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50Direct warrant realismIn Andrew Dole & Andrew Chignell (eds.), God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge University Press. 2005.Direct Realism often emerges as a solution to a certain type of problem. Hume and, especially, Berkeley, wielding some of the most powerful arguments of 18th Century philosophy, forcefully attacked the notion that there could be good inferences from the occurrence of one’s sensations to the existence of external, mind-independent bodies. Given the success of these attacks, and also given the assumption, made by Berkeley and arguably by Hume as well, that our knowledge of and rational belief in t…Read more
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180The Conditionals of DeliberationMind 119 (473): 1-42. 2010.Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * …Read more
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53Contextualism and Knowledge AttributionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 913-929. 1992.
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154Simple 'might's, indicative possibilities and the open futurePhilosophical Quarterly 48 (190): 67-82. 1998.are ambiguous. In the mouth of someone who cannot remember whether it was Michael, or rather someone else, who was top scorer, can express the epistemic possibility that Michael led the league in scoring. But from someone who knows that Michael did not even play last season, but is wondering what would have happened if he had, means something quite different. Now where it has this quite different meaning, may still turn out to be the expression of some epistemic possibility. Perhaps where does not…Read more
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128This is the text for a presentation I gave at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C. on December 28, 1998. It was written very quickly, and I haven't had time to go back and fix it up, but I probably won't have time to fix it up any time soon, and several people have requested copies, so I don't see any harm in making it available. Please remember that it is a draft, and don't quote it without permission.
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133Relevant Alternatives and the Content of Knowledge AttributionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (1): 193-197. 1996.In “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” I argue that advocates of the “Relevant Alternatives” theory of knowledge fall into certain mistakes result if they tie the content of a knowledge attribution, on a given occasion of use, too tightly to what the range of relevant alternatives is on that occasion, and I sketch an alternative approach to the issues involved that avoids such mistakes. In “The Shifting Content of Knowledge Attributions,” Anthony Brueckner charges that my own account of …Read more
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46The key test cases for deciding between my brand of contextualism and Jennifer Nagel’s brand of invariantism are the third-person examples. As matters currently stand, first-person cases, like my original Bank cases (pp. 1-2), are pretty useless here. Nagel can agree that the speaker’s claim to “know” in Case A and his admission that he doesn’t “know” in Case B are both true; she just accepts a different account of why it is that both assertions can be, and are, true, according to which it is be…Read more
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174Virtually all monotheistic religions profess that there is a divine being who is extremely powerful, knowledgeable, and good. The evils of this world present various challenges for such religions. The starkest challenge is directed toward views that posit a being whose power, knowledge, and goodness are not just immense, but are as great as can be: an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being (for short, an oopg being). For it would seem that such a being would have the power, the knowled…Read more
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278How Can We Know that We're Not Brains in Vats?Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (S1): 121-148. 2000.This should be fairly close to the text of this paper as it appears in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000), Spindel Conference Supplement: 121-148.
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23The Problem with Subject‐Sensitive InvariantismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 346-350. 2004.Thomas Blackson does not question that my argument in section 2 of “Assertion, Knowledge and Context” establishes the conclusion that the standards that comprise a truth-condition for “I know that P” vary with context, but does claim that this does not suffice to validly demonstrate the truth of contextualism, because this variance in standards can be handled by what we will here call Subject-Sensitive Invariantism, and so does not demand a contextualist treatment. According to SSI, the varying …Read more
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82Conditionals, Literal Content, and 'DeRose's Thesis': A Reply to BarnettMind 121 (482): 443-455. 2012.Against Barnett (2012), I argue that the theory I advance in DeRose 2010 is best construed as one on which ‘"were"ed-up’ future-directed conditionals like ‘If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby’ are, in ways important to how they function in deliberation, different in literal content from their ‘straightforward’ counterparts like ‘If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby’. I also defend my way of classifying future-directed conditionals against a…Read more
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350The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 1Oxford University Press. 2009.Contextualism has been hotly debated in recent epistemology and philosophy of language. The Case for Contextualism is a state-of-the-art exposition and defense of the contextualist position, presenting and advancing the most powerful arguments in favor of the view and responding to the most pressing objections facing it.
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201Conditional assertions and "biscuit" conditionalsNoûs 33 (3): 405-420. 1999.kind of joke to ask what is the case if the antecedent is false—“And where are the biscuits if I don’t want any?”, “And what’s on PBS if I’m not interested?”, “And who shot Kennedy if that’s not what I’m asking?”. With normal indicative conditionals like.
