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Against generalized comprehensionSynthese 205 (2): 1-9. 2025.Naive set theory, as practiced in the nineteenth century by Cantor, Dedekind, and Frege, consists of two basic principles: _extensionality_ and _naive comprehension_. According to the latter, _every_ condition determines a set. This is usually formalized by the schema \(\exists y \forall x\, (x \in y \leftrightarrow A(x))\), where \(A(x)\) is any condition on \(x\) in which \(y\) doesn’t occur free. Some philosophers have argued that, since this restriction is in place to avoid paradox, in a log…Read more
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Deflating Mental Representation (The Jean Nicod Lectures)MIT Press (open access). 2025.Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors’ explanatory interests and goals, or they embrace some form of anti-realism, holding that mental representations are at best useful fictions. It is becoming increasingly clear that neither view is satisfactory. Realists disagree about the basis for objective content, and c…Read more
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Suspension in InquiryEpisteme 1-13. forthcoming.When we're inquiring to find out whether p is true, knowing that we'll get better evidence in the future seems like a good reason to suspend judgment about p now. But, as Matt McGrath has recently argued, this natural thought is in deep tension with traditional accounts of justification. On traditional views of justification, which doxastic attitude you are justified in having now depends on your current evidence, not on what you might learn later. McGrath proposes to resolve this tension by dis…Read more
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Betting on TheoriesCambridge University Press. 1993.This book is a major contribution to decision theory, focusing on the question of when it is rational to accept scientific theories. The author examines both Bayesian decision theory and confirmation theory, refining and elaborating the views of Ramsey and Savage. He argues that the most solid foundation for confirmation theory is to be found in decision theory, and he provides a decision-theoretic derivation of principles for how many probabilities should be revised over time. Professor Maher d…Read more
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Putting logic in its place: formal constraints on rational beliefOxford University Press. 2004.
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Knowledge-First Evidentialism about RationalityIn Julien Dutant Fabian Dorsch (ed.), The New Evil Demon Problem, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.Knowledge-first evidentialism combines the view that it is rational to believe what is supported by one's evidence with the view that one's evidence is what one knows. While there is much to be said for the view, it is widely perceived to fail in the face of cases of reasonable error—particularly extreme ones like new Evil Demon scenarios (Wedgwood, 2002). One reply has been to say that even in such cases what one knows supports the target rational belief (Lord, 201x, this volume). I spell out t…Read more
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Epistemic Rationality and the Value of TruthPhilosophical Review 133 (4): 329-365. 2024.Veritism is the idea that what makes a belief epistemically rational is that it is a fitting response to the value of truth. This idea promises to serve as the foundation for an elegant and systematic treatment of epistemic rationality, one that illuminates the importance of distinctively epistemic normative standards without sacrificing extensional adequacy. But this article proposes that veritism cannot fulfill this promise. It goes on to explain why not, in part by showing that three radicall…Read more
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Belief Revision NormalizedJournal of Philosophical Logic 1-49. forthcoming.We use the normality framework of Goodman and Salow (2018, 2021, 2023b) to investigate of dynamics of rational belief. The guiding idea is that people are entitled to believe that their circumstances aren’t especially abnormal. More precisely, a rational agent’s beliefs rule out all and only those possibilities that are either (i) ruled out by their evidence or (ii) sufficiently less normal than some other possibility not ruled out by their evidence. Working within this framework, we argue that …Read more
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Opinion PoolingCambridge University Press. 2025.Disagreement is a common feature of a social world. For various reasons, however, we sometimes need to resolve a disagreement into a single set of opinions. This can be achieved by pooling the opinions of individuals that make up the group. This Element provides an opinionated survey on some ways of pooling opinions: linear pooling, multiplicative pooling (including geometric), and pooling through imprecise probabilities. While this Element gives significant attention to the axiomatic approach i…Read more
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Ur-Priors, Conditionalization, and Ur-Prior ConditionalizationErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3. 2016.Conditionalization is a widely endorsed rule for updating one’s beliefs. But a sea of complaints have been raised about it, including worries regarding how the rule handles error correction, changing desiderata of theory choice, evidence loss, self-locating beliefs, learning about new theories, and confirmation. In light of such worries, a number of authors have suggested replacing Conditionalization with a different rule — one that appeals to what I’ll call “ur-priors”. But different authors ha…Read more
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On the dilemma for partial subjunctive suppositionAnalysis 84 (3): 576-592. 2024.In ‘The logic of partial supposition’, Eva and Hartmann present a dilemma for a normative account of partial subjunctive supposition: the natural subjunctive analogue of Jeffrey conditionalization is Jeffrey imaging, but this rule violates a natural monotonicity constraint. This paper offers a partial defence of Jeffrey imaging against Eva and Hartmann’s objection. I show that, although Jeffrey imaging is non-monotonic in Eva and Hartmann’s sense, it is what I call status quo monotonic. A status…Read more
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Rational risk‐aversion: Good things come to those who weightPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3): 697-725. 2024.No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is…Read more
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Bigger, Badder BugsMind 134 (533): 134-170. 2025.
