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Would You Really Rather Be Lucky Than Good? On the Normative Status of Naturalizing EpistemologyIn Chase B. Wrenn (ed.), Naturalism, Reference, and Ontology: Essays in Honor of Roger F. Gibson, Peter Lang Publishing Group. pp. 47--76. 2008.
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Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of MindWalter de Gruyter. 2009.
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199Nonconciliation in Peer Disagreement: Its Phenomenology and Its RationalityGrazer Philosophische Studien 94 (1-2): 194-225. 2017.The authors argue in favor of the “nonconciliation” (or “steadfast”) position concerning the problem of peer disagreement. Throughout the paper they place heavy emphasis on matters of phenomenology—on how things seem epistemically with respect to the net import of one’s available evidence vis-à-vis the disputed claim p, and on how such phenomenology is affected by the awareness that an interlocutor whom one initially regards as an epistemic peer disagrees with oneself about p. Central to the arg…Read more
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55Winch and the Constraints on Interpretation: Versions of the Principle of CharitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 153-173. 2010.
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25Chromatic IlluminationProtoSociology 38 35-58. 2021.We argue that introspection reveals a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience that hitherto has been largely unappreciated in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science: conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We call this phenomenon chromatic illumination. We begi…Read more
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24Epistemic Competence And Contextualist Epistemology: Why Contextualism Is Not Just The Poor Person's CoherentismJournal of Philosophy 91 (12): 627-649. 1994.
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9Wittgenstein's Descriptivist Approach to Understanding: Is There a Place for Explanation in Interpretive Accounts?Dialectica 42 (2): 105-115. 1988.SummaryIn his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Wittgenstein holds that in studying or interpreting a language and associated activities we should not attempt to explain what goes on, just describe, for description is able to give us everything we could ask for. He seems to presents two arguments for this descriptivist approach. I criticize both. Generally, I argue that Wittgenstein's position seems to presuppose a radical distinction between description and explanation that cannot be supported.…Read more
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35The Supervenient Causal Efficacy of Chromatically Illuminated Conscious ExperienceProtoSociology 39 169-203. 2022.In our work we have drawn attention to an aspect of conscious experience that we have labeled chromatic illumination, which consists of conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We have also characterized the prototypical causal role of chromatic-illumination features o…Read more
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86Are Epistemic Norms Fundamentally Social Norms?Episteme 17 (3): 281-300. 2020.People develop and deploy epistemic norms – normative sensibilities in light of which they regulate both their individual and community epistemic practice. There is a similarity to folk's epistemic normative sensibilities – and it is by virtue of this that folk commonly can rely on each other, and even work jointly to produce systems of true beliefs – a kind of epistemic common good. Agents not only regulate their belief forming practices in light of these sensitivities, but they make clear to o…Read more
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7What’s the Point?In David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 87-114. 2015.The chapter rehearses the main outlines of gatekeeping contextualism—the view that it is central to the concept of knowledge that attributions of knowledge function in a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for contextually salient communities. The case for gatekeeping contextualism is clarified within an extended discussion of the character of philosophical reflection. The chapter argues that normatively valenced, evaluative concepts constitute a broad class of concepts for which a sociolinguistic poi…Read more
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43Norms, invariance, and explanatory relevancePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (3): 324-338. 2005.Descriptions of social norms can be explanatory. The erotetic approach to explanation provides a useful framework. I describe one very broad kind of explanation-seeking why-question, a genus that is common to the special sciences, and argue that descriptions of norms can serve as an answer to such why-questions. I draw upon Woodwards recent discussion of the explanatory role of generalizations with a significant degree of invariance. Descriptions of norms provide what is, in effect, a generaliz…Read more
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7Epistemic Virtues and Cognitive DispositionsIn Gregor Damschen, Robert Schnepf & Karsten Stüber (eds.), Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, De Gruyter. pp. 296-319. 2009.
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19Conceptually Grounded Necessary TruthsIn Albert Casullo & Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), The a Priori in Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 111. 2013.
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On the armchair justification of conceptually grounded necessary truthsIn Albert Casullo & Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), The a Priori in Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. 2013.
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54Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlementSynthese 197 (11): 4907-4926. 2020.Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a non-evidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are ind…Read more
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458Epistemic Norms as Social NormsIn Miranda Fricker, Peter Graham, David Henderson & Nikolaj Jang Pedersen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 425-436. 2019.This chapter examines how epistemic norms could be social norms, with a reliance on work on the philosophy and social science of social norms from Bicchieri (on the one hand) and Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin and Southwood (on the other hand). We explain how the social ontology of social norms can help explain the rationality of epistemic cooperation, and how one might begin to model epistemic games.
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56A Refined Account of the "Epistemic Game": Epistemic Norms, Temptations, and Epistemic CoorperationAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 383-396. 2017.In "Epistemic Norms and the 'Epistemic Game' They Regulate", we advance a general case for the idea that epistemic norms regulating the production of beliefs might usefully be understood as social norms. There, we drew on the influential account of social norms developed by Cristina Bicchieri, and we managed to give a crude recognizable picture of important elements of what are recognizable as central epistemic norms. Here, we consider much needed elaboration, suggesting models that help one thi…Read more
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6Actions are done for reasons. The reasons are beliefs and desires, which are physical states that causally interact in a rather special way. Their interaction exhibits a characteristic pattern: it is rational, at least in certain important respects.
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102Epistemic Norms and the "Epistemic Game" They Regulate: The Basic Structured Epistemic Costs and BenefitsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 367-382. 2017.This paper is a beginning—an initial attempt to think of the function and character of epistemic norms as a kind of social norm. We draw on social scientific thinking about social norms and the social games to which they respond. Assume that people individually follow epistemic norms for the sake of acquiring a stock of true beliefs. When they live in groups and share information with each other, they will in turn produce a shared store of true beliefs, an epistemic public good. True beliefs, pr…Read more
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68Let’s Be Flexible: Our Interpretive/Explanatory Toolbox, or In Praise of Using a Range of ToolsJournal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2): 261-299. 2011.This paper explores the role and limits of cognitive simulation in understanding or explaining others. In simulation, one puts one's own cognitive processes to work on pretend input similar to that one supposes that the other plausibly had. Such a process is highly useful. However, it is also limited in important ways. Several limitations fall out from the various forms of cognitive diversity. Some of this diversity results from cultural differences, or from differences in individuals' cognitive…Read more
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107Motivated contextualismPhilosophical Studies 142 (1). 2009.The concept of knowledge is used to certify epistemic agents as good sources (on a certain point or subject matter) for an understood audience. Attributions of knowledge and denials of knowledge are used in a kind of epistemic gate keeping for (epistemic or practical) communities with which the attributor and interlocutors are associated. When combined with reflection on kinds of practical and epistemic communities, and their situated epistemic needs for gate keeping, this simple observation reg…Read more
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5How important is the indeterminacy of action?Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 (2): 223-231. 1986.
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30Epistemic Virtues and Cognitive DispositionsIn Horgan Terry & Henderson David (eds.), Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 296-319. 2009.
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32Abductive Inference, Explicable and Anomalous Disagreement, and Epistemic ResourcesRes Philosophica 93 (3): 567-584. 2016.Disagreement affords humans as members of epistemic communities important opportunities for refining or improving their epistemic situations with respect to many of their beliefs. To get such epistemic gains, one needs to explore and gauge one’s own epistemic situation and the epistemic situations of others. Accordingly, a fitting response to disagreement regarding some matter, p, typically will turn on the resolution of two strongly interrelated questions: (1) whether p, and (2) why one’s inter…Read more
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21IntroductionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (4): 317-322. 2017.The papers in this issue all concern the normative standards by which we do or should regulate our joint epistemic lives in communities. Plausibly, reflection on how we should regulate ourselves—what one should insist on in one's own practice and that of one's epistemic partners—takes some cues from reflection on what we do insist on. The reverse is plausibly also the case. These papers also, more or less explicitly, suggest that our epistemic sensibilities themselves reflect the demands of epis…Read more
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43Simulation theory versus theory theory: A difference without a difference in explanationsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 34 (S1): 65-93. 1996.
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University of Nebraska, LincolnDepartment of PhilosophyRobert R. Chambers Distinguished Professorship of Philosophy and the Moral Sciences
Lincoln, Nebraska, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Philosophy of Physical Science |