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Scepticism, Rationalism, and ExternalismIn Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2005.
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13And OtherwiseIn David Phiroze Christensen & Jennifer Lackey (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 54. 2013.Timothy Williamson has argued that our evidence is what we know. This implies that anything we come to know by inference instantly becomes part of our evidence, and that all of our evidence is true. I argue that neither of these implications is correct. I conclude by noting a rival theory of evidence, one based on a suggestion Jerry Fodor makes in The Modularity of Mind , is not vulnerable to the criticisms I make of Williamson, nor to the criticisms he makes of traditional theories of evidence.
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50Epistemic modals in contextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 131--170. 2005.A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If we…Read more
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91Intrinsic vs. extrinsic propertiesIn Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Metaphysics Research Lab. 2014.I have some of my properties purely in virtue of the way I am. (My mass is an example.) I have other properties in virtue of the way I interact with the world. (My weight is an example.) The former are the intrinsic properties, the latter are the extrinsic properties. This seems to be an intuitive enough distinction to grasp, and hence the intuitive distinction has made its way into many discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and even epistemology. Unfortunately, when we look mor…Read more
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1062Epistemic Modals and Epistemic ModalityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-18. 2011.There is a lot that we don’t know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don’t know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. It’s tempting to give a very simple analysis of epistemic possibility: • A possibility is an epistemic possibility if we do not know that it does not obtain. But this is problematic for a f…Read more
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68Introduction: Epistemic modals and epistemic modalityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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6In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Epistemic Modals in Context, Oxford University Press. pp. 131--168. 2005.
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In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Epistemic Modals in Context, Oxford University Press. pp. 131-168. 2005.
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1453Epistemic Modals in ContextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 131-170. 2005.A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If we…Read more
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164This paper contributes to the project of articulating and defending the supra-Bayesian approach to judgment aggregation. I discuss three cases where a person is disposed to defer to two different experts, and ask how they should respond when they learn about the opinion of each. The guiding principles are that this learning should go by conditionalisation, and that they should aim to update on the evidence that the expert had updated on. But this doesn’t settle how the update on pairs of experts…Read more
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292Over the years I’ve written many papers defending an idiosyncratic version of interest-relative epistemology. This book collects and updates the views I’ve expressed over those papers. Interest-relative epistemologies all start in roughly the same way. A big part of what makes knowledge important is that it rationalises action. But for almost anything we purportedly know, there is some action that it wouldn’t rationalise. I know what I had for breakfast, but I wouldn’t take a bet at billion to o…Read more
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293What question are decision theorists trying to answer, and why is it worth trying to answer it? A lot of philosophers talk as if the aim of decision theory is to describe how we should make decisions, and the reason to do this is to help us make better decisions. I disagree on both fronts. The aim of the decision theory is to describe how a certain kind of idealised decider does in fact decide. And the reason to do this is that this idealisation, like many other idealisations, helps generate exp…Read more
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199On UncertaintyDissertation, Monash University. 1998.This dissertation looks at a set of interconnected questions concerning the foundations of probability, and gives a series of interconnected answers. At its core is a piece of old-fashioned philosophical analysis, working out what probability is. Or equivalently, investigating the semantic question of what is the meaning of ‘probability’? Like Keynes and Carnap, I say that probability is degree of reasonable belief. This immediately raises an epistemological question, which degrees count as reas…Read more
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74This book uses computer modeling to investigate trends in what is published in leading philosophy journals over the last century and a half. The notable trends include the rise of realism from a fringe view to the mainstream metaphysical outlook, the increase in specialization, and the increasing depth of integration between philosophy and physical sciences. It also contains a guide to how to do similar investigations, and discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.