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Philosophy of science and the replicability crisisPhilosophy Compass 14 (11). 2019.Replicability is widely taken to ground the epistemic authority of science. However, in recent years, important published findings in the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences have failed to replicate, suggesting that these fields are facing a “replicability crisis.” For philosophers, the crisis should not be taken as bad news but as an opportunity to do work on several fronts, including conceptual analysis, history and philosophy of science, research ethics, and social epistemology. This …Read more
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“Adding Up” Reasons: Lessons for Reductive and Nonreductive ApproachesEthics 132 (1): 38-88. 2021.How do multiple reasons combine to support a conclusion about what to do or believe? This question raises two challenges: How can we represent the strength of a reason? How do the strengths of multiple reasons combine? Analogous challenges about confirmation have been answered using probabilistic tools. Can reductive and nonreductive theories of reasons use these tools to answer their challenges? Yes, or more exactly: reductive theories can answer both challenges. Nonreductive theories, with the…Read more
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A Pragmatist’s Guide to Epistemic UtilityPhilosophy of Science 84 (4): 613-638. 2017.
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Knowledge, false belief, and reductioInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (6): 2073-2079. 2024.Recently, a number of cases have been proposed which seem to show that – contrary to widely held opinion – a subject can inferentially come to know some proposition p from an inference which relies on a false belief q which is essential. The standard response to these cases is to insist that there is really an additional true belief in the vicinity, making the false belief inessential. I present a new kind of case suggesting that a subject can inferentially come to know a proposition from an ess…Read more
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Epistemic akrasia: No apology requiredNoûs 58 (1): 54-76. 2024.It is natural to think that rationality imposes some relationship between what a person believes, and what she believes about what she’s rational to believe. Epistemic akrasia—for example, believing P while believing that P is not rational to believe in your situation—is often seen as intrinsically irrational. This paper argues otherwise. In certain cases, akrasia is intuitively rational. Understanding why akratic beliefs in those case are indeed rational provides a deeper explanation how typica…Read more
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The Epistemology of SkillsIn Steup Matthias (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Epistemology. forthcoming.
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Practical reasons to believe, epistemic reasons to act, and the baffled action theoristPhilosophical Issues 33 (1): 22-32. 2023.
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What We Epistemically Owe To Each OtherPhilosophical Studies 176 (4). 2019.This paper is about an overlooked aspect—the cognitive or epistemic aspect—of the moral demand we place on one another to be treated well. We care not only how people act towards us and what they say of us, but also what they believe of us. That we can feel hurt by what others believe of us suggests both that beliefs can wrong and that there is something we epistemically owe to each other. This proposal, however, surprises many theorists who claim it lacks both intuitive and theoretical support.…Read more
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On Stalnaker's "Indicative Conditionals"In Louise McNally & Zoltan Szabo (eds.), Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol 100, Springer. forthcoming.
Boston, MA, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Formal Epistemology |