-
9Intentionality, Point of View, and the Role of the InterpreterPhenomenology and Mind 22 (22): 92. 2022.The three main approaches to the metaphysics of intentionality can arguably be subjected to analysis in terms of grammatical point of view: the approach of the (internalist) phenomenal intentionality programme (plus productivism about linguistic content) may be regarded as first-personal; interpretationism, perhaps, as second-personal; and (reductive externalist) causal information theories (including teleosemantics) as third-personal. After making this plausible, the current paper focusses on t…Read more
-
5Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne: Relativism and Monadic Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-19-956055-4; £ 19.99 (hardback); 148 + viii pages (review)History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 13 (1): 148-155. 2010.
-
74Defeating Fake News: On Journalism, Knowledge, and DemocracyMoral Philosophy and Politics 8 (1): 5-26. 2021.The central thesis of this paper is that fake news and related phenomena serve as defeaters for knowledge transmission via journalistic channels. This explains how they pose a threat to democracy; and it points the way to determining how to address this threat. Democracy is both intrinsically and instrumentally good provided the electorate has knowledge (however partial and distributed) of the common good and the means of achieving it. Since journalism provides such knowledge, those who value de…Read more
-
7Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop (08/09/2022).
-
3Playing Games, Following Rules, and Linguistic ActivityIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Philosophical Insights Into Pragmatics, De Gruyter. pp. 127-142. 2019.
-
4On the Normativity of Speech ActsIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Semantics and Beyond: Philosophical and Linguistic Inquiries. Preface, De Gruyter. pp. 9-26. 2014.
-
Speech acts, actions, and eventsIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
-
Speech acts, actions, and eventsIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
-
40Training philosopher engineers for better AIAI and Society 38 (2): 861-868. 2023.There is a deluge of AI-assisted decision-making systems, where our data serve as proxy to our actions, suggested by AI. The closer we investigate our data (raw input, or their learned representations, or the suggested actions), we begin to discover “bugs”. Outside of their test, controlled environments, AI systems may encounter situations investigated primarily by those in other disciplines, but experts in those fields are typically excluded from the design process and are only invited to attes…Read more
-
11Sizes, ratios, approximations: On what and how the ANS representsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Clarke and Beck propose that the approximate number system (ANS) represents rational numbers. The evidence cited supports only the view that it represents ratios (and positive integers). Rational numbers are extensive magnitudes (i.e., sizes), whereas ratios are intensities. It is also argued that WHAT a system represents and HOW it does so are not as independent of one another as the authors assume.
-
22Editorial: Computationalism Meets the Philosophy of InformationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3): 507-515. 2020.
-
44Attitudes and ascriptions in Stalnaker modelsLinguistics and Philosophy 42 (5): 517-539. 2019.What role, if any, should centered possible worlds play in characterizing the attitudes? Lewis :513–543, 1979) argued that, in order to account for the phenomena of self-location :474–497, 1977, Noûs 13:3–21, 1979), the contents of the attitudes should be taken to be centered propositions. Stalnaker Assertion: New philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), however, has argued that while centered worlds are needed to characterize …Read more
-
27The Act and Object of Judgment: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)Routledge. 2019.This book presents 12 original essays on historical and contemporary philosophical discussions of judgment. The central issues explored in this volume can be separated into two groups namely, those concerning the act and object of judgment. What kind of act is judgment? How is it related to a range of other mental acts, states, and dispositions? Where and how does assertive force enter in? Is there a distinct category of negative judgments, or are these simply judgments whose objects are negativ…Read more
-
12Knowledge, Safety, and QuestionsFilosofia Unisinos 17 (1): 58-62. 2016.Safety-based theories of knowledge face a difficulty surrounding necessary truths: no subject could have easily falsely believed such a proposition. Failing to predict that ill-grounded beliefs in such propositions do not constitute knowledge, standard safety theories are therefore less informative than desired. Some have suggested that the subjects at issue could easily have believed some related false proposition; but they have given no indication as to what makes a proposition related. I sugg…Read more
-
40Alethic Pluralism and the Role of Reference in the Metaphysics of TruthSouthern Journal of Philosophy 55 (1): 116-135. 2017.In this paper, I outline and defend a novel approach to alethic pluralism, the thesis that truth has more than one metaphysical nature: where truth is, in part, explained by reference, it is relational in character and can be regarded as consisting in correspondence; but where instead truth does not depend upon reference it is not relational and involves only coherence. In the process, I articulate a clear sense in which truth may or may not depend upon reference: this involves distinguishing se…Read more
-
31The Tarskian Turn. Edited by Leon Horsten (review)Philosophical Quarterly 63 (252): 629-632. 2013.
-
52On representational content and format in core numerical cognitionPhilosophical Psychology 30 (1-2): 119-139. 2017.Carey has argued that there is a system of core numerical cognition – the analog magnitude system – in which cardinal numbers are explicitly represented in iconic format. While the existence of this system is beyond doubt, this paper aims to show that its representations cannot have the combination of features attributed to them by Carey. According to the argument from abstractness, the representation of the cardinal number of a collection of individuals as such requires the representation of in…Read more
-
941Indexical Reliabilism and the New Evil DemonErkenntnis 78 (6): 1317-1336. 2013.Stewart Cohen’s New Evil Demon argument raises familiar and widely discussed concerns for reliabilist accounts of epistemic justification. A now standard response to this argument, initiated by Alvin Goldman and Ernest Sosa, involves distinguishing different notions of justification. Juan Comesaña has recently and prominently claimed that his Indexical Reliabilism (IR) offers a novel solution in this tradition. We argue, however, that Comesaña’s proposal suffers serious difficulties from the per…Read more
-
24On the Normativity of Speech ActsIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Semantics and Beyond: Philosophical and Linguistic Inquiries, De Gruyter. pp. 9-26. 2014.
-
61The Knowledge Rule and the Action RuleSouthern Journal of Philosophy 52 (4): 552-574. 2014.In this paper I compare Timothy Williamson's knowledge rule of assertion with Ishani Maitra and Brian Weatherson's action rule. The paper is in two parts. In the first part I present and respond to Maitra and Weatherson's master argument against the knowledge rule. I argue that while its second premise, to the effect that an action X can be the thing to do though one is in no position to know that it is, is true, its first premise is not: the data do not support the claim that whenever X is the …Read more
-
1015Counter Closure and Knowledge despite FalsehoodPhilosophical Quarterly 64 (257): 552-568. 2014.Certain puzzling cases have been discussed in the literature recently which appear to support the thought that knowledge can be obtained by way of deduction from a falsehood; moreover, these cases put pressure, prima facie, on the thesis of counter closure for knowledge. We argue that the cases do not involve knowledge from falsehood; despite appearances, the false beliefs in the cases in question are causally, and therefore epistemologically, incidental, and knowledge is achieved despite falseh…Read more
-
86Deriving the Norm of AssertionJournal of Philosophical Research 39 75-85. 2014.Frank Hindriks has attempted to derive a variant of Timothy Williamson’s knowledge rule for assertion on the basis of a more fundamental belief expression analysis of that speech act. I show that his attempted derivation involves a crucial equivocation between two senses of ‘must,’ and therefore fails. I suggest two possible repairs; but I argue that even if they are successful, we should prefer Williamson’s fully general knowledge rule to Hindriks’s restricted moral norm.
-
29What Is Semantic Content?In Erich Rast & Luiz Carlos Baptista (eds.), Meaning and Context, Peter Lang. pp. 2--187. 2010.
Brian Ball
Northeastern University London
University of Oxford
-
Northeastern University LondonAssociate Professor
-
Oxford, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland