Billy Dunaway

Testimony can be a source of knowledge. This paper examines how misinterpretation, or the risk of it, can prevent a hearer from acquiring testimonial knowledge. Because unreliability in interpretation can arise in many ways, section 2 considers a variety of such cases. Section 3 sketches some desiderata for a successful account of the role of interpretation in testimony, by analogous consideration of inference. On our account, interpretation needn’t proceed inferentially through knowledgeable belief about what is said. Finally, section 4 offers a safety-theoretic account of reliable interpretation which explains how and when misinterpretation prevents knowledge.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Allan Gibbard is one of the most significant contributors to philosophy over the last five decades. Gibbard's work covers an impressive number of subfields within philosophy, including ethics, philosophy of language, decision theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. It also engages with, and makes significant contributions to, work from the natural and social sciences. This volume is not a collection of artifacts from past decades of philosophy. Instead, it is a collection of essays that each make a significant contribution to contemporary work in philosophy. This reflects the fact that Gibbard's work has not only had a massive influence on past discussion in philosophy but also continues to influence new directions of philosophical research. With contributions from: Sara Aronowitz, Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, David Braddon-Mitchell, Nate Charlow, Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, Billy Dunaway, Melissa Fusco, Sona Ghosh, Allan Gibbard, Bill Harper, Paul Horwich, Zoë Johnson King, Tristram McPherson, Howard Nye, Lauren Olin, Caleb Perl, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, Connie Rosati, Mark Schroeder, Alex Silk, Daniel J. Singer, Brian Skyrms, and Seth Yalcin.

This paper looks at the phenomenon of ethical vagueness by asking the question, how ought one to reason about what to do when confronted with a case of ethical vagueness? I begin by arguing that we must confront this question, since ethical vagueness is inescapable. I then outline one attractive answer to the question: we ought to maximize expected moral value when confronted with ethical vagueness. This idea yields determinate results for what one rationally ought to do in cases of ethical vagueness. But what it recommends is dependent on which substantive theory of vagueness is true; one can't draw conclusions about how to reason about vagueness in ethics in the absence of concrete assumptions about the nature of vagueness.

Anti-realism is often claimed to be preferable to realism on epistemological grounds: while realists have difficulty explaining how we can ever know claims if we are realists about it, anti-realism faces no analogous problem. This paper focuses on anti-realism about normativity to investigate this alleged advantage to anti-realism in detail. I set up a framework in which a version of anti-realism explains a type of modal reliability that appears to be epistemologically promising, and plausibly explains the appearance of an epistemological advantage to realism. But, I argue, this appearance is illusory, and on closer investigation the anti-realist view does not succeed in explaining the presence of familiar epistemological properties for normative belief like knowledge or the absence of defeat. My conclusion on the basis of this framework is that there is a tension in the anti-realist view between the urge to idealize the conditions in which normative beliefs ground normative facts, and a robust kind of reliability that normative belief can have if the anti-realist resists these idealizations.

This paper advances two theses about evolutionary debunking arguments in ethics. The first is that, while such arguments are often motivated with the rhetoric of ‘luck', proponents of these arguments have not distinguished between the kinds of luck that might lead to the formation of a true belief. Once we make the needed distinctions, the relevance of the kind of luck which can be derived from broadly evolutionary explanations to the epistemological conclusions debunkers draw is suspect. The second thesis is that debunkers might successfully show that epistemic luck is relevant to their concerns. But they will need to include specific premises about the kind of evolutionary mechanism that explains the beliefs that the debunker targets. Proponents of debunking arguments, if they continue to insist on using luck-based considerations, are then hostage to empirical fortune in a way not previously recognized.

James Dreier (Philos Perspect 18: 23-44, 2004) states what he calls the "Problem of Creeping Minimalism": that metaethical Expressivists can accept a series of claims about meaning, under which all of the sentences that Realists can accept are consistent with Expressivism. This would allow Expressivists to accept all of the Realist's sentences, and as Dreier points out, make it difficult to say what the difference between the two views is. That Expressivists can accept these claims about meaning has been suggested by Simon Blackburn on behalf of his "quasirealist". I argue against the assumption that there is a way to interpret the Realist's sentences in a way that renders them consistent with Expressivism.