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26Remarks on Ángel Pinillos’s Why We DoubtInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-9. forthcoming.In these brief remarks, I describe the author’s Bayesian explication of the narrow function of the meta-cognitive, heuristic algorithm (pbs) that is at the heart of his psychological explanation of why we entertain skeptical doubts. I provide some critical remarks, and an alternative Bayesian approach that is (to my mind) somewhat more elegant than the author’s.
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Symmetries and asymmetries in evidential supportIn Antony Eagle (ed.), Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings, Routledge. 2011.
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Closure, Counter-Closure, and Inferential KnowledgeIn Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida & Peter David Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem, Oxford University Press. pp. 312-324. 2017.The chapter begins with some general remarks about closure and counter-closure, and is followed with a discussion of the following: I (a) review some (alleged) counterexamples to counter-closure, I then continue by (b) discussing a popular strategy for responding to such counterexamples to counter-closure, and finally I (c) pose a dilemma for this popular strategy. Once I have discussed these three points I conclude the chapter by proposing that we reject counter-closure, but at the same time th…Read more
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803Deference Done BetterPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 99-150. 2021.There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring…Read more
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Part IV. Collective entities and formal epistemology. Individual coherence and group coherenceIn Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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65A Problem for Confirmation Measure ZPhilosophy of Science 88 (4): 726-730. 2021.In this article, I present a serious problem for confirmation measure Z.
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1120Four Approaches to SuppositionErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (26): 58-98. 2022.Suppositions can be introduced in either the indicative or subjunctive mood. The introduction of either type of supposition initiates judgments that may be either qualitative, binary judgments about whether a given proposition is acceptable or quantitative, numerical ones about how acceptable it is. As such, accounts of qualitative/quantitative judgment under indicative/subjunctive supposition have been developed in the literature. We explore these four different types of theories by systematica…Read more
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189Two Approaches to Belief RevisionErkenntnis 84 (3): 487-518. 2019.In this paper, we compare and contrast two methods for the revision of qualitative beliefs. The first method is generated by a simplistic diachronic Lockean thesis requiring coherence with the agent’s posterior credences after conditionalization. The second method is the orthodox AGM approach to belief revision. Our primary aim is to determine when the two methods may disagree in their recommendations and when they must agree. We establish a number of novel results about their relative behavior.…Read more
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41Confirmation, causation, and Simpson's paradoxEpisteme 14 (3): 297-309. 2017.ABSTRACTIn this paper, I review some recent treatments of Simpson's Paradox, and I propose a new rationalizing explanation of its paradoxicality.
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IntroductionIn Cherie Braden, Rodrigo Borges & Branden Fitelson (eds.), Themes From Klein, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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307How Not to Detect DesignThe Design Inference. William A. DembskiPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 472-488. 1999.As every philosopher knows, “the design argument” concludes that God exists from premisses that cite the adaptive complexity of organisms or the lawfulness and orderliness of the whole universe. Since 1859, it has formed the intellectual heart of creationist opposition to the Darwinian hypothesis that organisms evolved their adaptive features by the mindless process of natural selection. Although the design argument developed as a defense of theism, the logic of the argument in fact encompasses …Read more
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84Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacyThinking and Reasoning 14 (2): 182-199. 2008.The conjunction fallacy has been a key topic in debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. Despite extensive inquiry, however, the attempt of providing a satisfactory account of the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we elaborate the suggestion (first discussed by Sides et al., 2001) that in standard conjunction problems the fallacious probability judgments experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of confirmation relations, meant in terms of…Read more
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265Logical Foundations of Evidential SupportPhilosophy of Science 73 (5): 500-512. 2006.Carnap's inductive logic (or confirmation) project is revisited from an "increase in firmness" (or probabilistic relevance) point of view. It is argued that Carnap's main desiderata can be satisfied in this setting, without the need for a theory of "logical probability." The emphasis here will be on explaining how Carnap's epistemological desiderata for inductive logic will need to be modified in this new setting. The key move is to abandon Carnap's goal of bridging confirmation and credence, in…Read more
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398Goodman’s “New Riddle‘Journal of Philosophical Logic 37 (6): 613-643. 2008.First, a brief historical trace of the developments in confirmation theory leading up to Goodman's infamous "grue" paradox is presented. Then, Goodman's argument is analyzed from both Hempelian and Bayesian perspectives. A guiding analogy is drawn between certain arguments against classical deductive logic, and Goodman's "grue" argument against classical inductive logic. The upshot of this analogy is that the "New Riddle" is not as vexing as many commentators have claimed. Specifically, the anal…Read more
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371Accuracy, Coherence and EvidenceOxford Studies in Epistemology 5 61-96. 2015.Taking Joyce’s (1998; 2009) recent argument(s) for probabilism as our point of departure, we propose a new way of grounding formal, synchronic, epistemic coherence requirements for (opinionated) full belief. Our approach yields principled alternatives to deductive consistency, sheds new light on the preface and lottery paradoxes, and reveals novel conceptual connections between alethic and evidential epistemic norms
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180- In decision theory, an agent is deciding how to value a gamble that results in different outcomes in different states. Each outcome gets a utility value for the agent.
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199Dutch Book Arguments. B is susceptibility to sure monetary loss (in a certain betting set-up), and F is the formal role played by non-Pr b’s in the DBT and the Converse DBT. Representation Theorem Arguments. B is having preferences that violate some of Savage’s axioms (and/or being unrepresentable as an expected utility maximizer), and F is the formal role played by non-Pr b’s in the RT.
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105Introduction to the Special Issue: Probability, Confirmation and FallaciesSynthese 184 (1): 1-1. 2012.
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44To be honest, I have almost nothing critical to say about Jim’s presentation (and this is quite unusual for a cranky analytic philosopher like me!). What Jim has said is all very sensible, and his examples are very well chosen, etc. So, instead of making critical remarks, I will try to expand a little on one of the themes Jim briefly touched upon in his talk: the contextuality of probability.
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584Plantinga’s Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary NaturalismPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2). 1998.In Chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga constructs two arguments against evolutionary naturalism, which he construes as a conjunction E&N .The hypothesis E says that “human cognitive faculties arose by way of the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought directs our attention (p.220).”1 With respect to proposition N , Plantinga (p. 270) says “it isn’t easy to say precisely what naturalism is,” but then adds that “crucial to metaphysical naturalism, of course, is…Read more
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23REVIEWS-An introduction to probability and inductive logicBulletin of Symbolic Logic 9 (4): 506-507. 2003.
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19The talk is mainly defensive. I won’t offer positive accounts of the “paradoxical” cases I will discuss (but, see “Extras”).
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54Note: This is not an ad hoc change at all. It’s simply the natural thing say here – if one thinks of F as a generalization of classical logical entailment. The extra complexity I had in my original (incorrect) definition of F was there because I was foolishly trying to encode some non-classical, or “relavant” logical structure in F. I now think this is a mistake, and that I should go with the above, classical account of F. Arguments about relevance logic need to be handled in a different way (and …Read more
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Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Formal Epistemology |