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Radical internalismPhilosophical Issues 32 (1): 46-64. 2022.In her paper “Radical Externalism”, Amia Srinivasan argues that externalism about epistemic justification should be preferred to internalism by those who hold a “radical” worldview (according to which pernicious ideology distorts our evidence and belief‐forming processes). I share Srinivasan's radical worldview, but do not agree that externalism is the preferable approach in light of the worldview we share. Here I argue that cases informed by this worldview can intuitively support precisely the …Read more
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Normative Source and Extensional AdequacyJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 10 (3): 1-26. 2016.Internalists about practical reasons maintain that all of an agent’s reasons for action derive their normative force via some relation in which they stand with that agent’s pro-attitudes, or the pro-attitudes that the agent would have in some idealized set of circumstances. One common complaint against internalism is that the view is extensionally inadequate – that it cannot render the correct verdicts about what reasons agents have in a range of important cases. In this paper, I examine that ch…Read more
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Reasons, Reason, and ContextIn Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.This paper explores various subtleties in our ordinary thought and talk about normative reasons—subtleties which, if taken seriously, have various upshots, both substantive and methodological. I focus on two subtleties in particular. The first concerns the use of reason (in its normative sense) as both a count noun and as a mass noun, and the second concerns the context-sensitivity of normative reasons-claims. The more carefully we look at the language of reasons, I argue, the clearer its limita…Read more
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Death and DeclinePhilosophical Quarterly 73 (1): 248-257. 2022.In this paper, I investigate backward-looking accounts of death's badness. I begin by reviewing deprivationism—the standard, forward-looking account of death's badness. On deprivationism, death is bad for its victims when it deprives them of a good future. This account famously faces two problems—Lucretius’s symmetry problem and the preemption problem. This motivates turning to backward-looking accounts of death's badness on which death is bad for its victim (in a respect) when it involves a dec…Read more
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Noncognitivism and agent-centered normsPhilosophical Studies 179 (4): 1019-1038. 2021.This paper takes up a neglected problem for metaethical noncognitivism: the characterization of the acceptance states for agent-centered normative theories like Rational Egoism. If Egoism is a coherent view, the non-cognitivist needs a coherent acceptance state for it. This can be provided, as Dreier and Gibbard have shown. But those accounts fail when generalized, assigning the same acceptance state to normative theories that are clearly distinct, or assigning no acceptance state to theories th…Read more
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Conspiracy Theories and Evidential Self-InsulationIn Sven Bernecker, Amy K. Flowerree & Thomas Grundmann (eds.), The Epistemology of Fake News, Oxford University Press. pp. 82-105. 2021.What are conspiracy theories? And what, if anything, is epistemically wrong with them? I offer an account on which conspiracy theories are a unique way of holding a belief in a conspiracy. Specifically, I take conspiracy theories to be self-insulating beliefs in conspiracies. On this view, conspiracy theorists have their conspiratorial beliefs in a way that is immune to revision by counter-evidence. I argue that conspiracy theories are always irrational. Although conspiracy theories involve an e…Read more
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How irrelevant influences bias beliefPhilosophical Perspectives 29 (1): 7-39. 2015.
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Moorean Facts and Belief Revision, or Can the Skeptic Win?Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1): 179-209. 2005.
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Review of Raymond Geuss, 'Who Needs a World View?' (review)Los Angeles Review of Books. 2020.
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Is critical thinking epistemically responsible?Metaphilosophy 36 (4): 522-531. 2005.
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Knowledge Norms and Acting WellThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 49-55. 2012.I argue that evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning is less straightforward than is often assumed in the literature. In particular, cases in which knowledge is intuitively present, but action is intuitively epistemically unwarranted, provide no traction against the knowledge norm. The knowledge norm indicates what it is appropriately to hold a particular content as a reason for action; it does not provide a theory of what reasons are sufficient for what actions. Absent a general th…Read more
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Respect and the reality of apparent reasonsPhilosophical Studies 178 (10): 3129-3156. 2021.Rationality requires us to respond to apparent normative reasons. Given the independence of appearance and reality, why think that apparent normative reasons necessarily provide real normative reasons? And if they do not, why think that mistakes of rationality are necessarily real mistakes? This paper gives a novel answer to these questions. I argue first that in the moral domain, there are objective duties of respect that we violate whenever we do what appears to violate our first-order duties.…Read more
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Suspended judgmentPhilosophical Studies 162 (2): 165-181. 2013.Abstract In this paper I undertake an in-depth examination of an oft mentioned but rarely expounded upon state: suspended judgment. While traditional epistemology is sometimes characterized as presenting a “yes or no” picture of its central attitudes, in fact many of these epistemologists want to say that there is a third option: subjects can also suspend judgment. Discussions of suspension are mostly brief and have been less than clear on a number of issues, in particular whether this third o…Read more
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Evidentialism doesn’t make an exception for beliefSynthese 198 (6): 5477-5494. 2021.Susanna Rinard has recently offered a new argument for pragmatism and against evidentialism. According to Rinard, evidentialists must hold that the rationality of belief is determined in a way that is different from how the rationality of other states is determined. She argues that we should instead endorse a view she calls Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of all states is determined in the same way. In this paper, I show that Rinard’s claims are mistaken, and that evidentiali…Read more
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Might All Normativity be Queer?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (1): 41-58. 2010.Here I discuss the conceptual structure and core semantic commitments of reason-involving thought and discourse needed to underwrite the claim that ethical normativity is not uniquely queer. This deflates a primary source of ethical scepticism and it vindicates so-called partner in crime arguments. When it comes to queerness objections, all reason-implicating normative claims—including those concerning Humean reasons to pursue one's ends, and epistemic reasons to form true beliefs—stand or fall …Read more
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Evidence and Normativity: Reply to LeitePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 465-474. 2007.According to one view about the rationality of belief, such rationality is ultimately nothing other than the rationality that one exhibits in taking the means to one’s ends. On this view, epistemic rationality is really a species or special case of instrumental rationality. In particular, epistemic rationality is instrumental rationality in the service of one’s distinctively cognitive or epistemic goals (perhaps: one’s goal of holding true rather than false beliefs). In my (2003), I dubbed this …Read more
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The skeptic and the dogmatistNoûs 34 (4). 2000.Consider the skeptic about the external world. Let’s straightaway concede to such a skeptic that perception gives us no conclusive or certain knowledge about our surroundings. Our perceptual justification for beliefs about our surroundings is always defeasible—there are always possible improvements in our epistemic state which would no longer support those beliefs. Let’s also concede to the skeptic that it’s metaphysically possible for us to have all the experiences we’re now having while all th…Read more
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Solving the skeptical problemPhilosophical Review 104 (1): 1-52. 1995.
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Conditional ObligationsSocial Theory and Practice 46 (2): 365-390. 2020.Some obligations are conditional such that act A is morally optional, but if one chooses A, one is required to do act B rather than some other less valuable act C. Such conditional obligations arise frequently in research ethics, in the philosophical literature, and in real life. They are controversial: how does a morally optional act give rise to demanding requirements to do the best? Some think that the fact that a putative obligation has a conditional structure, so defined, is a strike agains…Read more
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Rational Requirements and the Primacy of PressureMind 129 (516): 1033-1070. 2020.There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one’s mental states, independently of whether those attitudes are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associ…Read more
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Why be rationalMind 114 (455): 509-563. 2005.Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense …Read more
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Enkrasia or evidentialism? Learning to love mismatchPhilosophical Studies 177 (3): 597-632. 2020.I formulate a resilient paradox about epistemic rationality, discuss and reject various solutions, and sketch a way out. The paradox exemplifies a tension between a wide range of views of epistemic justification, on the one hand, and enkratic requirements on rationality, on the other. According to the enkratic requirements, certain mismatched doxastic states are irrational, such as believing p, while believing that it is irrational for one to believe p. I focus on an evidentialist view of justif…Read more
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Accuracy, Coherence and EvidenceOxford Studies in Epistemology 5 61-96. 2015.
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``Subjective and Objective Justification in Ethics and Epistemology"The Monist 71 (3): 405--419. 1988.
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |