistemologyIn John Greco & John Turri (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, Mit Press. 2012.Virtue epistemology is by now a broad and varied field. Also by now, there are various helpful overviews of the field available, some of which are included in this volume (see especially Battaly 2008 and Baehr 2008).1 This introduction will not provide another. Rather, we will begin with a brief characterization of what virtue epistemology is (Section 1), and then briefly describe some of the topics that are treated in this volume (Section 2). Some of these are topics that have occupied ep…Read more
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365SatisficingIn J. E. Crimmins & D. C. Long (eds.), Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism, Bloomsbury Academic. 2013.An encyclopedic entry on 'satisficing'.
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EpistemologyIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of philosophy and the social sciences, Sage. 2013.An overview of recent trends in epistemology.
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2Introduction to InfinitismIn John Turri & Peter D. Klein (eds.), Ad infinitum: new essays on epistemological infinitism, Oxford University Press. 2014.An introduction to infinitism.
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295Ernest SosaIn Robert Audi (ed.), Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd Edition, Cambridge University Press. 2015.A lexicographical entry on "Ernest Sosa".
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856AssertionIn Robert Audi (ed.), Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd Edition, Cambridge University Press. 2015.A lexicographical entry on 'assertion'.
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359Thomas ReidIn Margaret Cameron, Benjamin Hill & Robert Stainton (eds.), Sourcebook in history of philosophy of language, Springer. pp. 807-809. 2016.A brief introduction to Thomas Reid's philosophy on language.
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1The value of knowledgeStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as justification or under…Read more
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10Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 2nd EditionWiley-Blackwell. 2008.A collection of vigorous debates on some of the most controversial topics in recent theoretical epistemology.
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1A critical review of “Gettier” cases and theoretical attempts to solve “the” "Gettier" "problem"In Stephen Cade Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology: The Key Thinkers, Continuum. pp. 214-229. 2012.A critical review of “Gettier” cases and theoretical attempts to solve “the” "Gettier" "problem".
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12Ad infinitum: new essays on epistemological infinitism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.This volume presents new work on infinitism, the view that there are no foundational reasons for beliefs--an ancient view in epistemology, now growing again in popularity. Leading epistemologists illuminate its strengths and weaknesses, and address questions new and old about justification, reasoning, responsibility, disagreement, and trust.
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215You gotta believeIn Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic norms: new essays on action, belief and assertion, Oxford University Press. pp. 193-199. 2014.Proper assertion requires belief. In support of this thesis, I provide an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding assertion and show how to handle cases of "selfless" assertion.
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239Creative reasoningIn John Turri & Peter D. Klein (eds.), Ad infinitum: new essays on epistemological infinitism, Oxford University Press. pp. 210-226. 2014.I defend the unpopular view that inference can create justification. I call this view inferential creationism. Inferential creationism has been favored by infinitists, who think that it supports infinitism. But it doesn’t. Finitists can and should accept creationism.
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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 |