•  251
    Tom Kelly argues that instrumentalist aeeounts of epistemie rationality fail beeause what a person has reason to believe does not depend upon the eontent of his or her goals. However, his argument fails to distinguish questions about what the evidence supports from questions about what a person ought to believe. Once these are distinguished, the instrumentalist ean avoid Kelly’s objeetions. The paperconcludes by sketehing what I take to be the most defensible version of the instrumentalist view.
  •  248
    Love as a reactive emotion
    Philosophical Quarterly 61 (245): 673-699. 2011.
    One variety of love is familiar in everyday life and qualifies in every reasonable sense as a reactive attitude. ‘Reactive love’ is paradigmatically (a) an affectionate attachment to another person, (b) appropriately felt as a non-self-interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover, and (c) paradigmatically manifested in certain kinds of acts of goodwill and characteristic affective, desiderative and othe…Read more
  •  228
    G.E. Moore’s writings on external world skepticism show us, in broad outline, how to dispense with external world skepticism in a way that is satisfying, intellectually responsible, and yet avoids engaging in constructive epistemological theory-building altogether. His work thus reveals something very important about the relation between epistemology and ordinary life, and also about what it would take to reach a satisfying resolution of certain sorts of perennial philosophical problems.
  •  197
    On justifying and being justified
    Philosophical Issues 14 (1). 2004.
    We commonly speak of people as being ‘‘justified’’ or ‘‘unjustified’’ in believing as they do. These terms describe a person’s epistemic condition. To be justified in believing as one does is to have a positive epistemic status in virtue of holding one’s belief in a way which fully satisfies the relevant epistemic requirements or norms. This requires something more (or other) than simply believing a proposition whose truth is well-supported by evidence, even by evidence which one possesses onese…Read more
  •  197
    Believing one’s reasons are good
    Synthese 161 (3): 419-441. 2008.
    Is it coherent to suppose that in order to hold a belief responsibly, one must recognize something else as a reason for it? This paper addresses this question by focusing on so-called "Inferential Internalist" principles, that is principles of the following form: in order for one to have positive epistemic status Ø in virtue of believing P on the basis of R, one must believe that R evidentially supports P, and one must have positive epistemic status Ø in relation to that latter belief as well. W…Read more
  •  189
    Is knowledge a mental state? For philosophers working within the idealistic tradition, the answer is trivial: there is nothing else for knowledge to be. For most others, however, the claim has seemed prima facie implausible. Knowing that p requires or involves the fact that p, or p’s truth, and that – with certain specifiable exceptions – is quite independent of my mind; so while knowledge may require or involve certain mental states, it itself is not a state of mind
  •  175
    Is there a plausible argument for external world skepticism? Robert Nozick’s well-known discussion focuses upon arguments which utilize the Sensitivity Requirement and the Closure Principle. Nozick claims, correctly, that no such argument succeeds. But he gets almost all the details wrong. The Sensitivity Requirement and the Closure Principle are compatible; the Sensitivity Requirement is incorrect; and even if true, the Closure Principle is structurally incapable of generating a plausible and v…Read more
  •  172
    How to take skepticism seriously
    Philosophical Studies 148 (1). 2010.
    Modern-day heirs of the Cartesian revolution have been fascinated by the thought that one could utilize certain hypotheses – that one is dreaming, deceived by an evil demon, or a brain in a vat – to argue at one fell swoop that one does not know, is not justified in believing, or ought not believe most if not all of what one currently believes about the world. A good part of the interest and mystique of these discussions arises from the contention that the seeds of such arguments lie in our ordi…Read more
  •  146
    According to a common view, the activity of justifying is epistemologically irrelevant: being justified in believing as one does never requires the ability to justify one’s belief. This view runs into trouble regarding the epistemic basing relation, the relation between a person’s belief and the reasons for which the person holds it. The view must appeal to basing relations as part of its account of what it is for a person to be justified in believing as she does, but the view prevents basing re…Read more
  •  133
    Immediate warrant, epistemic responsibility, and Moorean dogmatism
    In Andrew Evan Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press. 2011.
