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An action is agentially perfect if and only if, if a person tries to perform it, they succeed, and, if a person performs it, they try to. We argue that trying itself is agentially perfect: if a person tries to try to do something, they try to do it; and, if a person tries to do something, they try to try to do it. We show how this claim sheds new light on the logical structure of intentional action, on the question of whether basic actions are tryings, and on the notion of “options” in decision …Read more
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Knowledge in the face of conspiracy conditionalsLinguistics and Philosophy 44 (3): 737-771. 2020.
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Thinking and being surePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3): 634-654. 2022.How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are not sure of. For example, you might think that it will rain sometime this mo…Read more
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Embedded AttitudesJournal of Semantics 36 (3): 377-406. 2019.This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint…Read more
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Knowledge by constraintPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 1-28. 2021.
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Lying and knowingSynthese 198 (6): 5351-5371. 2019.
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Thinking, Guessing, and BelievingPhilosophers' Imprint 22 (1): 1-34. 2022.This paper defends the view, put roughly, that to think that p is to guess that p is the answer to the question at hand, and that to think that p rationally is for one’s guess to that question to be in a certain sense non-arbitrary. Some theses that will be argued for along the way include: that thinking is question-sensitive and, correspondingly, that ‘thinks’ is context-sensitive; that it can be rational to think that p while having arbitrarily low credence that p; that, nonetheless, rational …Read more
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Indicative conditionals without iterative epistemologyNoûs 55 (3): 560-580. 2019.This paper argues that two widely accepted principles about the indicative conditional jointly presuppose the falsity of one of the most prominent arguments against epistemological iteration principles. The first principle about the indicative conditional, which has close ties both to the Ramsey test and the “or‐to‐if” inference, says that knowing a material conditional suffices for knowing the corresponding indicative. The second principle says that conditional contradictions cannot be true whe…Read more
Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |