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267Religious DisagreementIn Stewart Goetz & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.Many people with religious beliefs, pro or con, are aware that those beliefs are denied by a great number of others who are as reasonable, intelligent, fair-minded, and relatively unbiased as they are. Such a realization often leads people to wonder, “How do I know I’m right and they’re wrong? How do I know that the basis for my belief is right and theirs is misleading?” In spite of that realization, most people stick with their admittedly controversial religious belief. This entry examines the …Read more
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24Can We Know Anything? A DebateRoutledge. 2023."In this book, Michael Huemer and Bryan Frances debate whether - and how - we can gain knowledge of the world outside of our own minds. Starting with opening statements, the debate moves through two rounds of replies. Frances argues that we lack knowledge because, for example, we cannot rule out the possibility that we are brains in vats being artificially stimulated in such a way as to create an illusion of living in the real world. Huemer disagrees that we need evidence against such possibilit…Read more
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471How Much Suffering Is Enough?Religious Studies. forthcoming.Isn’t there something like an amount and density of horrific suffering whose discovery would make it irrational to think God exists? Use your imagination to think of worlds that are much, much, much worse than you think Earth is when it comes to horrific suffering. Isn’t there some conceivable scenario which, if you were in it, would make you say “Ok, ok. God doesn’t exist, at least in the way we thought God was. We were wrong about that”? Pursuing this question leads to what I call the Problem …Read more
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195The Unfortunate Consequences of Progress in PhilosophyIn Maria Baghramian, Adam Carter & R. Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Disagreement, Routledge. forthcoming.We tend to think that philosophical progress, to the extent that it exists, is a good thing. I agree. Even so, it has some surprising unfortunate consequences for the rationality of philosophical belief.
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334The Epistemic Consequences of ParadoxCambridge University Press. 2022.By pooling together exhaustive analyses of certain philosophical paradoxes, we can prove a series of fascinating results regarding philosophical progress, agreement on substantive philosophical claims, knockdown arguments in philosophy, the wisdom of philosophical belief, the epistemic status of metaphysics, and the power of philosophy to refute common sense. As examples, this Element examines the Sorites Paradox, the Liar Paradox, and the Problem of the Many – although many other paradoxes can …Read more
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729Metaphysics, bullshit, and the analysis of philosophical problemsSynthese 199 (3-4): 11541-11554. 2021.Although metaphysics has made an impressive comeback over the past half century, there are still a great many philosophers today who think it is bullshit, under numerous precisifications of ‘That’s just bullshit’ so that it’s a negative assessment and doesn’t apply to most philosophy. One encounters this attitude countless times in casual conversations, social media, and occasionally in print. Is it true?
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143An Agnostic Defends God: How Science and Philosophy Support AgnosticismPalgrave-Macmillan. 2021.This book contains a unique perspective: that of a scientifically and philosophically educated agnostic who thinks there is impressive—if maddeningly hidden—evidence for the existence of God. Science and philosophy may have revealed the poverty of the familiar sources of evidence, but they generate their own partial defense of theism. Bryan Frances, a philosopher with a graduate degree in physics, judges the standard evidence for God’s existence to be awful. And yet, like many others with simila…Read more
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687Is It Rational to Reject Expert Consensus?International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (3-4): 325-345. 2020.Philosophers defend, and often believe, controversial philosophical claims. Since they aren’t clueless, they are usually aware that their views are controversial—on some occasions, the views are definitely in the minority amongst the relevant specialist-experts. In addition, most philosophers are aware that they are not God’s gift to philosophy, since they admit their ability to track truth in philosophy is not extraordinary compared to that of other philosophers. In this paper I argue that in m…Read more
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1117Philosophical proofs against common senseAnalysis 81 (1): 18-26. 2021.Many philosophers are sceptical about the power of philosophy to refute commonsensical claims. They look at the famous attempts and judge them inconclusive. I prove that, even if those famous attempts are failures, there are alternative successful philosophical proofs against commonsensical claims. After presenting the proofs I briefly comment on their significance.
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677The Epistemology of Theistic Philosophers’ Reactions to the Problem of EvilAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4): 547-572. 2020.I first argue that, contrary to many atheistic philosophers, there is good reason to think the typical theistic philosopher’s retaining of her theism when faced with the Problem of Evil is comparatively epistemically upstanding even if both atheism is true and the typical theistic philosopher has no serious criticism of the atheist’s premises in the PoE argument. However, I then argue that, contrary to many theistic philosophers, even if theism is true, the typical theistic philosopher has no go…Read more
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541The Epistemology of DisagreementIn Gerry Dunne (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. forthcoming.Short introduction to the epistemology of disagreement
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88Epistemically Different Epistemic PeersTopoi 40 (5): 1063-1073. 2019.For over a decade now epistemologists have been thinking about the peer disagreement problem of whether a person is reasonable in not lowering her confidence in her belief P when she comes to accept that she has an epistemic peer on P who disbelieves P. However, epistemologists have overlooked a key realistic way how epistemic peers can, or even have to, differ epistemically—a way that reveals the inadequacy of both conformist and non-conformist views on peer disagreement by uncovering how the c…Read more
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60The Epistemology of Real-World Religious Disagreement Without PeersPhilosophia Christi 20 (1): 289-297. 2018.When you learn that a large body of highly intelligent, fair-minded, reasonable, and relatively unbiased thinkers disagree with you, does that give you good reason to think you’re wrong? Should you think, “Wait a minute. Maybe I’ve missed something here”? Should you at least drastically reduce your confidence? There is a general epistemological problem here regarding controversial beliefs, one that has nothing especially to do with religious belief. I argue that applying this discussion to relig…Read more
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253A book on the problem of evil, focusing on alleged gratuitous suffering.
