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743Petitio Principii: A Bad Form of ReasoningMind 122 (487). 2013.In this paper I develop an account of petitio principii (the fallacy sometimes also called ‘vicious circularity’, or ‘begging the question’) which has two crucial features: it employs the notion of doxastic justification, and it takes circularity to be relative to an evidential state. According to my account, an argument will be circular relative to an evidential state if and only if having doxastic justification for the conclusion is necessary, for a subject in that evidential state, to have do…Read more
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456Scepticism, defeasible evidence and entitlementPhilosophical Studies 168 (2): 439-455. 2014.The paper starts by describing and clarifying what Williamson calls the consequence fallacy. I show two ways in which one might commit the fallacy. The first, which is rather trivial, involves overlooking background information; the second way, which is the more philosophically interesting, involves overlooking prior probabilities. In the following section, I describe a powerful form of sceptical argument, which is the main topic of the paper, elaborating on previous work by Huemer. The argument…Read more
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156Knowing how to establish intellectualismGrazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1): 217-261. 2008.In this paper, we present a number of problems for intellectualism about knowledge-how, and in particular for the version of the view developed by Stanley & Williamson 2001. Their argument draws on the alleged uniformity of 'know how'-and 'know wh'-ascriptions. We offer a series of considerations to the effect that this assimilation is problematic. Firstly, in contrast to 'know wh'-ascriptions, 'know how'-ascriptions with known negative answers are false. Secondly, knowledge-how obeys closure pr…Read more
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148Experience and reasoning: challenging the a priori/a posteriori distinctionSynthese 197 (3): 1127-1148. 2020.Williamson and others have recently argued against the significance of the a priori/a posteriori distinction. My aim in this paper is to explain, defend, and expand upon one of these arguments. In the first section, I develop in some detail a line of argument sketched in Williamson. In the second section, I consider two replies to Williamson and show that they miss the structure of the challenge, as I understand it. The problem for defenders of the distinction is to find a way to draw it without…Read more
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123Thought Experiments, Concepts and ConceptionsIn Eugen Fischer & John Collins (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism: Rethinking Philosophical Method, Routledge. pp. 132-150. 2015.The paper aims to offer an account of the cognitive capacities involved in judgements about thought experiments, without appealing to the notions of analyticity or intuition. I suggest that we employ a competence in the application of the relevant concepts. In order to address the worry that this suggestion is not explanatory, I look at some theories of concepts discussed in psychology, and I use them to illustrate how such competence might be realized. This requires, crucially, distinguishing b…Read more
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99In Conversation with the Skeptic: Contextualism and the Raising of StandardsInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2): 97-118. 2013.I begin by describing the solution to the problem of skepticism propounded by contextualists, which constitutes the background of the rest of the paper. I then address the question of what happens when a skeptic and a non-skeptic are confronted in dialogue to the standards in play for correct knowledge ascription, on the assumption that contextualism about knowledge is right. I argue against Keith DeRose that there are reasons, both intuitive and theoretical, to conclude that the standards will …Read more
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91Out of NothingThought: A Journal of Philosophy (2): 132-138. 2018.Graham Priest proposed an argument for the conclusion that ‘nothing’ occurs as a singular term and not as a quantifier in a sentence like (1) ‘The cosmos came into existence out of nothing’. Priest's point is that, intuitively, (1) entails (C) ‘The cosmos came into existence at some time’, but this entailment relation is left unexplained if ‘nothing’ is treated as a quantifier. If Priest is right, the paradoxical notion of an object that is nothing plays a role in our very understanding of reali…Read more
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80Is Knowledge of Essence Required for Thinking about Something?Dialectica 70 (2): 217-228. 2016.Lowe claims that having knowledge of the essence of an object is a precondition for thinking about it. Lowe supports this claim with roughly the following argument: you cannot think about something unless you know what you are thinking about; and to know what it is that you are thinking about just is to know its essence. I will argue that this line of reasoning fails because of an equivocation in the expression ‘what a thing is’, which can be used to indicate the essence of the thing but also, m…Read more
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62The ‘If’ in the ‘What If’Topoi 38 (4): 811-820. 2019.In this paper, I defend the view that any good account of the logical form of thought experiments should contain a conditional. Moreover, there are some reasons to think it should be a counterfactual conditional. First, I defend Williamson’s account of the logical form of thought experiments against a competing account offered by Ichikawa and Jarvis. The two accounts have a similar structure, but Williamson’s posits a counterfactual conditional where Ichikawa and Jarvis’ posits a strict conditio…Read more
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51In the first part of the dissertation, chapters 1 to 3, I criticize several views which tend to set philosophy apart from other cognitive achievements. I argue against the popular views that 1) Intuitions, as a sui generis mental state, are involved crucially in philosophical methodology 2) Philosophy requires engagement in conceptual analysis, understood as the activity of considering thought experiments with the aim to throw light on the nature of our concepts, and 3) Much philosophical knowle…Read more
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42La debolezza del volere. Filosofia analitica e spiegazioni dell'irrazionalitàIride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 16 (1): 125-136. 2003.
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4Filosofia della conoscenza. Cosa sappiamo, come lo sappiamo (edited book)Archetipo Libri (CLUEB). 2024.Le domande sulla natura, le fonti e la possibilità della conoscenza sono da sempre al centro della riflessione filosofica, ma negli ultimi decenni sono state affrontate da nuovi punti di vista e con metodologie inedite, ricevendo risposte talora sorprendenti. Questo volume presenta un campione della ricerca epistemologica più recente, rendendo accessibili al pubblico italiano i contributi di alcuni dei maggiori studiosi contemporanei della disciplina. L'opera è suddivisa in quattro parti, dedica…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Epistemology |