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55On Living the Testimonial Sceptic’s Life: Can Testimonial Scepticism Be Dismissed?Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1): 333-354. 2023.Within the contemporary epistemology of testimony, it is widely assumed that testimonial scepticism can be dismissed without engaging with possible reasons or arguments supporting the view. This assumption of dismissibility both underlies the debate between reductionist and non-reductionist views of testimony and is responsible for the neglect of testimonial scepticism within contemporary epistemology. This paper argues that even given liberal assumptions about what may constitute valid grounds …Read more
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437Disagreement, progress, and the goal of philosophySynthese 201 (2): 1-22. 2023.Modest pessimism about philosophical progress is the view that while philosophy may sometimes make some progress, philosophy has made, and can be expected to make, only very little progress (where the extent of philosophical progress is typically judged against progress in the hard sciences). The paper argues against recent attempts to defend this view on the basis of the pervasiveness of disagreement within philosophy. The argument from disagreement for modest pessimism assumes a teleological c…Read more
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54Informed Consent, Error and Suspending Ignorance: Providing Knowledge or Preventing Error?Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2): 351-368. 2022.The standard account of informed consent has recently met serious criticism, focused on the mismatch between its implications and widespread intuitions about the permissibility of conducting research and providing treatment under conditions of partial knowledge. Unlike other critics of the standard account, we suggest an account of the relations between autonomy, ignorance, and valid consent that avoids these implausible implications while maintaining the standard core idea, namely, that the pri…Read more
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53Uncertainty, error and informed consent to challenge trials of COVID-19 vaccines: response to Steel et alJournal of Medical Ethics 46 (12): 813-814. 2020.In a recent article, Steel, Buchak and Eyal argue that current levels of uncertainty do not present a good reason to bar controlled human infection trials of COVID-19 vaccines from proceeding. We argue that their argumentation for this conclusion is flawed. SBE are mistaken about the effects which different forms of ignorance have on participants’ ability to provide valid informed consent. Decision-makers considering whether to allow such trials, we argue, must ultimately consider the likelihood…Read more
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121Trust and BeliefIn Judith Simon (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy, . pp. 109-120. forthcoming.One fundamental divide among philosophers studying the nature of trust concerns the relation between trust and belief. According to doxastic accounts of trust, trust entails a belief about the trustee: either the belief that she is trustworthy with respect to what she is trusted to do, or that she will do what she is trusted to do. Non-doxastic accounts deny that trusting entails holding such a belief. The chapter describes and evaluates the main considerations which have been cited for and agai…Read more
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24Review of Knowledge Transmission by Stephen Wright (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201907. 2019.
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38Trust, Preemption, and KnowledgeIn Katherine Dormandy (ed.), Trust in Epistemology, . 2019.This chapter gives an account of epistemic trust. It argues that trust in general is a matter of declining to take precautions against the trustee’s failing to come through, and that this amounts in the epistemic case to declining to rely on evidence for the testified proposition, instead relying solely on the testifier. But if this is so, how can trust play a positive role in securing knowledge? The key, it is argued, lies in recognizing that trust is preemptive: Trusting someone entails believ…Read more
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82Disagreement, Democracy, and the Goals of Science: Is a Normative Philosophy of Science Possible, If Ethical Inquiry Is Not?Philosophy 86 (4): 525-544. 2011.W.V.Quine and Philip Kitcher have both developed naturalistic approaches to the philosophy of science which are partially based on a skeptical view about the possibility of rational inquiry into certain questions of value. Nonetheless, both Quine and Kitcher do not wish to give up on the normative dimension of the philosophy of science. I argue that Kitcher's recent argument against the specification of the goal of science in terms of truth raises a problem for Quine's account of the normative d…Read more
