•  23
    Uncertainty and Intention
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25 (3). 2023.
    Speakers typically use the sentence “I will go to the store” to simultaneously express an intention to go to the store and a belief that they will go to the store. This is consonant with two popular theses about intentions: first, intending to j implies believing that one will j; second, intending to j commits one to j-ing. In this paper, I argue that at least one of these theses is false. I do so by exploring what speakers express when they utter a sentence with a slightly different form, like …Read more
  •  201
    It is often claimed that credences are not reducible to ordinary beliefs about probabilities. Such a reduction appears to be decisively ruled out by certain sorts of triviality results–analogous to those often discussed in the literature on conditionals. I show why these results do not, in fact, rule out the view. They merely give us a constraint on what such a reduction could look like. In particular they show that there is no single proposition belief in which suffices for having a particular …Read more
  •  29
    Imprecise Credences and Acceptance
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
    Elga (2010) argues that no plausible decision rule governs action with imprecise credences. I follow Moss (2015a) in claiming that the solution to Elga’s challenge is found in the philosophy of mind, not in devising a special new decision rule. Moss suggests that in decision situations that involve imprecise credences, we must identify with a precise credence, but she says little about identification. By reflecting on the common conception of identification and on what is necessary for Moss’s so…Read more
  •  57
    Quantificational Attitudes
    Journal of Philosophy 118 (11): 585-613. 2021.
    The literature contains a popular argument in favor of the position that conditional attitudes are not simple attitudes with conditional contents but, rather, have a more complex structure. In this paper I show that an analogous argument applies to what we might call quantificational attitudes—like an intention to follow every bit of good advice I receive or a desire to get rabies shots for each bite I incur from an infected bat. The conditions under which these attitudes are satisfied and thwar…Read more
  •  85
    Linguistic Disobedience
    Philosophers' Imprint 20 (21): 1-16. 2020.
    There has recently been a flurry of activity in the philosophy of language on how to best account for the unique features of epithets. One of these features is that epithets can be appropriated (that is, the offense-grounding potential of a term can be removed). We argue that attempts to appropriate an epithet fundamentally involve a violation of language-governing rules. We suggest that the other conditions that make something an attempt at appropriation are the same conditions that characteriz…Read more
  •  52
    Probabilistic Antecedents and Conditional Attitudes
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (1): 62-79. 2021.
    I generalize the notion of a conditional attitude by bringing together two topics of inquiry. One is the ordinary inquiry into conditional attitudes. The other topic is the inquiry into the attitude of thinking that a proposition is likely, or having a high credence in a proposition. For instance, what is it to intend to go to the game if it is likely that Kershaw pitches? Being likely that Kershaw pitches is the condition of the attitude. Given a natural position about statements like “It is li…Read more
  •  92
    What might but must not be
    Analysis 80 (4): 647-656. 2020.
    We examine an objection to analysing the epistemic ‘might’ and ‘may’ as existential quantifiers over possibilities. Some claims that a proposition “might” be the case appear felicitous although, according to the quantifier analysis, they are necessarily false, since there are no possibilities in which the proposition is true. We explain such cases pragmatically, relying on the fact that ‘might’-sentences are standardly used to convey that the speaker takes a proposition as a serious option in re…Read more
  •  35
    Evaluating the multiple proposition strategy
    Ratio 33 (3): 163-172. 2020.
    Contextualism about many expressions faces a common objection: in some discourses it appears that there is no single interpretation which can explain how a speaker is justified in making her assertion and how a hearer with different information or standards is justified in negatively evaluating what the speaker said. According to the Multiple Proposition Strategy , contextualists may attempt to explain these competing features pragmatically in terms of different propositions in play. In this pap…Read more
  •  96
    Noncognitivism and the Frege‐Geach Problem in Formal Epistemology
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 184-208. 2019.
    This paper makes explicit the way in which many theorists of the epistemology of uncertainty, or formal epistemologists, are committed to a version of noncognitivism—one about thoughts that something is likely. It does so by drawing an analogy with metaethical noncognitivism. I explore the degree to which the motivations for both views are similar and how both views have to grapple with the Frege‐Geach Problem about complex thoughts. The major upshot of recognizing this noncognitivism is that it…Read more
  •  65
    Might-beliefs and asymmetric disagreement
    Synthese 196 (11): 4775-4805. 2019.
    What we can call asymmetric disagreement occurs when one agent is in disagreement with another, but not vice-versa. In this paper, I give an example of and develop a framework for understanding this phenomenon. One pivotal feature of my example is that one of the agents in the scenario has a belief about what might be the case—a might-belief. I show that a traditional account of might-beliefs and disagreement cannot explain the initially surprising phenomenon of asymmetric disagreement. In order…Read more
  •  64
    Quantificational Credences
    Philosophers' Imprint 15. 2015.
    In addition to full beliefs, agents have attitudes of varying confidence, or credences. For instance, I do not believe that the Boston Red Sox will win the American League East this year, but I am at least a little bit confident that they will – i.e. I have a positive credence that they will. It is also common to think that agents have conditional credences. For instance, I am very confident – i.e. have a conditional credence of very-likely strength – that the Red Sox will win the AL East this y…Read more
  •  6868
    A Dutch Book Theorem for Quantificational Credences
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4. 2017.
    In this paper, I present an argument for a rational norm involving a kind of credal attitude called a quantificational credence – the kind of attitude we can report by saying that Lucy thinks that each record in Schroeder’s collection is 5% likely to be scratched. I prove a result called a Dutch Book Theorem, which constitutes conditional support for the norm. Though Dutch Book Theorems exist for norms on ordinary and conditional credences, there is controversy about the epistemic significance o…Read more
  •  116
    Simple Contextualism about Epistemic Modals Is Incorrect
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (4): 252-262. 2014.
    I argue against a simple contextualist account of epistemic modals. My argument, like the argument on which it is based , charges that simple contextualism cannot explain all of the conversational data about uses of epistemic modals. My argument improves on its predecessor by insulating itself from recent contextualist attempts by Janice Dowell and Igor Yanovich to get around that argument. In particular, I use linguistic data to show that an utterance of an epistemic modal sentence can be warra…Read more
  •  83
    Taking 'Might'‐Communication Seriously
    Analytic Philosophy 55 (2): 176-198. 2014.
    In this paper, I show that, given seemingly plausible assumptions about the epistemic ‘might’ and conditionals, we cannot explain why in some circumstances it is appropriate to utter conditional ‘might’-sentences, like “If Angelica has crumbs in her pocket, then she might be the thief” and not the corresponding simple ones, like “Angelica might be the thief.” So, one of our assumptions must be incorrect. I argue that the root of the problem is an umbrella thesis about the pragmatics of ‘might’-c…Read more
  •  46
    In addition to beliefs, people have attitudes of confidence called credences. Combinations of credences, like combinations of beliefs, can be inconsistent. It is common to use tools from probability theory to understand the normative relationships between a person’s credences. More precisely, it is common to think that something is a consistency norm on a person’s credal state if and only if it is a simple transformation of a truth of probability. Though it is common to challenge the right-to-le…Read more