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141Reply to ByrnePhilosophical Studies 178 (9): 3049-3054. 2020.In this reply to Alex Byrne’s comment on our book Narrow Content, we address Byrne’s claim that internalism is best framed as a thesis about properties of agents rather than properties of thoughts, arguing that a thought-based framework is better suited to standard internalist ambitions. We also discuss whether there is any prospect for a view in the internalist spirit that prescinds from multiplying indices beyond worlds, address Byrne’s ordinary language considerations against an ontology of t…Read more
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16Reply to Bourget and MendeloviciInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.We detect three main critical ideas in Bourget and Mendelovici's (2022; henceforth BM) discussion of Narrow Content (Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne 2018). We will discuss each in this reply.
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1144Operator arguments revisitedPhilosophical Studies 176 (11): 2933-2959. 2019.Certain passages in Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’ are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator ‘always’ would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims …Read more
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147Being in a position to knowPhilosophical Studies 179 (4): 1323-1339. 2022.The concept of being in a position to know is an increasingly popular member of the epistemologist’s toolkit. Some have used it as a basis for an account of propositional justification. Others, following Timothy Williamson, have used it as a vehicle for articulating interesting luminosity and anti-luminosity theses. It is tempting to think that while knowledge itself does not obey any closure principles, being in a position to know does. For example, if one knows both p and ‘If p then q’, but on…Read more
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24Reply to PietroskiPhilosophical Studies 178 (9): 3055-3059. 2020.In this reply to Paul Pietroski’s comment on our book Narrow Content, we address his concern that we assume too tight a connection between sentences and contents and thus ignore polysemy. We argue that we were not relying on problematic disquotational assumptions and that our arguments are fully compatible with rampant polysemy. We also argue that Pietroski’s strategy of making room for a theoretically interesting kind of narrow content by giving up the idea that contents determine extensions at…Read more
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428Doncaster pandas and Caesar's armadillo: Scepticism and via negativa knowledgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2): 360-373. 2023.The external world sceptic tells some familiar narratives involving massive deception. Perhaps we are brains in vats. Perhaps we are the victim of a deceitful demon. You know the drill. The sceptic proceeds by observing first that victims of such deceptions know nothing about their external environment and that second, since we cannot rule out being a victim of such deceptions our- selves, our own external world beliefs fail to attain the status of knowledge. Discussions of global external world…Read more
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Against Conservatism in MetaphysicsIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
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The epistemic use of 'ought'In Lee Walters & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington., Oxford University Press. 2021.
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31Relativism and Monadic TruthOxford University Press. 2009.Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.
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681Safety, Closure, and Extended MethodsJournal of Philosophy 121 (1): 26-54. 2024.Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epist…Read more
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9The proceedings of the Seventh Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference at the University of Nottinghamin April 1997. Contents: Material culture abd the question of social continuity in Roman Britain ( M. Grahame ); Motivation and ideologies of Romanization ( R. Haussler ); The Romanization of Italy: global accluaturation or cultural bricolage? ( N. Terrenato ); Social change and architectural diversity in Roman period Britain ( S. Clarke ); Reflections in the archaeological record of social dev…Read more
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18Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of Mind (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.Increasingly, the mind is being treated as a fit subject for scientific inquiry. As cognitive science and empirical psychology strive to uncover the mind's secrets, it is fitting to inquire as to what distinctive role is left for philosophy in the study of mind. This collection, which includes contributions by some of the leading scholars in the field, offers a rich variety of perspectives on this issue. Topics addressed include: the place of a priori inquiry in philosophy of mind, moral psychol…Read more
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345DesirePhilosophers' Imprint 22 (n/a). 2022.In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions are evaluated relative to a contextual…Read more
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293Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise ChancesMind 131 (523): 892-916. 2021.– We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot re…Read more
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646Inheritance: Professor Procrastinate and the logic of obligation1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1): 84-106. 2021.Inheritance is the principle that deontic `ought' is closed under entailment. This paper is about a tension that arises in connection with Inheritance. More specifically, it is about two observations that pull in opposite directions. One of them raises questions about the validity of Inheritance, while the other appears to provide strong support for it. We argue that existing approaches to deontic modals fail to provide us with an adequate resolution of this tension. In response, we develop a po…Read more
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495Wanting what’s not bestPhilosophical Studies 179 (4): 1275-1296. 2021.In this paper, we propose a novel account of desire reports, i.e. sentences of the form 'S wants p'. Our theory is partly motivated by Phillips-Brown's (2021) observation that subjects can desire things even if those things aren't best by the subject's lights. That is, being best isn't necessary for being desired. We compare our proposal to existing theories, and show that it provides a neat account of the central phenomenon.