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115Epistemic Modality (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.There is a lot that we don't know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don't know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. What are these epistemic possibilities? They do not match up with metaphysical possibilities - there are various cases where something is epistemically possible but not metaphysically possi…Read more
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6RelativismIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 1997.Relativism is the view that the truth of a sentence is relative both to a context of utterance and to a context of assessment. That the truth of a sentence is relative to a context of utterance is uncontroversial in contemporary semantics. This chapter focuses on three points: whether the version of contextualism is vulnerable to the disagreement and retraction arguments, and if so, whether these problems can be avoided by a more sophisticated contextualist theory. The points include: whether re…Read more
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26Humean SupervenienceIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.Humean supervenience is the conjunction of three theses: Truth supervenes on being, Anti‐haecceitism, and Spatiotemporalism. The first clause is a core part of Lewis's metaphysics. The second clause is related to Lewis's counterpart theory. The third clause says there are no fundamental relations beyond the spatiotemporal, or fundamental properties of extended objects. Supervenience is classified into strong modal Humean supervenience, local modal Humean supervenience and familiar modal Humean s…Read more
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188Intrinsic vs. extrinsic propertiesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.We have some of our properties purely in virtue of the way we are. (Our mass is an example.) We have other properties in virtue of the way we interact with the world. (Our weight is an example.) The former are the intrinsic properties, the latter are the extrinsic properties. This seems to be an intuitive enough distinction to grasp, and hence the intuitive distinction has made its way into many discussions in philosophy, including discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemo…Read more
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905In Defense of a Kripkean DogmaPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1): 56-68. 2011.In “Against Arguments from Reference” (Mallon et al., 2009), Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-his…Read more
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286Prankster's ethicsPhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1). 2004.Diversity is a good thing. Some of its value is instrumental. Having people around with diverse beliefs, or customs, or tastes, can expand our horizons and potentially raise to salience some potential true beliefs, useful customs or apt tastes. Even diversity of error can be useful. Seeing other people fall away from the true and the useful in distinctive ways can immunise us against similar errors. And there are a variety of pleasant interactions, not least philosophical exchange, that wouldn’t…Read more
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53Book Symposium. Steffen Borge, The Philosophy of FootballSport, Ethics and Philosophy 16 (3): 333-396. 2022.This is a book symposium on Steffen Borge’s The Philosophy of Football. It has contributions from William Morgan, Murray Smith and Brian Weatherson with replies from Borge.
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Epistemic Modals in ContextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth, Oxford University Press. 2005.
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13Intrinsic Properties and Combinatorial PrinciplesIn Robert M. Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties, De Gruyter. pp. 69-86. 2014.
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84Accuracy and the ImpsLogos and Episteme 10 (3): 263-282. 2019.Recently several authors have argued that accuracy-first epistemology ends up licensing problematic epistemic bribes. They charge that it is better, given the accuracy-first approach, to deliberately form one false belief if this will lead to forming many other true beliefs. We argue that this is not a consequence of the accuracy-first view. If one forms one false belief and a number of other true beliefs, then one is committed to many other false propositions, e.g., the conjunction of that fals…Read more
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87Normative ExternalismOxford University Press. 2019.Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, t…Read more
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264Interest-relative invariantismIn Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. 2017.Postprint.
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48Notes on Some Ideas in Lloyd Humberstone’s Philosophical Applications of Modal LogicAustralasian Journal of Logic 15 (1). 2018.Lloyd Humberstone’s recently published Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic presents a number of new ideas in modal logic as well explication and critique of recent work of many others. We extend some of these ideas and answer some questions that are left open in the book.
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294What do Philosophers do? Scepticism and the Practice of Philosophy, by Penelope Maddy (review)Mind 128 (509): 269-271. 2019.Review of _ What do Philosophers do? Scepticism and the Practice of Philosophy _, by Penelope Maddy
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413Interests, evidence and gamesEpisteme 15 (3): 329-344. 2018.Pragmatic encroachment theories have a problem with evidence. On the one hand, the arguments that knowledge is interest-relative look like they will generalise to show that evidence too is interest-relative. On the other hand, our best story of how interests affect knowledge presupposes an interest-invariant notion of evidence. The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of evidence that is interest-relative, but which allows that ‘best story’ to go through with minimal changes. The core idea is…Read more
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