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153This paper contributes to the project of articulating and defending the supra-Bayesian approach to judgment aggregation. I discuss three cases where a person is disposed to defer to two different experts, and ask how they should respond when they learn about the opinion of each. The guiding principles are that this learning should go by conditionalisation, and that they should aim to update on the evidence that the expert had updated on. But this doesn’t settle how the update on pairs of experts…Read more
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274Over the years I’ve written many papers defending an idiosyncratic version of interest-relative epistemology. This book collects and updates the views I’ve expressed over those papers. Interest-relative epistemologies all start in roughly the same way. A big part of what makes knowledge important is that it rationalises action. But for almost anything we purportedly know, there is some action that it wouldn’t rationalise. I know what I had for breakfast, but I wouldn’t take a bet at billion to o…Read more
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281What question are decision theorists trying to answer, and why is it worth trying to answer it? A lot of philosophers talk as if the aim of decision theory is to describe how we should make decisions, and the reason to do this is to help us make better decisions. I disagree on both fronts. The aim of the decision theory is to describe how a certain kind of idealised decider does in fact decide. And the reason to do this is that this idealisation, like many other idealisations, helps generate exp…Read more
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180On UncertaintyDissertation, Monash University. 1998.This dissertation looks at a set of interconnected questions concerning the foundations of probability, and gives a series of interconnected answers. At its core is a piece of old-fashioned philosophical analysis, working out what probability is. Or equivalently, investigating the semantic question of what is the meaning of ‘probability’? Like Keynes and Carnap, I say that probability is degree of reasonable belief. This immediately raises an epistemological question, which degrees count as reas…Read more
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67This book uses computer modeling to investigate trends in what is published in leading philosophy journals over the last century and a half. The notable trends include the rise of realism from a fringe view to the mainstream metaphysical outlook, the increase in specialization, and the increasing depth of integration between philosophy and physical sciences. It also contains a guide to how to do similar investigations, and discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach.
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251Epistemic Modality (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.There is a lot that we don't know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don't know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. What are these epistemic possibilities? They do not match up with metaphysical possibilities - there are various cases where something is epistemically possible but not metaphysically possi…Read more
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6RelativismIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 1997.Relativism is the view that the truth of a sentence is relative both to a context of utterance and to a context of assessment. That the truth of a sentence is relative to a context of utterance is uncontroversial in contemporary semantics. This chapter focuses on three points: whether the version of contextualism is vulnerable to the disagreement and retraction arguments, and if so, whether these problems can be avoided by a more sophisticated contextualist theory. The points include: whether re…Read more
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24Humean SupervenienceIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.Humean supervenience is the conjunction of three theses: Truth supervenes on being, Anti‐haecceitism, and Spatiotemporalism. The first clause is a core part of Lewis's metaphysics. The second clause is related to Lewis's counterpart theory. The third clause says there are no fundamental relations beyond the spatiotemporal, or fundamental properties of extended objects. Supervenience is classified into strong modal Humean supervenience, local modal Humean supervenience and familiar modal Humean s…Read more
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347Intrinsic vs. extrinsic propertiesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.We have some of our properties purely in virtue of the way we are. (Our mass is an example.) We have other properties in virtue of the way we interact with the world. (Our weight is an example.) The former are the intrinsic properties, the latter are the extrinsic properties. This seems to be an intuitive enough distinction to grasp, and hence the intuitive distinction has made its way into many discussions in philosophy, including discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemo…Read more
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1034In Defense of a Kripkean DogmaPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1): 56-68. 2011.In “Against Arguments from Reference” (Mallon et al., 2009), Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-his…Read more
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276Prankster's ethicsPhilosophical Perspectives 18 (1). 2004.Diversity is a good thing. Some of its value is instrumental. Having people around with diverse beliefs, or customs, or tastes, can expand our horizons and potentially raise to salience some potential true beliefs, useful customs or apt tastes. Even diversity of error can be useful. Seeing other people fall away from the true and the useful in distinctive ways can immunise us against similar errors. And there are a variety of pleasant interactions, not least philosophical exchange, that wouldn’t…Read more
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50Book Symposium. Steffen Borge, The Philosophy of FootballSport, Ethics and Philosophy 16 (3): 333-396. 2022.This is a book symposium on Steffen Borge’s The Philosophy of Football. It has contributions from William Morgan, Murray Smith and Brian Weatherson with replies from Borge.
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Epistemic Modals in ContextIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, Clarendon Press. 2005.
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13Intrinsic Properties and Combinatorial PrinciplesIn Robert M. Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties, De Gruyter. pp. 69-86. 2014.
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84Accuracy and the ImpsLogos and Episteme 10 (3): 263-282. 2019.Recently several authors have argued that accuracy-first epistemology ends up licensing problematic epistemic bribes. They charge that it is better, given the accuracy-first approach, to deliberately form one false belief if this will lead to forming many other true beliefs. We argue that this is not a consequence of the accuracy-first view. If one forms one false belief and a number of other true beliefs, then one is committed to many other false propositions, e.g., the conjunction of that fals…Read more
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87Normative ExternalismOxford University Press. 2019.Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, t…Read more
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243Interest-relative invariantismIn Jonathan Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. 2017.Postprint.