    “Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moo…Read more
  •  130
    Changing One's Mind: Self‐Conscious Belief and Rational Endorsement
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (1): 150-171. 2018.
    Self-consciously attempting to shape one's beliefs through deliberation and reasoning requires that one stand in a relation to those beliefs that might be signaled by saying that one must inhabit one's beliefs as one's own view. What does this amount to? A broad swath of philosophical thinking about self-knowledge, norms of belief, self-consciousness, and related areas assumes that this relation requires one to endorse, or be rationally committed to endorsing, one's beliefs. In fact, however, fu…Read more
  •  119
    Why Don't I Know That I'm Not a BIV?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (1): 205-213. 2015.
  •  116
    Tom Kelly argues that instrumentalist accounts of epistemic rationality fail because what a person has reason to believe does not depend upon the content of his or her goals. However, his argument fails to distinguish questions about what the evidence supports from questions about what a person ought to believe. Once these are distinguished, the instrumentalist can avoid Kelly’s objections. The paper concludes by sketching what I take to be the most defensible version of the instrumentalist view…Read more
  •  116
    Keith DeRose has recently argued that the contextual variability of appropriate assertion, together with the knowledge account of assertion, yields a direct argument that 'knows' is semantically context-sensitive. The argument fails because of an equivocation on the notion of warranted assertability. Once the equivocation is removed, it can be seen that the invariantist can retain the knowledge account of assertion and explain the contextual variability of appropriate assertion by appealing to W…Read more
  •  96
    Epistemological externalism and the project of traditional epistemology
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (3). 2005.
    Traditional epistemological reflection on our beliefs about the world attempts to proceed without presupposing or ineliminably depending upon any claims about the world. It has been argued that epistemological externalism fails to engage in the right way with the motivations for this project. I argue, however, that epistemological externalism satisfyingly undermines this project. If we accept the thesis that certain conditions other than the truth of one's belief must obtain in the world outside…Read more
  •  88
    In the broadest sense of the term, fallibilism is an anti-dogmatic intellectual stance or attitude: an openness to the possibility that one has made an error and an accompanying willingness to give a fair hearing to arguments that one’s belief is incorrect (no matter what that belief happens to be about). So understood, fallibilism’s central insight is that it is possible to remain open to new evidence and arguments while also reasonably treating an issue as settled for the purposes of current i…Read more
  •  78
    This paper responds to Stephen Hetherington's discussion of my ‘Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?’ (2004). The Infallibilist skeptic holds that in order to know something, one must be able to rule out every possible alternative to the truth of one’s belief. This requirement is false. In this paper I first clarify this requirement’s relation to our ordinary practice. I then turn to a more fundamental issue. The Infallibilist holds – along with many non-skeptical epistemologists – tha…Read more
  •  72
    Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming&quest
    Philosophical Quarterly 54 (215): 232-251. 2004.
    A familiar form of scepticism supposes that knowledge requires infallibility. Although that requirement plays no role in our ordinary epistemic practices, Barry Stroud has argued that this is not a good reason for rejecting a sceptical argument: our ordinary practices do not correctly reflect the requirements for knowledge because the appropriateness-conditions for knowledge attribution are pragmatic. Recent fashion in contextualist semantics for 'knowledge' agrees with this view of our practice…Read more
  •  70
    A localist solution to the regress of epistemic justification
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (3). 2005.
    Guided by an account of the norms governing justificatory conversations, I propose that person-level epistemic justification is a matter of possessing a certain ability: the ability to provide objectively good reasons for one's belief by drawing upon considerations which one responsibly and correctly takes there to be no reason to doubt. On this view, justification requires responsible belief and is also objectively truth-conducive. The foundationalist doctrine of immediately justified beliefs i…Read more
  •  69
    But That's Not Evidence; It's Not Even True!
    Philosophical Quarterly 63 (250): 81-104. 2013.
