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505Why Deliberative Democracy is (Still) UntenablePublic Affairs Quarterly 26 (3): 199-220. 2012.A common objection to deliberative democracy is that available evidence on public ignorance makes it unlikely that social deliberation among the public is a process likely to yield accurate outputs. The present paper considers—and ultimately rejects—two responses to this objection. The first response is that the correct conclusion to draw from the evidence is simply that we must work harder to ensure that the deliberative process improves the deliberators’ epistemic situation. The main problem f…Read more
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79Epistemic Perfectionism and Liberal DemocracySocial Philosophy Today 29 49-58. 2013.Robert Talisse’s recent attempt to justify liberal democracy in epistemic terms is in many ways a breath of fresh air. However, in the present paper we argue that his defense faces two inter-related problems. The first problem pertains to his defense of liberalism, and owes to the fact that a commitment to the folk-epistemological norms in terms of which he makes his case does not commit one to partaking in liberal institutions. Consequently, our (alleged) commitment to the relevant epistemic no…Read more
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40Information MarketsIn Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.Applied philosophy has been a growing area of research for the last 40 years. Until now, however, almost all of this research has been centered around the field of ethics. A Companion to Applied Philosophy breaks new ground, demonstrating that all areasof philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind, can be applied, and are relevant to questions of everyday life. This perennial topic in philosophy provides an overview of these various applied phi…Read more
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102Review of Robert B. Talisse, Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2009) (review)Philosophical Quarterly 61 (244): 666-668. 2011.The review argues that Talisse's epistemic defense of democracy in his "Democracy and Moral Conflict," albeit novel and interesting, falls prey to an epistemic analogue of the problem of reasonable moral pluralism that Rawls famously posed for moral justifications of democracy.
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471Intuitions in epistemology: Towards a naturalistic alternativeStudia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2): 15-34. 2009.The present paper revisits the main methodological problems with conceptual analysis and considers two attempts to rectify them in terms of prototypes and reflective equilibria, respectively. Finding both wanting for the purposes of epistemological analysis, a naturalistic alternative is then sketched that explores the positive implications of aforementioned problems for the demarcation of the respective roles of intuitions and empirical investigation within three epistemological domains, viz., …Read more
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100The Social Virtue Of Blind DeferencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3): 545-582. 2015.Recently, it has become popular to account for knowledge and other epistemic states in terms of epistemic virtues. The present paper focuses on an epistemic virtue relevant when deferring to others in testimonial contexts. It is argued that, while many virtue epistemologists will accept that epistemic virtue can be exhibited in cases involving epistemically motivated hearers, carefully vetting their testimonial sources for signs of untrustworthiness prior to deferring, anyone who accepts that al…Read more
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716On Epistemic AgencyDissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 2010.Every time we act in an effort to attain our epistemic goals, we express our epistemic agency. The present study argues that a proper understanding of the actions and goals relevant to expressions of such agency can be used to make ameliorative recommendations about how the ways in which we actually express our agency can be brought in line with how we should express our agency. More specifically, it is argued that the actions relevant to such expressions should be identified with the variety of…Read more
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181What’s so Good about a Wise and Knowledgeable Public?Acta Analytica 27 (2): 199-216. 2012.Political philosophers have been concerned for some time with the epistemic caliber of the general public, qua the body that is, ultimately, tasked with political decision-making in democratic societies. Unfortunately, the empirical data paints a pretty dismal picture here, indicating that the public tends to be largely ignorant on the issues relevant to governance. To make matters worse, social psychological research on how ignorance tends to breed overconfidence gives us reason to believe that…Read more
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227Dream Skepticism and the Conditionality ProblemErkenntnis 75 (1): 45-60. 2011.Recently, Ernest Sosa (2007) has proposed two novel solutions to the problem of dream skepticism. In the present paper, I argue that Sosa’s first solution falls prey to what I will refer to as the conditionality problem, i.e., the problem of only establishing a conditional—in this case, if x, then I am awake, x being a placeholder for a condition incompatible with dreaming—in a context where it also needs to be established that we can know that the antecedent holds, and as such can infer the con…Read more
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75Review of Colin McGinn, Truth by Analysis: Games, Names, and Philosophy (OUP 2012) (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2012.
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128Epistemology and empirical investigationGrazer Philosophische Studien 76 (1): 109-134. 2008.Recently, Hilary Kornblith has argued that epistemological investigation is substantially empirical. In the present paper, I will first show that his claim is not contingent upon the further and, admittedly, controversial assumption that all objects of epistemological investigation are natural kinds. Then, I will argue that, contrary to what Kornblith seems to assume, this methodological contention does not imply that there is no need for attending to our epistemic concepts in epistemology. Unde…Read more
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110Meno and the MonistMetaphilosophy 44 (1-2): 157-170. 2013.Recent critiques of veritistic value monism, or the idea that true belief is unique in being of fundamental epistemic value, typically invoke a claim about the surplus value of knowledge over mere true belief, in turn traced back to Plato's Meno. However, to the extent Plato at all defends a surplus claim in the Meno, it differs from that figuring in contemporary discussions with respect to both its scope and the kind of value at issue, and is under closer scrutiny fully compatible with veritist…Read more
Areas of Interest
Social Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Epistemic Normativity |
Epistemic Value |
Epistemic Virtues |
PhilPapers Editorships
Naturalized Epistemology |