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48Notes on Some Ideas in Lloyd Humberstone’s Philosophical Applications of Modal LogicAustralasian Journal of Logic 15 (1). 2018.Lloyd Humberstone’s recently published Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic presents a number of new ideas in modal logic as well explication and critique of recent work of many others. We extend some of these ideas and answer some questions that are left open in the book.
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283What do Philosophers do? Scepticism and the Practice of Philosophy, by Penelope Maddy (review)Mind 128 (509): 269-271. 2019.Review of _ What do Philosophers do? Scepticism and the Practice of Philosophy _, by Penelope Maddy
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402Interests, evidence and gamesEpisteme 15 (3): 329-344. 2018.Pragmatic encroachment theories have a problem with evidence. On the one hand, the arguments that knowledge is interest-relative look like they will generalise to show that evidence too is interest-relative. On the other hand, our best story of how interests affect knowledge presupposes an interest-invariant notion of evidence. The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of evidence that is interest-relative, but which allows that ‘best story’ to go through with minimal changes. The core idea is…Read more
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187This collection arose out of a conference on intuitions at the University of Notre Dame in April 1996. The papers in it mainly address two related questions: (a) How much evidential weight should be assigned to intuitions? and (b) Are concepts governed by necessary and sufficient conditions, or are they governed by ‘family resemblance’ conditions, as Wittgenstein suggested? The book includes four papers by psychologists relating and analyzing some empirical findings concerning intuitions and ele…Read more
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547Intellectual Skill and the Rylean RegressPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (267): 370-386. 2017.Intelligent activity requires the use of various intellectual skills. While these skills are connected to knowledge, they should not be identified with knowledge. There are realistic examples where the skills in question come apart from knowledge. That is, there are realistic cases of knowledge without skill, and of skill without knowledge. Whether a person is intelligent depends, in part, on whether they have these skills. Whether a particular action is intelligent depends, in part, on whether …Read more
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772The Bayesian and the DogmatistProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt2): 169-185. 2007.Dogmatism is sometimes thought to be incompatible with Bayesian models of rational learning. I show that the best model for updating imprecise credences is compatible with dogmatism.
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188In Defence of the ACA's Medicaid ExpansionPublic Affairs Quarterly 27 (3): 267-288. 2013.The only part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ‘the ACA’) struck down in National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) et al. v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. was a provision expanding Medicaid. We will argue that this was a mistake; the provision should not have been struck down. We’ll do this by identifying a test that C.J. Roberts used to justify his view that this provision was unconstitutional. We’ll defend that test against some …Read more
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278Three recent books have argued that Keynes’s philosophy, like Wittgenstein’s, underwent a radical foundational shift. It is argued that Keynes, like Wittgenstein, moved from an atomic Cartesian individualism to a more conventionalist, intersubjective philosophy. It is sometimes argued this was caused by Wittgenstein’s concurrent conversion. Further, it is argued that recognising this shift is important for understanding Keynes’s later economics. In this paper I argue that the evidence adduced fo…Read more
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342The asymmetric magnets problemPhilosophical Perspectives 20 (1). 2006.There are many controversial theses about intrinsicness and duplication. The first aim of this paper is to introduce a puzzle that shows that two of the uncontroversial sounding ones can’t both be true. The second aim is to suggest that the best way out of the puzzle requires sharpening some distinctions that are too frequently blurred, and adopting a fairly radical reconception of the ways things are.
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44In earlier work I argued that using ‘vague probabilities’ did not ground any argument for significantly adjusting Bayesian decision theory. In this note I show that my earlier arguments don’t carry across smoothly to game theory. Allowing agents to have vague probabilities over possible outcomes dramatically increases the range of possible Nash equilibria in certain games, and hence arguably (but only arguably) increases the range of possible rational action.
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46Barrett and Artzenius posed a problem concerning infinite sequences of decisions. It appeared that the strategy of making the rational choice at each stage of the game was, in some circumstances, guaranteed to lead to lower returns than the strategy of making the irrational choice at each stage. This paper shows that there is only the appearance of paradox. The choices that Barrett and Artzenius were calling ‘rational’ cannot be economically justified, and so it is not surprising that someone wh…Read more
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543Explanation, Idealisation and the Goldilocks ProblemPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 461-473. 2012.Michael Strevens’s book Depth is a great achievement.1 To say anything interesting, useful and true about explanation requires taking on fundamental issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So this book not only tells us a lot about scientific explanation, it has a lot to say about causation, lawhood, probability and the relation between the physical and the special sciences. It should be read by anyone interested in any of those questions, which includes presumably the vast majorit…Read more
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Epistemology |
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