•  8
    Modal Quantification Without Worlds
    In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 8, Oxford University Press. pp. 151-186. 2013.
    This paper is about avoiding commitment to an ontology of possible worlds with two primitives: a hyperintensional connective like ‘in virtue of’, and primitive quantification into predicate position. I argue that these tools (which some believe can be independently motivated) render dispensable the ontology of possible worlds needed by traditional anaylses of modality. They also shed new light on the notion of truth-at-a-world.
  •  263
    The Folk Probably do Think What you Think They Think
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (3): 421-441. 2013.
    Much of experimental philosophy consists of surveying 'folk' intuitions about philosophically relevant issues. Are the results of these surveys evidence that the relevant folk intuitions cannot be predicted from the ‘armchair’? We found that a solid majority of philosophers could predict even results claimed to be 'surprising'. But, we argue, this does not mean that such experiments have no role at all in philosophy.
  •  75
    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…Read more
  •  62
    Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
    Philosophical Review 127 (2): 260-264. 2018.
  •  74
    Ethical Vagueness and Practical Reasoning
    Philosophical Quarterly 67 (266): 38-60. 2017.
    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 vagu…Read more
  •  51
    Epistemological motivations for anti-realism
    Philosophical Studies 175 (11): 2763-2789. 2018.
    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 e…Read more
  •  50
  •  155
    Supervenience Arguments and Normative Non‐naturalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3): 627-655. 2014.
  •  200
    Minimalist semantics in meta-ethical expressivism
    Philosophical Studies 151 (3). 2010.
    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…Read more
  •  160
    Reference Magnetism as a Solution to the Moral Twin Earth Problem
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3. 2016.
  •  3588
    Realism and Objectivity
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 135-150. 2017.
  •  382
    Scepticism
    In William J. Abraham Frederick D. Aquino (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, Oxford University Press. pp. 290-308. 2017.
    To what extent are the answers to theological questions knowable? And if the relevant answers are knowable, which sorts of inquirers are in a position to know them? In this chapter we shall not answer these questions directly but instead supply a range of tools that may help us make progress here. The tools consist of plausible structural constraints on knowledge. After articulating them, we shall go on to indicate some ways in which they interact with theological scepticism. In some cases the s…Read more
  •  40
    Luck: Evolutionary and epistemic
    Episteme 14 (4): 441-461. 2017.
    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 se…Read more