•  18
    Remarks on Ángel Pinillos’s Why We Doubt
    International 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.
  • Closure, Counter-Closure, and Inferential Knowledge
    In 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
  •  751
    Deference Done Better
    with Kevin Dorst, Benjamin A. Levinstein, Bernhard Salow, and Brooke E. Husic
    Philosophical 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
  • Part IV. Collective entities and formal epistemology. Individual coherence and group coherence
    with Fabrizio Cariani Rachael Briggs and When to Defer to Supermajority Testimony
    In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2014.
  •  77
    Remarks on staffel on full belief
    Philosophical Studies 180 (2): 385-393. 2022.
  •  61
    A Problem for Confirmation Measure Z
    Philosophy of Science 88 (4): 726-730. 2021.
    In this article, I present a serious problem for confirmation measure Z.
  •  6
    Introduction
    Studia Logica 86 (2): 147-148. 2007.
  •  1050
    Four Approaches to Supposition
    Ergo: 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
  •  182
    Two Approaches to Belief Revision
    with Ted Shear
    Erkenntnis 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
  •  36
    Confirmation, causation, and Simpson's paradox
    Episteme 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.
  • Introduction
    with Cherie Braden
    In Cherie Braden, Rodrigo Borges & Branden Fitelson (eds.), Themes From Klein, Springer Verlag. 2019.
  •  279
    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
  •  137
    Measuring Confirmation and Evidence
    with Ellery Elles
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (12): 663-672. 2000.
  •  33
    Introduction
    Studia Logica 86 (3): 351-352. 2007.
  •  78
    Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacy
    Thinking 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
  •  261
    Logical Foundations of Evidential Support
    Philosophy 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
  •  277
    Probability
    with Alan Hajek and Ned Hall
    In Jessica Pfeifer & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Routledge. 2006.
    There are two central questions concerning probability. First, what are its formal features? That is a mathematical question, to which there is a standard, widely (though not universally) agreed upon answer. This answer is reviewed in the next section. Second, what sorts of things are probabilities---what, that is, is the subject matter of probability theory? This is a philosophical question, and while the mathematical theory of probability certainly bears on it, the answer must come from elsewh…Read more
  •  163
    The Wason task(s) and the paradox of confirmation
    Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1): 207-241. 2010.
    The (recent, Bayesian) cognitive science literature on the Wason Task (WT) has been modeled largely after the (not-so-recent, Bayesian) philosophy of science literature on the Paradox of Confirmation (POC). In this paper, we apply some insights from more recent Bayesian approaches to the (POC) to analogous models of (WT). This involves, first, retracing the history of the (POC), and, then, re-examining the (WT) with these historico-philosophical insights in mind
  •  44
    This is a high quality, concise collection of articles on the foundations of probability and statistics. Its editor, Richard Swinburne, has collected five papers by contemporary leaders in the field, written a pretty thorough and even-handed introductory essay, and placed a very clean and accessible version of Reverend Thomas Bayes’s famous essay (“An Essay Towards the Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances”) at the end, as an Appendix (with a brief historical introduction by the noted sta…Read more
  •  29
    Axiomatic proofs through automated reasoning
    with Larry Wos
    Bulletin of the Section of Logic 29 (3): 125-36. 2000.
  •  97
    It is useful to note how (CC) differs from closure: (C) If S comes to believe q solely on the basis of competent deduction from p and S knows that p, then S knows that q. I won’t be discussing (C) today, but here is a useful contrast
  •  28
    We’ll adopt a simple framework today. Our assumptions: A model (M) is a family of hypotheses. A hypothesis (H) is a curve plus an associated error term . For simplicity, we’ll assume a common N (0, 1) Gaussian
  •  36
    In this talk, I will explain why only one of Miller’s two types of language-dependence-of-verisimilitude problems is a (potential) threat to the sorts of accuracy-dominance approaches to coherence that I’ve been discussing
  •  115
    Updating: Learning versus supposing
    with Jiaying Zhao, Vincenzo Crupi, Katya Tentori, and Daniel Osherson
    Cognition 124 (3): 373-378. 2012.
  •  67
    FEW 2009 Special Issue: Preface (review)
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 39 (6): 591-591. 2010.
  •  12
    Remarks on "Random Sequences"
    with Daniel Osherson
    Australasian Journal of Logic 12 (1). 2015.
    We show that standard statistical tests for randomness of finite sequences are language-dependent in an inductively pernicious way.
  •  170
    Symmetries and asymmetries in evidential support
    with Ellery Eells
    Philosophical Studies 107 (2). 2002.
    Several forms of symmetry in degrees of evidential support areconsidered. Some of these symmetries are shown not to hold in general. This has implications for the adequacy of many measures of degree ofevidential support that have been proposed and defended in the philosophical literature.
  •  136
    Naive deductivist accounts of confirmation have the undesirable consequence that if E confirms H, then E also confirms the conjunction H·X, for any X—even if X is completely irrelevant to E and H. Bayesian accounts of confirmation may appear to have the same problem. In a recent article in this journal Fitelson (2002) argued that existing Bayesian attempts to resolve of this problem are inadequate in several important respects. Fitelson then proposes a new‐and‐improved Bayesian account that over…Read more