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264Religious 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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23Can 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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467How 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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193The 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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332The 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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727Metaphysics, 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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1114Philosophical 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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676The 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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538The 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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249DisagreementStanford 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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576Contradictory Belief and Epistemic Closure PrinciplesMind and Language 14 (2). 1999.Kripke’s puzzle has puts pressure on the intuitive idea that one can believe that Superman can fly without believing that Clark Kent can fly. If this idea is wrong then many theories of belief and belief ascription are built from faulty data. I argue that part of the proper analysis of Kripke’s puzzle refutes the closure principles that show up in many important arguments in epistemology, e.g., if S is rational and knows that P and that P entails Q, then if she considers these two beliefs and Q,…Read more
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1195When a Skeptical Hypothesis Is LiveNoûs 39 (4). 2005.I’m going to argue for a set of restricted skeptical results: roughly put, we don’t know that fire engines are red, we don’t know that we sometimes have pains in our lower backs, we don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and we don’t even know that we believe any of those truths. However, people unfamiliar with philosophy and cognitive science do know all those things. The skeptical argument is traditional in form: here’s a skeptical hypothesis; you can’t epistemically neutralize it, you have to b…Read more
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768The Atheistic Argument from OutrageousnessThink 17 (48): 107-116. 2018.When pressed, many atheists offer three reasons why they reject theism: there is strong evidence against theism, there is no strong evidence for theism, and theism is so outrageous that it needs a great deal of support in order for us to believe it in a reasonable manner. I examine the third reason, arguing that it fails.
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2072The Irrationality of Religious BeliefThink 15 (42): 15-33. 2016.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 my previous essay I explained why they think so many religious beliefs are rational. In this essay I explain why they think those same beliefs are irrational
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1366Religious DisagreementIn Graham Robert Oppy (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, Routledge. 2015.In this essay I try to motivate and formulate the main epistemological questions to ask about the phenomenon of religious disagreement. I will not spend much time going over proposed answers to those questions. I address the relevance of the recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement. I start with some fiction and then, hopefully, proceed with something that has at least a passing acquaintance with truth.
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503Ontology, Composition, Quantification and ActionAnalysis 76 (2): 137-142. 2016.The literature on material composition has largely ignored the composition of actions and events. I argue that this is a mistake. I present a set of individually plausible yet jointly inconsistent claims regarding the connection between quantification and existence, the composition of physical entities and the logical forms of action sentences.
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720Defending Millian TheoriesMind 107 (428): 703-728. 1998.In this article I offer a three-pronged defense of Millian theories, all of which share the rough idea that all there is to a proper name is its referent, so it has no additional sense. I first give what I believe to be the first correct analysis of Kripke’s puzzle and its anti-Fregean lessons. The main lesson is that the Fregean’s arguments against Millianism and for the existence of semantically relevant senses (that is, individuative elements of propositions or belief contents that are sensi…Read more
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514Arguing for Frege's Fundamental PrincipleMind and Language 13 (3). 1998.Saul Kripke's puzzle about belief demonstrates the lack of soundness of the traditional argument for the Fregean fundamental principle that the sentences 'S believes that a is F' and 'S believes that b is F' can differ in truth value even if a = b. This principle is a crucial premise in the traditional Fregean argument for the existence of semantically relevant senses, individuative elements of beliefs that are sensitive to our varying conceptions of what the beliefs are about. Joseph Owens has …Read more
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1492The Reflective Epistemic RenegadePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2). 2010.Philosophers often find themselves in disagreement with contemporary philosophers they know full well to be their epistemic superiors on the topics relevant to the disagreement. This looks epistemically irresponsible. I offer a detailed investigation of this problem of the reflective epistemic renegade. I argue that although in some cases the renegade is not epistemically blameworthy, and the renegade situation is significantly less common than most would think, in a troublesome number of cases …Read more
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2447Why the Vagueness Paradox is AmazingThink 17 (50): 27-38. 2018.One of the hardest problems in philosophy, one that has been around for over two thousand years without generating any significant consensus on its solution, involves the concept of vagueness: a word or concept that doesn't have a perfectly precise meaning. There is an argument that seems to show that the word or concept simply must have a perfectly precise meaning, as violently counterintuitive as that is. Unfortunately, the argument is usually so compressed that it is difficult to see why exac…Read more
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294The epistemological consequences of paradox are paradoxical. They can be usefully generated by telling a series of once-upon-a-time stories that make various philosophical points, starting out innocent and ending up, well, paradoxical. This is an introduction to my Live Skepticism, defended in Skepticism Comes Alive
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451This is an essay written for undergraduates who are confused about what a rigid designator is.
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