•  10
    This book explains the Problem of Truth’s Value and offers a virtue-theoretic solution to it. The Problem of Truth’s Value arises because it is hard to reconcile good theories of truth’s nature with good theories of why we should value truth. Some theories build value into the very nature of truth, but they tend to obscure the connection between what is true and how things are in the world. Other theories treat truth as a purely descriptive feature of claims. They struggle to explain how such a …Read more
  •  8
    Blindspots and brightspots for alethic pluralism
    Synthese 202 (4): 1-18. 2023.
    Alethic pluralists often claim that truth is not only relevant to normative evaluations, but inherently normative. I raise a problem for such versions of pluralism, based on the dual phenomena of “blindspots” and “brightspots.” If truth is inherently a kind of fitness for belief, then all true propositions should be fit for belief, and no false ones should be. Blindspots, however, are true propositions that can’t be the content of true beliefs. I argue that they aren’t fit for belief. Similarly,…Read more
  •  83
    Deflating the Success-Truth Connection
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1): 96-110. 2021.
    According to a prominent objection, deflationist theories of truth can’t account for the explanatory connection between true belief and successful action [Putnam 1978]. Canonical responses to the objection show how to reformulate truth-involving explanations of particular successful actions to omit any mention of truth [Horwich 1998]. According to recent critics, though, the canonical strategy misses the point. The deflated paraphrases lack the generality or explanatory robustness of the origina…Read more
  •  20
    Deflating the Success-Truth Connection
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1): 96-110. 2023.
    ABSTRACT According to a prominent objection, deflationist theories of truth can’t account for the explanatory connection between true belief and successful action [Putnam 1978]. Canonical responses to the objection show how to reformulate truth-involving explanations of particular successful actions, so as to omit any mention of truth [Horwich 1998]. According to recent critics, though, the canonical strategy misses the point. The deflated paraphrases lack the generality or explanatory robustnes…Read more
  •  14
    Alethic pluralism and truth-attributions
    American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (4): 311-324. 2020.
    The core of alethic pluralism is the idea that truth is a different property in some discourses from others. Orthodox pluralists such as Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch share three commitments that motivate their view. One is Ecumenicalism, the view that scientific and moral claims are both truth-apt. The second is Occasional Realism, the view that truth in science is a matter of justification-independent, accurate representation, while truth in ethics is a matter of ideal epistemic justifiabil…Read more
  •  31
    Setting the record straight: a defense of vacating wins in response to rules violations
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 48 (2): 169-185. 2021.
    ABSTRACT Sometimes, teams or players violate the rules of their leagues or associations. And sometimes, their leagues or associations respond by striking their wins from the official record. Especially in American college sports governed by the NCAA, this practice of vacating results is unpopular and widely decried. It should not be. Vacating wins can be an appropriate response to rules violations in higher-order competitions in the same way that it can be appropriate to call back a scoring play…Read more
  •  327
    Alethic Pluralism and Logical Form
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2): 249-265. 2020.
    According to strong pluralist theories of truth, ‘true’ designates different properties depending on which sentences it’s applied to. An influential objection to strong pluralism claims it can’t make sense of logically complex sentences whose components have different truth-properties. For example, if ‘true’ designates correspondents for ‘Tabby is a cat’, and it designates coherence for ‘Tabby is beautiful’, what does it designate for ‘Tabby is a beautiful cat’ (Tappolet 1997)? Will Gamester (20…Read more
  •  11
    Tradeoffs, Self-Promotion, and Epistemic Teleology
    In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 249-276. 2016.
    Epistemic teleology is the view that (a) some states have fundamental epistemic value, and (b) all other epistemic value and obligation are to be understood in terms of promotion of or conduciveness to such fundamentally valuable states. Veritistic reliabilism is a paradigm case: It assigns fundamental value to true belief, and it makes all other assessments of epistemic value or justification in terms of the reliable acquisition of beliefs that are true rather than false. Teleology faces potent…Read more
  •  827
    The Unreality of Realization
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2): 305-322. 2010.
    This paper argues against the realization principle, which reifies the realization relation between lower-level and higher-level properties. It begins with a review of some principles of naturalistic metaphysics. Then it criticizes some likely reasons for embracing the realization principle, and finally it argues against the principle directly. The most likely reasons for embracing the principle depend on the dubious assumption that special science theories cannot be true unless special science …Read more
  • Truth and the Normativity of Naturalistic Epistemology
    Dissertation, Washington University. 2001.
    Epistemology is supposed to explain the difference between good and bad ways of deciding what to believe. Epistemological naturalism is the view that we should address philosophical questions about knowledge and justified belief from within our best scientific understanding of the world. A puzzle thus arises for naturalism: How can science, which tells us how we do decide what to believe, make the additional normative step of explaining how it would be good for us to do so? A common answer is th…Read more
  •  379
    Linguistic Understanding and Knowledge of Truth-Conditions
    Acta Analytica 32 (3): 355-370. 2017.
    What do you know when you know what a sentence means? According to some theories, understanding a sentence is, in part, knowing its truth-conditions. Dorit Bar-On, Claire Horisk, and William Lycan have defended such theories on the grounds of an “epistemic determination argument”. That argument turns on the ideas that understanding a sentence, along with knowledge of the non-linguistic facts, suffices to know its truth-value, and that being able to determine a sentence’s truth-value given knowle…Read more
  •  497
    Pragmatism, Truth, and Inquiry
    Contemporary Pragmatism 2 (1): 95-113. 2005.
    C. S. Peirce once defined pragmatism as the opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension: ‘Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ (Peirce 1982a: 48) More succinctly, Richard Rorty has described the position in this way.
  •  242
    True belief is not instrumentally valuable
    In Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj Pedersen (eds.), New Waves in Truth, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
    This paper argues against the almost universally held view that truth is an instrumentally valuable property of beliefs. For truth to be instrumentally valuable in the way usually supposed, it must play a causal role in the satisfaction of our desires. As it happens, truth can play no such role, because it is screened off from causal relevance by some of the truth-like properties first discussed by Stephen Stich. Because it is not causally relevant to the success of our actions, truth is not ins…Read more
  •  415
    A Puzzle About Desire
    Erkenntnis 73 (2): 185-209. 2010.
    The following four assumptions plausibly describe the ideal rational agent. (1) She knows what her beliefs are. (2) She desires to believe only truths. (3) Whenever she desires that P → Q and knows that P, she desires that Q. (4) She does not both desire that P and desire that ~P, for any P. Although the assumptions are plausible, they have an implausible consequence. They imply that the ideal rational agent does not believe and desire contradictory propositions. She neither desires the world to…Read more
  •  78
    Naturalistic epistemology
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2003.
    Overview of the basic ideas and motivations of naturalism in epistemology, with discussion of the styles of naturalism associated with W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Alvin Goldman.
  •  102
    Truth
    Polity. 2014.
    What is truth? Is there anything that all truths have in common that makes them true rather than false? Is truth independent of human thought, or does it depend in some way on what we believe or what we would be justified in believing? In what sense, if any, is it better for beliefs or statements to be true than to be false? In this engaging and accessible new introduction Chase Wrenn surveys a variety of theories of the nature of truth and evaluates their philosophical costs and benefits. Payin…Read more
  •  587
    Truth is not (Very) Intrinsically Valuable
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (1): 108-128. 2017.
    We might suppose it is not only instrumentally valuable for beliefs to be true, but that it is intrinsically valuable – truth makes a non-derivative, positive contribution to a belief's overall value. Some intrinsic goods are better than others, though, and this article considers the question of how good truth is, compared to other intrinsic goods. I argue that truth is the worst of all intrinsic goods; every other intrinsic good is better than it. I also suggest the best explanation for truth's…Read more
  •  75
    This paper offers an interpretation of Plato's argument in Republic V that lovers of sights and sounds can have only opinion, and philosophers alone have legitimate claims to knowledge. The argument depends on the idea that knowledge is "set over what is" while mere opinion is "set over what is and is not." I argue for an enhanced veridical interpretation of 'to be' in this passage, on which 'what is' means, roughly, "what is so." Given a distinction between what is so independently of how thing…Read more
  •  945
    Epistemology as Engineering?
    Theoria 72 (1): 60-79. 2006.
    According to a common objection to epistemological naturalism, no empirical, scientific theory of knowledge can be normative in the way epistemological theories need to be. In response, such naturalists as W.V. Quine have claimed naturalized epistemology can be normative by emulating engineering disciplines and addressing the relations of causal efficacy between our cognitive means and ends. This paper evaluates that "engineering reply" and finds it a mixed success. Based on consideration of wha…Read more
  •  45
    Naturalism, Reference, and Ontology: Essays in Honor of Roger F. Gibson (edited book)
    Peter Lang Publishing Group. 2008.
    The essays address a wide range of topics, including normativity and naturalized epistemology, holism, consciousness, the philosophy of logic, perception, value ...
  •  266
    Truth and other self-effacing properties
    Philosophical Quarterly 54 (217). 2004.
    A “self-effacing” property is one that is definable without referring to it. Colin McGinn (2000) has argued that there is exactly one such property: truth. I show that if truth is a self-effacing property, then there are very many others—too many even to constitute a set.
  •  239
    Tradeoffs, Self-Promotion, and Epistemic Teleology
    In Pedro Schmechtig & Martin Grajner (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms, and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 249-276. 2016.
    Epistemic teleology is the view that (a) some states have fundamental epistemic value, and (b) all other epistemic value and obligation are to be understood in terms of promotion of or conduciveness to such fundamentally valuable states. Veritistic reliabilism is a paradigm case: It assigns fundamental value to true belief, and it makes all other assessments of epistemic value or justification in terms of the reliable acquisition of beliefs that are true rather than false. Teleology faces potent…Read more
  •  413
    Inter-world probability and the problem of induction
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (3). 2006.
    Laurence BonJour has recently proposed a novel and interesting approach to the problem of induction. He grants that it is contingent, and so not a priori, that our patterns of inductive inference are reliable. Nevertheless, he claims, it is necessary and a priori that those patterns are highly likely to be reliable, and that is enough to ground an a priori justification induction. This paper examines an important defect in BonJour's proposal. Once we make sense of the claim that inductive infere…Read more
  •  840
    Hypothetical and Categorical Epistemic Normativity
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 42 (2): 273-290. 2004.
    In this paper, I consider an argument of Harvey Siegel's according to which there can be no hypothetical normativity anywhere unless there is categorical normativity in epistemology. The argument fails because it falsely assumes people must be bound by epistemic norms in order to have justified beliefs
  •  541
    Practical success and the nature of truth
    Synthese 181 (3): 451-470. 2011.
    Philip Kitcher has argued for a causal correspondence view of truth, as against a deflationary view, on the grounds that the former is better poised than the latter to explain systematically successful patterns of action. Though Kitcher is right to focus on systematically successful action, rather than singular practical successes, he is wrong to conclude that causal correspondence theories are capable of explaining systematic success. Rather, I argue, truth bears no explanatory relation to syst…Read more
  •  2604
    Why There are No Epistemic Duties
    Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review 46 (1): 115-136. 2007.
    An epistemic duty would be a duty to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgment from a proposition, and it would be grounded in purely evidential or epistemic considerations. If I promise to believe it is raining, my duty to believe is not epistemic. If my evidence is so good that, in light of it alone, I ought to believe it is raining, then my duty to believe supposedly is epistemic. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people do sometimes have duties t…Read more
  •  35
    Why There Are No Epistemic Duties
    Dialogue 46 (1): 115-136. 2007.
    ABSTRACT: Epistemic duties would be duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, and they would be grounded in purely evidential considerations. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people may have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations. Rather, allegedly epistemic duties are a species of moral duty.RÉSUMÉ: Les fonctions épistém…Read more