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95Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief By Martin Smith (review)Analysis 77 (3): 670-672. 2017.© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] traditional picture of justification affirms the following: a belief is justified when it is sufficiently likely on one’s evidence. Over and against this well-received conception, Smith’s Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief develops an alternative: the normic support conception of justification. While likel…Read more
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1Rationality and MiraclesIn John Greco, Tyler Dalton McNabb & Jonathan Fuqua (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Religious Epistemology, Cambridge University Press. 2023.
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Fallibilism and a guarantee of truthIn Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, Routledge. 2024.
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32Cartesian Infallibilism and a Guarantee of TruthThe Monist 106 (4): 409-422. 2023.This paper draws a line of demarcation between fallibilism and infallibilism. Taking Cartesian Infallibilism as a guide, it advances a picture of infallibilism whereby infallible knowledge requires, among other conditions, luminosity of a truth-guaranteeing property. Some implications for contemporary theories of knowledge are explored.
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34On What We Owe in AttentionJournal of Philosophical Research 47 219-228. 2022.A central aim of Sandy Goldberg’s project is to defend a fundamentally epistemic source of normative conversational pressure—one which does not reduce to the interpersonal dimension. A second core aim is to provide an explanation of how expectations are generated by the performances within a conversation. This essay raises several challenges for chapter 2 of his book, ‘Your Attention Please!.’ From various angles, the essay challenges the central idea of that chapter: namely, that by the act of …Read more
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976Divine Hiddenness and Other EvidenceIn L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. 2013.Many people do not know or believe there is a God, and many experience a sense of divine absence. Are these (and other) “divine hiddenness” facts evidence against the existence of God? Using Bayesian tools, we investigate *evidential arguments from divine hiddenness*, and respond to two objections to such arguments. The first objection says that the problem of hiddenness is just a special case of the problem of evil, and so if one has responded to the problem of evil then hiddenness has no addit…Read more
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202Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and StakesOxford Studies in Epistemology 6. 2019.Defenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on p and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate notion of st…Read more
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82J. L. Schellenberg: The hiddenness argument: philosophy’s new challenge to belief in God: Oxford University Press, 2017, 160 pp, $35.95 , $20.95 (review)International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 86 (1): 85-89. 2019.
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654Pragmatic Encroachment and ClosureIn Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, Routledge. 2018.
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87On providing evidenceEpisteme 15 (3): 245-260. 2018.Obligations to provide evidence to others arise in many contexts. This paper develops a framework within which to understand what it is to provide evidence to someone. I argue that an initially plausible connection between evidence-providing and evidence-possession fails: it is not the case that in order to count as providing evidence to someone, the intended recipient must have the evidence. I further argue that the following is possible: evidence is provided to an agent, the agent does not hav…Read more
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154Divine Hiddenness: Defeated EvidenceRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 81 119-132. 2017.This paper challenges a common assumption in the literature concerning the problem of divine hiddenness, namely, that the following are inconsistent: God's making available adequate evidence for belief that he exists and the existence of non-culpable nonbelievers. It draws on the notions of defeated evidence and glimpses to depict the complexity of our evidential situation with respect to God's existence.
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139Hume, Defeat, and Miracle ReportsIn Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Dani Rabinowitz (eds.), Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 13-28. 2018.This chapter investigates the rationality of failing to believe miracle reports. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume's argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume's argument, I argue that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument, and I explore the aptness of as well as some l…Read more
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940Epistemic Authority and Conscientious BeliefEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (4): 91--99. 2014.
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213Fallibilism and the flexibility of epistemic modalsPhilosophical Studies 167 (3): 597-606. 2014.It is widely acknowledged that epistemic modals admit of inter-subjective flexibility. This paper introduces intra-subjective flexibility for epistemic modals and draws on this flexibility to argue that fallibilism is consistent with the standard account of epistemic modals
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138On the intimate relationship of knowledge and actionEpisteme 12 (3): 343-353. 2015.Pragmatic encroachment offers a picture of knowledge whereby knowledge is unstable. This paper argues that pragmatic encroachment is committed to more instability than has been hitherto noted. One surprising result of the arguments in this paper is that pragmatic encroachment is not merely about changes in stakes. All sorts of practical factors can make for the presence or absence of knowledge on this picture stakes-sensitivity’ is misleading. Furthermore, insufficient attention has been paid to…Read more