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694Knowledge from multiple experiencesPhilosophical Studies 179 (4): 1341-1372. 2021.This paper models knowledge in cases where an agent has multiple experiences over time. Using this model, we introduce a series of observations that undermine the pretheoretic idea that the evidential significance of experience depends on the extent to which that experience matches the world. On the basis of these observations, we model knowledge in terms of what is likely given the agent’s experience. An agent knows p when p is implied by her epistemic possibilities. A world is epistemically po…Read more
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2129Multiple Universes and Self-Locating EvidencePhilosophical Review 131 (3): 241-294. 2022.Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in thi…Read more
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A metaphysician looks at the Everett interpretationIn Simon Saunders, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent & David Wallace (eds.), Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, & Reality, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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Epistemic Modals in ContextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, Clarendon Press. 2005.
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Recombination, Causal Constraints, and Humean Supervenience: An Argument for Temporal Parts?In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2004.
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546A New HopeJournal of Philosophy 119 (1): 5-32. 2022.The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire fail to explain …Read more
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226Free agency and materialismIn Daniel Howard-Snyder & J. Scott Jordan (eds.), Faith, Freedom, and Rationality, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 47-72. 1996.
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822Counterfactual ContaminationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 262-278. 2022.Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC is false, there is a tru…Read more
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8Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of MindKluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.Introduction: Philosophy in Mind / Michaelis Michael and John O’Leary-Hawthorne -- AI and the Synthetic A Priori / Jose Benardete -- Armchair Metaphysics /Frank Jackson -- Doubts About Conceptual Analysis /Gilbert Harman -- Deflationary Self-Knowledge / Andre Gallois -- How to Get to Know One’s Own Mind: Some Simple Ways / Annette Baier -- Psychology in Perspective / Huw Price -- Can Philosophy of Language Provide the Key to the Foundations of Ethics? /Karl-Otto Apel --Unprincipled Decisions / L…Read more
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62Externalism and ScepticismPhilosophical Studies 81 (1). 1996.According to an externalist theory of content the content of an individual’s thoughts and the meaning of her words need not supervene on her intrinsic history. Two individuals may be intrinsically exactly alike yet entertain different thoughts, and attach different meanings to the words they use. ETC, which has been most notably defended by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, has attained the status of current orthodoxy. Nevertheless, some maintain that combining ETC with the premisses t…Read more
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149Graded epistemic justificationPhilosophical Studies 178 (6): 1845-1858. 2020.The adjective ‘is justified’ has all the hallmarks of a gradable adjective. But the relationship between gradable uses and straightforward predications of the form ‘x is justified’ has been underexplored by epistemologists. In this paper we undertake to do some ground clearing as a prelude to better understanding this relationship.
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996Not So Phenomenal!The Philosophical Review. forthcoming.Our main aims in this paper is to discuss and criticise the core thesis of a position that has become known as phenomenal conservatism. According to this thesis, its seeming to one that p provides enough justification for a belief in p to be prima facie justified (a thesis we label Standard Phenomenal Conservatism). This thesis captures the special kind of epistemic import that seemings are claimed to have. To get clearer on this thesis, we embed it, first, in a probabilistic framework in which …Read more
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