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251DisagreementStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.This article examines the central epistemological issues tied to the recognition of disagreement.
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211Philosophical ExpertiseIn David Coady & James Chase (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 297-306. 2018.Philosophical expertise consists in knowledge, but it is controversial what this knowledge consists in. I focus on three issues: the extent and nature of knowledge of philosophical truths, how this philosophical knowledge is related to philosophical progress, and skeptical challenges to philosophical knowledge.
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128The Philosopher's Doom: Unreliable at Truth or Unreliable at LogicIn Ted Poston & Kevin McCain (eds.), The Mystery of Skepticism, Brill. 2019.By considering the epistemology and relations among certain philosophical problems, I argue for a disjunctive thesis: either (1) it is highly probable that there are (i) several (ii) mutually independent philosophical reductios of highly commonsensical propositions that are successful—so several aspects of philosophy have succeeded at refuting common sense—or (2) there is enough hidden semantic structure in even simple sentences of natural language to make philosophers highly unreliable at spott…Read more
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2845The Rationality of Religious BeliefsThink 14 (40): 109-117. 2015.Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In this essay I explain why they think religious belief is rational. In a sequel essay I explain why they think the very same beliefs are irrational
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443I say that it’s philosophically inexpensive because I think it is more convincing than any other Twin-Earth thought experiment in that it sidesteps many of the standard objections to the usual thought experiments. I also discuss narrow contents and give an analysis of Putnam’s original argument.
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225A presentation and analysis of the twin-earth thought experiments.
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921Rationally held ‘P, but I fully believe ~P and I am not equivocating’Philosophical Studies 173 (2): 309-313. 2016.One of Moore’s paradoxical sentence types is ‘P, but I believe ~P’. Mooreans have assumed that all tokens of that sentence type are absurd in some way: epistemically, pragmatically, semantically, or assertively. And then they proceed to debate what the absurdity really is. I argue that if one has the appropriate philosophical views, then one can rationally assert tokens of that sentence type, and one can be epistemically reasonable in the corresponding compound belief as well
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4151Plato’s Response to the Third Man Argument in the Paradoxical Exercise of the ParmenidesAncient Philosophy 16 (1): 47-64. 1996.An analysis of the Third Man Argument, especially in light of Constance Meinwald's book Plato's Parmenides. I argue that her solution to the TMA fails. Then I present my own theory as to what Plato's solution was.
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654In this essay (for undergraduates) I introduce three of the famous semantic paradoxes: the Liar, Grelling’s, and the No-No. Collectively, they seem to show that the notion of truth is highly paradoxical, perhaps even contradictory. They seem to show that the concept of truth is a bit akin to the concept of a married bachelor—it just makes no sense at all. But in order to really understand those paradoxes one needs to be very comfortable thinking about how lots of interesting sentences talk ab…Read more
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608Disquotation and SubstitutivityMind 109 (435): 519-25. 2000.Millianism is reasonable; that is, it is reasonable to think that all there is to the semantic value of a proper name is its referent. But Millianism appears to be undermined by the falsehood of Substitutivity, the principle that interchanging coreferential proper names in an intentional context cannot change the truth value of the resulting belief report. Mary might be perfectly rational in assenting to ‘Twain was a great writer’ as well as ‘Clemens was not a great writer’. Her confusion does n…Read more
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571The New Leibniz's Law Arguments for PluralismMind 115 (460): 1007-1022. 2006.For years philosophers argued for the existence of distinct yet materially coincident things by appealing to modal and temporal properties. For instance, the statue was made on Monday and could not survive being flattened; the lump of clay was made months before and can survive flattening. Such arguments have been thoroughly examined. Kit Fine has proposed a new set of arguments using the same template. I offer a critical evaluation of what I take to be his central lines of reasoning.
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152The Ontology of Some AfterimagesIn Manuel Curado & Steven Gouvei (eds.), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 118-144. 2017.A good portion of the work in the ontology of color focuses on color properties, trying to figure out how they are related to more straightforwardly physical properties. Another focus is realism: are ordinary material objects such as pumpkins really colored? A third emphasis is the nature of what is referred to by the terms ‘what it’s like’ or ‘phenomenal character’, as applied to color. In contrast, this essay is exclusively about select color tokens. I will be arguing that whether or not ordin…Read more
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936Justifying a Large Part of PhilosophyThink 18 (51): 93-99. 2019.I explain why research in non-applied, non-interdisciplinary, non-historical philosophy is worthwhile. The key move in the explanation is the realization that many philosophical problems can be put in the form of a set of highly plausible yet apparently jointly inconsistent claims regarding a fundamental notion.Export citation.
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517Spirituality, Expertise, and PhilosophersIn L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 44-81. 2013.We all can identify many contemporary philosophy professors we know to be theists of some type or other. We also know that often enough their nontheistic beliefs are as epistemically upstanding as the non-theistic beliefs of philosophy professors who aren’t theists. In fact, the epistemic-andnon-theistic lives of philosophers who are theists are just as epistemically upstanding as the epistemic-and-non-theistic lives of philosophers who aren’t theists. Given these and other, similar, facts, ther…Read more
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215Preface & Chp 1 of 'Scepticism Comes Alive'Oxford University Press. 2005.The preface and chapter 1 of my book Scepticism Comes Alive, 2005 OUP.
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