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82Replies to Nagel, Ludlow, and Fantl and McGrath (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3): 703-721. 2012.
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31Precis of The Case for ContextualismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3): 675-677. 2012.
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122Review of Knowledge and its limitsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (4): 573-577. 2002.
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23Laat me vanaf het begin duidelijk maken welke betekenis ik wel — en niet — aan de term “universalisme” zal hechten. Zoals ik de term gebruik, heeft “universalisme” betrekking op het standpunt dat alle menselijke wezens uiteindelijk gered zullen worden en bij Christus eeuwig leven zullen mogen genieten. Dit standpunt is verenigbaar met de opvatting dat God vele mensen na hun dood zal straffen. Vele universalisten nemen aan dat er van Goddelijke vergelding sprake zal zijn, hoewel enkelen daar well…Read more
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139A few years back, I participated in the Spindell Conference in Memphis, and gave a paper, “How Can We Know That We’re Not Brains in Vats?” (available on-line at: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/Spindell.htm). The bulk of that paper concerned responses to skepticism. I pursued an unusually radical criticism of the often-criticized “Putnam-style” responses to skepticism. To put it rather enigmatically, I argued that such responses don’t work even if they work! And I compared such responses with the…Read more
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44Plantinga construes the “atheologian” as claiming that “the conjunction of these two propositions is necessarily false, false in every possible world,” while Plantinga “aims to show that there is a possible world in which (1) and (2) are both true.”.
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397Contextualism, contrastivism, and X-Phi surveysPhilosophical Studies 156 (1): 81-110. 2011.I will here sharply oppose all the phases of the story Schaffer & Knobe tell. In Part 1 we will look at the supposed empirical case against standard contextualism, and in Part 2 we will investigate Schaffer & Knobe’s supposed empirical case for the superiority of contrastivism over standard contextualism.
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239Single scoreboard semanticsPhilosophical Studies 119 (1-2): 1-21. 2004.What happens to the "conversational score" when speakers in a conversation push the score for a context-sensitive term in different directions? In epistemology, contextualists are often construed as holding that both the skeptic ("You don't know!") and her opponent ("Oh, yes I do!") speak truthfully when they debate. This assumes a "multiple scoreboards" version of contextualism. But contextualists themselves typically opt for "single scoreboard" views on which such apparently competing claims r…Read more
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796Assertion, knowledge, and contextPhilosophical Review 111 (2): 167-203. 2002.This paper uses the knowledge account of assertion (KAA) in defense of epistemological contextualism. Part 1 explores the main problem afflicting contextualism, what I call the "Generality Objection." Part 2 presents and defends both KAA and a powerful new positive argument that it provides for contextualism. Part 3 uses KAA to answer the Generality Objection, and also casts other shadows over the prospects for anti-contextualism.
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193Now you know it, now you don’tThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5 91-106. 2000.Resistance to contextualism comes in the form of many very different types of objections. My topic here is a certain group or family of related objections to contextualism that I call “Now you know it, now you don’t” objections. I responded to some such objections in my “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” a few years back. In what follows here, I will expand on that earlier response in various ways, and, in doing so, I will discuss some aspects of David Lewis’s recent paper, “Elusive Know…Read more
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20Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 945-949. 1993.
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233Descartes, epistemic principles, epistemic circularity, and scientiaPacific Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 220-238. 1992.
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83Work in progress. Will probably split into two papers, and then, perhaps, later, will be brought back together, along with other material, into something larger. (All this only if it works out OK!).
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585Contextualism: An explanation and defenseIn John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 187--205. 1998.In epistemology, “contextualism” denotes a wide variety of more-or-less closely related positions according to which the issues of knowledge or justification are somehow relative to context. I will proceed by first explicating the position I call contextualism, and distinguishing that position from some closely related positions in epistemology, some of which sometimes also go by the name of “contextualism”. I’ll then present and answer what seems to many the most pressing of the objections to c…Read more
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140exactly as the essay appears in Skepticism. It's pretty close, though. In the version that appears in the book, page references to other essays in Skepticism refer to page numbers in the book, while below page references are, for the most part, to the original place of publication of the essays referred to. Also, I below make one correction (in red) of a factual error..
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Philosophy of Language |
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