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138The Public Understanding of What? Laypersons' Epistemic Needs, the Division of Cognitive Labor, and the Demarcation of SciencePhilosophy of Science 85 (5): 781-792. 2018.What must laypersons understand about science to allow them to make sound decisions on science-related issues? Relying on recent developments in social epistemology, this paper argues that scientific education should have the goal not of bringing laypersons' understanding of science closer to that of expert insiders, but rather of cultivating the kind of competence characteristic of “competent outsiders” (Feinstein 2011). Moreover, it argues that philosophers of science have an important ro…Read more
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549Kitcher on Well-Ordered Science: Should Science Be Measured against the Outcomes of Ideal Democratic Deliberation?Theoria 28 (2): 233-244. 2013.What should the goals of scientific inquiry be? What questions should scientists investigate, and how should our resources be distributed between different lines of investigation? Philip Kitcher has suggested that we should answer these questions by appealing to an ideal based on the consideration of hypothetical democratic deliberations under ideal circumstances. The paper argues that we have no reason to adopt this ideal. The paper examines both traditional arguments for democracy and Kitcher'…Read more
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241On the alleged perversity of the evidential view of testimonyAnalysis 72 (4): 700-707. 2012.According to the evidential view of testimony (EVT), the epistemic value of testimony is its value as evidence. Richard Moran has argued that because testimony is deliberately produced with the intention of making audiences form a belief, its value as evidence for the attested proposition is diminished; as a result, EVT cannot explain why we regard testimony as such a significant source of knowledge. I argue that this argument against EVT fails, because there is no reason to think that the delib…Read more
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778Zagzebski on Authority and Preemption in the Domain of BeliefEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (4): 61-76. 2014.The paper discusses Linda Zagzebski's account of epistemic authority. Building on Joseph Raz's account of political authority, Zagzebski argues that the basic contours of epistemic authority match those Raz ascribes to political authority. This, it is argued, is a mistake. Zagzebski is correct in identifying the pre-emptive nature of reasons provided by an authority as central to our understanding of epistemic authority. However, Zagzebski ignores important differences between practical and epis…Read more
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597Science and Informed, Counterfactual, Democratic ConsentPhilosophy of Science 82 (5): 1284-1295. 2015.On many science-related policy questions, the public is unable to make informed decisions, because of its inability to make use of knowledge obtained by scientists. Philip Kitcher and James Fishkin have both suggested therefore that on certain science-related issues, public policy should not be decided on by actual democratic vote, but should instead conform to the public’s counterfactual informed democratic decision. Indeed, this suggestion underlies Kitcher’s specification of an ideal of a wel…Read more
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284Epistemic authority, testimony and the transmission of knowledge†Episteme 4 (3): 368-381. 2007.I present an account of what it is to trust a speaker, and argue that the account can explain the common intuitions which structure the debate about the transmission view of testimony. According to the suggested account, to trust a speaker is to grant her epistemic authority on the asserted proposition, and hence to see her opinion as issuing a second order, preemptive reason for believing the proposition. The account explains the intuitive appeal of the basic principle associated with the trans…Read more
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1123Trust and belief: a preemptive reasons accountSynthese 191 (12): 2593-2615. 2014.According to doxastic accounts of trust, trusting a person to \(\varPhi \) involves, among other things, holding a belief about the trusted person: either the belief that the trusted person is trustworthy or the belief that she actually will \(\varPhi \) . In recent years, several philosophers have argued against doxastic accounts of trust. They have claimed that the phenomenology of trust suggests that rather than such a belief, trust involves some kind of non-doxastic mental attitude towards t…Read more
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64Epistemic Authority, Testimony and the Transmission of KnowledgeEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4 (3): 368-381. 2007.I present an account of what it is to trust a speaker, and argue that the account can explain the common intuitions which structure the debate about the transmission view of testimony. According to the suggested account, to trust a speaker is to grant her epistemic authority on the asserted proposition, and hence to see her opinion as issuing a second order, preemptive reason for believing the proposition. The account explains the intuitive appeal of the basic principle associated with the trans…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |