•  4
    What one can know depends on one’s evidence. Good scientific theories are supported by evidence. Our experiences provide us with evidence. Any sort of inquiry involves the seeking of evidence. It is irrational to believe contrary to your evidence. For these reasons and more, evidence is one of the most fundamental notions in the field of epistemology and is emerging as a crucial topic across academic disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence is an outstanding reference so…Read more
  •  122
    Must rational thinkers have consistent sets of beliefs? I shall argue that it can be rational for a thinker to believe a set of propositions known to be inconsistent. If this is right, an important test for a theory of rational belief is that it allows for the right kinds of inconsistency. One problem we face in trying to resolve disagreements about putative rational requirements is that parties to the disagreement might be working with different conceptions of the relevant attitudes. My aim is …Read more
  •  1422
    The Right in the Good: A Defense of Teleological Non-Consequentialism in Epistemology
    In Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn (eds.), Epistemic Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. pp. 23-47. 2018.
    There has been considerable discussion recently of consequentialist justifications of epistemic norms. In this paper, I shall argue that these justifications are not justifications. The consequentialist needs a value theory, a theory of the epistemic good. The standard theory treats accuracy as the fundamental epistemic good and assumes that it is a good that calls for promotion. Both claims are mistaken. The fundamental epistemic good involves accuracy, but it involves more than just that. The …Read more
  •  12
    The ranges of reasons and creasons
    Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 1-10. 2023.
    In this discussion, we look at three potential problems that arise for Whiting’s account of normative reasons. The first has to do with the idea that objective reasons might have a modal dimension. The second and third concern the idea that there is some sort of direct connection between sets of reasons and the deliberative ought or the ought of rationality. We can see that we might be better served using credences about reasons (i.e., creasons) to characterise any ought that is distinct from th…Read more
  •  77
    Absolutism and its Limits
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (1-2): 170-189. 2023.
    Many philosophers think that given the choice between saving the life of an innocent person and averting any number of minor ailments or inconveniences, it would be better to save the life. How, then, should one compare the risk of an innocent person’s life to such minor ailments and inconveniences? If lives are infinitely more important than insignificant factors then any risk cannot be outweighed, and that is untenable. An alternative approach seems more promising: let the values of such insig…Read more
  •  1756
    Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 257-272. 2018.
    In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three way…Read more
  •  202
    Knowledge and Prizes
    In Artūrs Logins & Jacques-Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality…Read more
  •  782
    What is Rational Belief?
    Noûs. forthcoming.
    A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's …Read more
  •  374
    Is Justification Just in the Head?
    In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley-blackwell. 2024.
    I argue that justification isn't just in the head. The argument is simple. We should be guided by our beliefs. We shouldn't be guided by anything to do what we shouldn't do. So, we shouldn't believe in ways that would guide us to do the things that we shouldn't. Among the various things we should do is discharge our duties (e.g., to fulfil our promissory obligations) and respect the rights of others (e.g., rights not to be harmed or killed by agents acting on bad information). The grounds of our…Read more
  •  158
    While we often assume that we can only know what is so, it's clear that we often speak as if we know things that aren't strictly speaking true. What should we make of this? Some would argue that we should take this talk as evidence that it's possible to know things that are strictly speaking false when, say, false representations are adequate for our purposes. I shall argue that it would be better on the whole to say (a) that knowledge ascriptions might be false but felicitous when the ascriptio…Read more
  •  345
    Knowledge, justification, belief, and suspension
    Philosophical Topics 49 (2): 371-384. 2021.
    In this paper, I want to discuss a problem that arises when we try to understand the connections between justification, knowledge, and suspension. The problem arises because some prima facie plausible claims about knowledge and the justification for judging and suspending are difficult to reconcile with the possibility of a kind of knowledge or apt belief that a thinker cannot aptly judge to be within her reach. I shall argue that if we try to accommodate the possibility of this kind of knowledg…Read more
  •  302
    N-1 Guilty Men
    In The Future of Normativity, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    We argue that there is nothing that can do the work that normative reasons are expected to do. A currently popular view is that in any given situation, a set of normative reasons (understood as a set of facts, typically about the agent’s situation) always determines the ways we prospectively should or should not respond. We discuss an example that we think shows no such collection of facts could have this normative significance. A radical response might be to dispense with reasons and explain th…Read more
  •  483
    In Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown identifies a number of problems for the so-called knowledge view of justification. According to this view, we cannot justifiably believe what we do not know. Most epistemologists reject this view on the grounds that false beliefs can be justified if, say, supported by the evidence or produced by reliable processes. We think this is a mistake and that many epistemologists are classifying beliefs as justified because they have properties that i…Read more
  •  404
    Eleven angry men
    Philosophical Issues 31 (1): 227-239. 2021.
    While many of us would not want to abandon the requirement that a defendant can only be found guilty of a serious criminal offence by a unanimous jury, we should not expect epistemology to give us the resources we need for justifying this requirement. The doubts that might prevent jurors from reaching unanimity do not show that, say, the BARD standard has not been met. Even if it were true, as some have suggested, that rationality requires that a jury composed of epistemic peers should coalesce …Read more
  •  498
    Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false
    Philosophical Studies 179 (3): 801-827. 2021.
    Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue tha…Read more
  •  124
    What is knowledge? Why is it valuable? How much of it do we have, and what ways of thinking are good ways to use to get more of it? These are just a few questions that are asked in epistemology, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge. This is Epistemology is a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and scope of human knowledge. Exploring both classic debates and contemporary issues in epistemology, this rigorous yet accessible textbook provides reade…Read more
  •  931
    Externalism Explained
    In Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    This is a defence of externalism about knowledge and also about justification. In this paper, I argue that an important virtue of externalism about these notions is that externalism about justification helps to explain the value of (i.e., importance of) knowledge. I also develop and expand upon some of my earlier arguments for externalism that drew upon what's now known as 'morally loaded cases'. The virtue of externalism is that it's the only view that can both allow for certain kinds of catego…Read more
  •  452
    Dividing Away Doxastic Dilemmas
    In Nick Hughes (ed.), Epistemic Dilemmas, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    It seems that different epistemic norms can come into conflict and so we might wonder what happens when they do impose incompatible requirements upon us. According to the dilemmic view, they might sometimes generate sets of requirements that cannot be satisfied, ensuring that there is no rationally acceptable way for a thinker to deal with the predicament she’s in. After reviewing the case for the dilemmic view, I introduce an alternative framework that accounts for the appearance of dilemma-lik…Read more
  •  731
    Our epistemology can shape the way we think about perception and experience. Speaking as an epistemologist, I should say that I don’t necessarily think that this is a good thing. If we think that we need perceptual evidence to have perceptual knowledge or perceptual justification, we will naturally feel some pressure to think of experience as a source of reasons or evidence. In trying to explain how experience can provide us with evidence, we run the risk of either adopting a conception of evide…Read more
  •  3
    The Routledge Handbook of Evidence (edited book)
    Routledge. forthcoming.
  •  767
    Justified Belief and Just Conviction
    In Jon Robson & Zachary Hoskins (eds.), Truth and Trial, Routledge. forthcoming.
    Abstract: When do we meet the standard of proof in a criminal trial? Some have argued that it is when the guilt of the defendant is sufficiently probable on the evidence. Some have argued that it is a matter of normic support. While the first view provides us with a nice account of how we ought to manage risk, the second explains why we shouldn’t convict on the basis of naked statistical evidence alone. Unfortunately, this second view doesn’t help us understand how we should manage risk (e.g., t…Read more
  •  1606
    Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance
    In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    In this paper, we propose a new theory of rationality defeat. We propose that defeaters are "indicators of ignorance", evidence that we’re not in a position to know some target proposition. When the evidence that we’re not in a position to know is sufficiently strong and the probability that we can know is too low, it is not rational to believe. We think that this account retains all the virtues of the more familiar approaches that characterise defeat in terms of its connection to reasons to bel…Read more
  •  33
    Determined by Reasons: A Competence Account of Acting for a Normative Reason, by MantelSusanne. New York and London: Routledge, 2018. Pp. xiii + 190.
  •  147
    We have written an introduction to epistemology that is accessible, engaging, and up to date. (We hope.) Introduction Chapter 1: The Regress Problem Chapter 2: Perception Chapter 3: The Apriori Chapter 4: Inference Chapter 5: On Knowing the Truth Chapter 6: Memory Chapter 7: Testimony Chapter 8: Kinds of Knowledge Chapter 9: Internalism vs. Externalism Chapter 10: The Ethics of Belief Chapter 11: Skepticism
  •  437
    Review of Kiesewetter, The Normativity of Rationality. (Ethics) (review)
    Ethics 129 (1): 127-32. 2018.
    Review of Kiesewetter's, The Normativity of Rationality (Oxford University Press) for Ethics
  •  663
    A theory of what we should believe should include a theory of what we should believe when we are uncertain about what we should believe and/or uncertain about the factors that determine what we should believe. In this paper, I present a novel theory of what we should believe that gives normative externalists a way of responding to a suite of objections having to do with various kinds of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. This theory is inspired by recent work in ethical theory in which non-conse…Read more
  •  1248
    Justification, knowledge, and normality
    Philosophical Studies 177 (6): 1593-1609. 2020.
    There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view faces two serious ch…Read more
  •  520
    Neither/Nor
    In Casey Doyle, Joe Milburn & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism, Routledge. 2019.
    Abstract: On one formulation, epistemological disjunctivism is the view that our perceptual beliefs constitute knowledge when they are based on reasons that provide them with factive support. Some would argue that it is impossible to understand how perceptual knowledge is possible unless we assume that we have such reasons to support our perceptual beliefs. Some would argue that it is impossible to understand how perceptual experience could furnish us with these reasons unless we assume that the…Read more
  •  31
    Superceded by Being more realistic about reasons, a paper on reasons perspectivism published by PPR. See above.