    If p is false, it isn't evidence for anything. This view is central in one important response to a familiar sceptical argument. I consider and reject various motivations for refusing to accept this view – proposals arising from, e.g., our practice of providing rationalising explanations of people's beliefs, various locutions appearing to relativise evidence to persons, the significance of people's mental states for attributions of reasons to them, and the role of evidence in epistemic principles…Read more
  •  58
    “Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moo…Read more
  •  57
    Some Thoughts on "Varieties of Skepticism" by James Conant and Andrea Kern
    Nordic Wittgenstein Review 4 (2): 146-152. 2015.
    Book review of Conant, James and Kern, Andrea, Varieties of Skepticism: Essays after Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014, vi + 458 pp
  •  56
    Some worries for would-be WAMmers
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 69 (1): 101-126. 2005.
    DeRose appeals to ordinary English usage to support his contextualist semantics for "know"-attributions. A common objection holds that though the relevant assertions are both appropriate and seemingly true, their seeming truth arises merely from their appropriateness. This Warranted Assertability Maneuver (WAM) aims to provide a stand-alone objection by providing a reason not to take the ordinary language data at face-value. However, there is no plausible model or mechanism for the pragmatic phe…Read more
  •  55
    J. L. Austin’s attitude towards traditional epistemological problems was largely negative. They arise and are maintained, he charged, by “sleight of hand,” “wile,” “concealed motives,” “seductive fallacies,” fixation on a handful of “jejune examples” and a host of small errors, misinterpretations, and mistakes about matters of fact (1962: 3- 6, 1979: 87). As these charges indicate, he did not offer a general critical theory of traditional epistemological theorizing or of the intellectual motivat…Read more
  •  53
    Austin and the Scope of Our Knowledge
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 12 (3): 195-206. 2020.
    In ordinary circumstances in which we know there is a goldfinch on a branch in the garden, do we know that the thing on the branch isn’t stuffed? Austin’s methodology is perfectly compatible with holding both that we do and that we wouldn’t know it’s a goldfinch if we didn’t. Moreover, Austin’s methodology supports the claim that if we had no information whatsoever about whether it is stuffed, we wouldn’t know the thing on the branch is a goldfinch. Finally, Mark Kaplan’s claim that P is part of…Read more
  •  47
    Skepticism and epistemic asymmetry
    Philosophical Issues 29 (1): 184-197. 2019.
    Philosophical Issues, EarlyView.
  •  38
    Socrates' Critique of Cognitivism
    with Wallace I. Matson
    Philosophy 66 (256). 1991.
    Ethics and lexicography would seem, prima facie, to have little to do with each other. Yet Aristotle testifies that Socrates pursued both:Socrates was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions. Socrates occupied himself with the excellences of character, and in connection with them became the first to raise the problem of universal definitions.
  •  36
    The Plain Inquirer’s Plain Evidence against the Global Skeptical Scenarios
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (3): 208-222. 2018.
    _ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 3, pp 208 - 222 Penelope Maddy claims that we can have no evidence that we are not being globally deceived by an evil demon. However, Maddy’s Plain Inquirer holds that she has good evidence for a wide variety of claims about the world and her relation to it. She rejects the broadly Cartesian idea that she can’t be entitled to these claims, or have good evidence for them, or know them, unless she can provide a defense of them that starts from nowhere. She likewise rejec…Read more
  •  35
    Projective Identification, Clinical Context, and Philosophical Elucidation
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 25 (2): 81-87. 2018.
    The clinical concept of projective identification encompasses both unconscious fantasies of putting aspects of oneself into another person, as well as interpersonal processes aimed at evoking a corresponding response in another person, all for purposes of defensive evacuation, control and/or communication.1 In thinking about this complex situation, we need to consider its interpersonal dimensions as well as the intrapsychic processes that take place in each party. Louise Braddock's paper is thou…Read more
  •  34
    Second-Personal Desire
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (4): 597-616. 2016.