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1081Against Second‐Order ReasonsNoûs 51 (2): 398-420. 2017.A normative reason for a person to? is a consideration which favours?ing. A motivating reason is a reason for which or on the basis of which a person?s. This paper explores a connection between normative and motivating reasons. More specifically, it explores the idea that there are second-order normative reasons to? for or on the basis of certain first-order normative reasons. In this paper, I challenge the view that there are second-order reasons so understood. I then show that prominent views …Read more
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48Review: Mark Wilson, Wandering significance: an essay on conceptual behaviour. Oxford University Press, 2006 (review)Metapsychology Online Reviews 10 (36). 2006.
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31Metaepistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions. What does it mean to claim that someone ought to do or believe something? Do such claims express beliefs about independently existing facts, or only attitudes of approval and disapproval towards certain pieces of conduct? How do putative facts about what people ought to do or …Read more
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2485Reasons for Belief, Reasons for Action, the Aim of Belief, and the Aim of ActionIn Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion, Oxford University Press. 2014.Subjects appear to take only evidential considerations to provide reason or justification for believing. That is to say that subjects do not take practical considerations—the kind of considerations which might speak in favour of or justify an action or decision—to speak in favour of or justify believing. This is puzzling; after all, practical considerations often seem far more important than matters of truth and falsity. In this paper, I suggest that one cannot explain this, as many have tried, …Read more
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25Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny – Edited by John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (review)Philosophical Investigations 34 (1): 97-101. 2010.
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177Conservatives and racists: Inferential role semantics and pejorativesPhilosophia 36 (3): 375-388. 2008.According to inferential role semantics, for any given expression to possess a particular meaning one must be disposed to make or, alternatively, acknowledge as correct certain inferential transitions involving it. As Williamson points out, pejoratives such as ‘Boche’ seem to provide a counter-example to IRS. Many speakers are neither disposed to use such expressions nor consider it proper to do so. But it does not follow, as IRS appears to entail, that such speakers do not understand pejorative…Read more
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64The later Wittgenstein on language (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2009.Ludwig Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings are dominated by remarks on language. However, while the textual analysis of Wittgenstein's writings is presently a booming industry, the tendency is to focus narrowly on exegetical matters with little attention to their bearing on philosophy at large. Moreover, one finds in contemporary philosophy of language various ideas with a distinctively Wittgensteinian ring to them but whose pedigree is uncertain. This volume brings together distin…Read more
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690Perspectivism and the Argument from GuidanceEthical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2): 361-374. 2017.Perspectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by your perspective, that is, your epistemic position. Objectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by the facts irrespective of your perspective. This paper explores an influential argument for perspectivism which appeals to the thought that the normative is action guiding. The crucial premise of the argument is that you ought to φ only if you are able to φ for the reasons which determine that you ought to φ. We show that …Read more
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894Truth: the Aim and Norm of BeliefTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (3): 121-136. 2013.Invited contribution to The Aim of Belief, a special issue of Teorema, guest-edited by J. Zalabardo.
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663On epistemic conceptions of meaning: Use, meaning and normativityEuropean Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 416-434. 2008.A number of prominent philosophers advance the following ideas: (1) Meaning is use. (2) Meaning is an intrinsically normative notion. Call (1) the use thesis, hereafter UT, and (2) the normativity thesis, hereafter NT. They come together in the view that for a linguistic expression to have meaning is for there to be certain proprieties governing its employment.1 These ideas are often associated with a third
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635Knowledge Is NOT Belief for Sufficient (Objective and Subjective) ReasonLogos and Episteme 6 (2): 237-243. 2015.Mark Schroeder has recently proposed a new analysis of knowledge. I examine that analysis and show that it fails. More specifically, I show that it faces a problem all too familiar from the post-Gettier literature, namely, that it is delivers the wrong verdict in fake barn cases.
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177Leave Truth Alone: On Deflationism and ContextualismEuropean Journal of Philosophy 19 (4): 607-624. 2010.Abstract: According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non-paradoxical) instances of the schema:(DS) It is true that p if and only if p.According to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth-conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like). On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depen…Read more
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143Defending semantic generalismAnalysis 67 (4). 2007.‘Particularism’ is a meta-ethical theory resulting from a holistic doctrine in the theory of reasons. According to Jonathan Dancy, the foremost contemporary proponent of particularism, ‘a feature that is a reason in favour of an action in one case may be no reason at all in another, or even a reason against’ (2004: 190). From this, Dancy claims, it follows that the ‘possibility of moral thought and judgement does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of moral principles’ (2004: 7). Th…Read more
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19Wittgenstein: Meaning and judgement (review)Philosophical Investigations 28 (4). 2005.Books reviewed: Michael Luntley, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Judgement, Blackwell Publishers, 2003, ix + 187, price £16.99 p.b. Reviewed by Daniel Whiting, University of Reading Department of Philosophy University of Reading Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AA [email protected].
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763Between Old and New: Brandom’s Analytic PragmatismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (4): 597-607. 2009.In his latest book, Between Saying and Doing, Robert Brandom aims to lay the foundations for a new approach to philosophy, 'analytic pragmatism', which as the name suggests aims to reconcile the insights of the pragmatists with the ambitions of the analytic tradition. To do so, Brandom offers what he describes as a ‘new metatheoretic conceptual apparatus’. In this paper, I raises questions concerning whether the method underlying that apparatus is really so new, and challenge the suggestion that…Read more
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229Should I Believe the Truth?Dialectica 64 (2): 213-224. 2010.Many philosophers hold that a general norm of truth governs the attitude of believing. In a recent and influential discussion, Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi raise a number of serious objections to this view. In this paper, I concede that Bykvist and Hattiangadi's criticisms might be effective against the formulation of the norm of truth that they consider, but suggest that an alternative is available. After outlining that alternative, I argue that it is not vulnerable to objections para…Read more
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44Normativity: Epistemic and Practical (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.What should I do? What should I think? Traditionally, ethicists tackle the first question, while epistemologists tackle the second. Philosophers have tended to investigate the issue of what to do independently of the issue of what to think, that is, to do ethics independently of epistemology, and vice versa. This collection of new essays by leading philosophers focuses on a central concern of both epistemology and ethics: normativity. Normativity is a matter of what one should or may do or think…Read more
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110The Good and the True (or the Bad and the False)Philosophy 88 (2): 219-242. 2013.It is commonplace to claim that it is good to believe the truth. In this paper, I reject that claim and argue that the considerations which might seem to support it in fact support a quite distinct though superficially similar claim, namely, that it is bad to believe the false. This claim is typically either ignored completely or lumped together with the previous claim, perhaps on the assumption that the two are equivalent, or at least that they stand or fall together. Such assumptions, I argue,…Read more
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42Meaning, norms, and use: critical notice of Donald Davidson's Truth, Language, and HistoryPhilosophical Investigations 30 (2): 179-187. 2007.
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170Inferentialism, representationalism and derogatory wordsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (2). 2007.In a recent paper, after outlining various distinguishing features of derogatory words, Jennifer Hornsby suggests that the phenomenon raises serious difficulties for inferentialism. Against Hornsby, I claim that derogatory words do not pose any insuperable problems for inferentialism, so long as it is supplemented with apparatus borrowed from Grice and Hare. Moreover, I argue, derogatory expressions pose difficulties for Hornsby's favoured alternative theory of meaning, representationalism, unle…Read more
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3Charles Travis, Thought's Footing: Themes in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 27 (5): 383-385. 2007.
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289The normativity of meaning defendedAnalysis 67 (2): 133-140. 2007.Meaning, according to a significant number of philosophers, is an intrinsically normative notion.1 For this reason, it is suggested, meaning is not conducive to a naturalistic explanation. In this paper, I shall not address whether this is indeed so. Nor shall I present arguments in support of the normativity thesis (see Glock 2005; Kripke 1982). Instead, I shall examine and respond to two forceful objections recently (and independently) raised against it by Boghossian (2005), Hattiangadi (2006)…Read more
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670Reasons and GuidanceAnalytic Philosophy 57 (3): 214-235. 2016.Many philosophers accept a response constraint on normative reasons: that p is a reason for you to φ only if you are able to φ for the reason that p. This constraint offers a natural way to cash out the familiar and intuitive thought that reasons must be able to guide us, and has been put to work as a premise in a range of influential arguments in ethics and epistemology. However, the constraint requires interpretation and faces putative counter-examples due to Julia Markovits, Mark Schroeder, a…Read more
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1614Particular and general: Wittgenstein, linguistic rules, and contextIn The later Wittgenstein on language, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.Wittgenstein famously remarks that ‘the meaning of a word is its use’ (PI §43). Whether or not one views this as gesturing at a ‘theory’ of meaning, or instead as aiming primarily at dissuading us from certain misconceptions of language that are a source of puzzlement, it is clear that Wittgenstein held that for certain purposes the meaning of an expression could profitably be characterised as its use. Throughout his later writings, however, Wittgenstein’s appeal to the notion of use pulls in tw…Read more
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304Meaning Holism and De Re AscriptionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (4): 575-599. 2008.According to inferential role semantics (IRS), for an expression to have a particular meaning or express a certain concept is for subjects to be disposed to make, or to treat as proper, certain inferential transitions involving that expression.1 Such a theory of meaning is holistic, since according to it the meaning or concept any given expression possesses or expresses depends on the inferential relations it stands in to other expressions
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638Keep Things in Perspective: Reasons, Rationality, and the A PrioriJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (1): 1-22. 2014.Objective reasons are given by the facts. Subjective reasons are given by one’s perspective on the facts. Subjective reasons, not objective reasons, determine what it is rational to do. In this paper, I argue against a prominent account of subjective reasons. The problem with that account, I suggest, is that it makes what one has subjective reason to do, and hence what it is rational to do, turn on matters outside or independent of one’s perspective. After explaining and establishing this point,…Read more
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47Meaning and Normativity, by Allan Gibbard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, xiv + 310 pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-19-964607-4 hb £30.00 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 23 (S1). 2015.
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Eve Gaudet, Quine on Meaning: The Indeterminacy of Translation (review)Philosophy in Review 27 (1): 30. 2007.
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110Between primitivism and naturalism: Brandom’s theory of meaningActa Analytica 21 (3): 3-22. 2006.Many philosophers accept that a naturalistic reduction of meaning is in principle impossible, since behavioural regularities or dispositions are consistent with any number of semantic descriptions. One response is to view meaning as primitive. In this paper, I explore Brandom’s alternative, which is to specify behaviour in non-semantic but normative terms. Against Brandom, I argue that a norm specified in non-semantic terms might correspond to any number of semantic norms. Thus, his theory of me…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |
Aesthetics |
17th/18th Century British Philosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy |
Value Theory |