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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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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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233Descartes, epistemic principles, epistemic circularity, and scientiaPacific Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 220-238. 1992.
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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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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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109Plantinga, Presumption, Possibility, and the Problem of EvilCanadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4). 1991.My topic is Alvin Plantinga’s ’solution’ to one of the many forms that the problem of evil takes: the modal abstract form. This form of the problem is abstract in that it does not deal with the amounts or kinds of evil which exist, but only with the fact that there is some evil or other. And it is modal in that it concerns the compossibility of the following propositions, not any evidential relation between them: God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly goodand There is evil in the world.
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118Lewis on ‘Might’ and ‘Would’ Counterfactual ConditionalsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (3): 413-418. 1994.Letting denote ‘would’ counterfactual conditionals like If I had looked in my pocket, I would have found a penny and letting denote ‘might’ counterfactual conditionals like If I had looked in my pocket, I might have found a penny,David Lewis’s thesis regarding the connection between these two types of conditionals is that.
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109A critical examination of Alvin Plantinga's attempted defense against the dreaded "Great Pumpkin Objection" to his theistic-belief-as-properly-basic religious epistemology.
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327The ordinary language basis for contextualism, and the new invariantismPhilosophical Quarterly 55 (219). 2005.I present the features of the ordinary use of 'knows' that make a compelling case for the contextualist account of that verb, and I outline and defend the methodology that takes us from the data to a contextualist conclusion. Along the way, the superiority of contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism is defended, and, in the final section, I answer some objections to contextualism.
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |