•  316
    The Nature of Belief
    In What is Belief?, . forthcoming.
    Philosophical accounts of the nature of belief, at least in the western tradition, are framed in large part by two ideas. One is that believing is a form of representing. The other is that a belief plays a causal role when a person acts on it. The standard picture of belief as a mental entity with representational properties and causal powers merges these two ideas. We are to think of beliefs as things that are true or false and that interact with desires, intentions, and emotions to bring about…Read more
  •  60
    Attitudes, Objects, and Norms: replies to Drucker, Schleifer McCormick, and Richard
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    These are my replies to comments on my book *On Believing* (OUP 2022) by Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Mark Richard.
  •  75
    Precis of: On Believing (OUP 2022)
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    This is a précis of my book for an author-meets-critics session forthcoming in Inquiry. The commenters are Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Mark Richard.
  • Transparency and Apperception (edited book)
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy Special Issue. 2019.
  •  176
    Davidson on Practical Knowledge
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (9). 2015.
    Did Donald Davidson agree with G.E.M. Anscombe that action requires a distinctive form of agential awareness? The answer is No, at least according to the standard interpretation of Davidson’s account of action. A careful study of Davidson’s early writings, however, reveals a much more subtle conception of the role of agential belief in action. While the role of the general belief in Davidson’s theory is familiar and has been much discussed, virtually no attention has been paid to the singular be…Read more
  •  17
    Lacking, needing, and wanting
    Analytic Philosophy 64 (2): 143-160. 2023.
    I offer a novel conception of the nature of wanting. According to it, wanting is lacking something one needs. Lacking is not a normative notion but needing is, and that is how goodness figures in to wanting. What a thing needs derives from what it is to be a good thing of its kind. In people, wanting is connected to both knowledge and the will. A person can know that she wants something and can act on that knowledge. When she does, she is acting in light of that want and her want is a reason why…Read more
  •  11
    Lacking, needing, and wanting
    Analytic Philosophy 64 (2): 143-160. 2023.
    I offer a novel conception of the nature of wanting. According to it, wanting is lacking something one needs. Lacking is not a normative notion but needing is, and that is how goodness figures in to wanting. What a thing needs derives from what it is to be a good thing of its kind. In people, wanting is connected to both knowledge and the will. A person can know that she wants something and can act on that knowledge. When she does, she is acting in light of that want and her want is a reason why…Read more
  •  38
    Practical Reasoning and the First Person
    Philosophia 45 (2): 677-700. 2017.
    I argue that while practical reasoning is essentially first personal it does not require having essentially first personal thoughts. I start with an example of good practical reasoning. Because there is debate about what practical reasoning is, I discuss how different sides in those debates can accommodate my example. I then consider whether my example involves essentially first personal thoughts. It is not always clear what philosophers who would claim that it must have in mind. I identify two …Read more
  •  64
    Developing original accounts of the many aspects of belief, On Believing puts the believer at the heart of the story. Developing a novel account of the normativity of belief, Hunter argues that the ethics of belief concern how a believer ought to be positioned in a world of possibilities.
  •  303
    Inference as a Mental Act
    In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    I will argue that a person is causally responsible for believing what she does. Through inference, she can sustain and change her perspective on the world. When she draws an inference, she causes herself to keep or to change her take on things. In a literal sense, she makes up her own mind as to how things are. And, I will suggest, she can do this voluntarily. It is in part because she is causally responsible for believing what she does that there are things that she ought to believe, and that w…Read more
  •  65
    The metaphysics of responsible believing
    Manuscrito 41 (4): 255-285. 2018.
    Contemporary philosophy of mind has tended to make the believer disappear. In response, Matt Boyle and Pamela Hieronymi have argued that believing is an act or activity, not a mental state. I argue that this response fails to fully critique contemporary accounts of believing. Such accounts assume that states of believing are particulars; with semantic properties; that we attend to in reflection and act on in inference; and with a rich causal life of their own. Together, these assumptions leave n…Read more
  •  32
    Belief: A Pragmatic Picture By Aaron Z. Zimmerman (review)
    Analysis 79 (1): 180-183. 2019.
    _ Belief: A Pragmatic Picture _ By ZimmermanAaron Z.Oxford University Press, 2018. viii + 180 pp.
  •  81
    In this paper, I try to make sense of the idea that true knowledge attributions characterize something that is more valuable than true belief and that survives even if, as Contextualism implies, contextual changes make it no longer identifiable by a knowledge attribution. I begin by sketching a familiar, pragmatic picture of assertion that helps us to understand and predict how the words “S knows that P” can be used to draw different epistemic distinctions in different contexts. I then argue tha…Read more
  •  68
    The thesis that anything conceivable is possible plays a central role in philosophical debates about the self. Discussions about free will have focused, at least in the last hundred years, on whether a free yet determined action is conceivable. If it is, and if anything conceivable is possible, then a deterministic physics would by itself pose no obstacle to human freedom. Current debates about the nature and value of personal survival turn on whether it is conceivable for a person to move from …Read more
  •  496
    Lacking, needing, and wanting
    Analytic Philosophy 64 (2): 143-160. 2023.
    I offer a novel conception of the nature of wanting. According to it, wanting is lacking something one needs. Lacking is not a normative notion but needing is, and that is how goodness figures in to wanting. What a thing needs derives from what it is to be a good thing of its kind. In people, wanting is connected to both knowledge and the will. A person can know that she wants something and can act on that knowledge. When she does, she is acting in light of that want and her want is a reason why…Read more
  •  22
    Manifesting Emotion (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2): 507-511. 2018.
    My contribution to an Author-Meets-Critics session on Christine Tappolet's book *Emotions, Value, and Agency*.
  •  40
    Understanding and Belief
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 559-580. 1998.
    A natural view is that linguistic understanding is a source of justification or evidence: that beliefs about the meaning of a text or speech act are prima facie justified when based on states of understanding. Neglect of this view is largely due to the widely held assumption that understanding a text or speech act consists in knowledge or belief. It is argued that this assumption rests, in part, on confusing occurrent states of understanding and dispositions to understand. It is then argued that…Read more
  •  17
    A thoroughly updated introduction to the concepts, methods, and standards of critical thinking, _A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking: Deciding What to Do and Believe, Second Edition_ is a unique presentation of the formal strategies used when thinking through reasons and arguments in many areas of expertise. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to critical thinking, the book offers a broad conception of critical thinking and explores the practical relevance to conducting research across fie…Read more
  •  136
    Is thinking an action?
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2 (2): 133-148. 2003.
    I argue that entertaining a proposition is not an action. Such events do not have intentional explanations and cannot be evaluated as rational or not. In these respects they contrast with assertions and compare well with perceptual events. One can control what one thinks by doing something, most familiarly by reciting a sentence. But even then the event of entertaining the proposition is not an action, though it is an event one has caused to happen, much as one might cause oneself to see a book …Read more
  •  84
    Belief and Self‐consciousness
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (5). 2008.
    This paper is about what is distinctive about first-person beliefs. I discuss several sets of puzzling cases of first-person belief. The first focus on the relation between belief and action, while the second focus on the relation of belief to subjectivity. I argue that in the absence of an explanation of the dispositional difference, individuating such beliefs more finely than truth conditions merely marks the difference. I argue that the puzzles reveal a difference in the ways that I am dispos…Read more
  •  6
    On Representing Content
    ProtoSociology 17 101-118. 2002.
    I consider whether the content of a speech act is best represented by a set of possible worlds or by an ordered set containing the individual and properties the speech act is about. I argue that there is nothing in such contents that an ordered set can represent that a set of worlds cannot. In particular, both can be used to capture what is distinctive about singular propositions. But a set of worlds better represents content in cases where the content concerns individuals that no longer exist. …Read more
  •  93
    Belief Ascription and Context Dependence
    Philosophy Compass 6 (12): 902-911. 2011.
    This article considers the question whether belief ascriptions exhibit context dependence. I first distinguish two potential forms of context dependence in belief ascription. Propositional context dependence concerns what the subject believes, whereas attitudinal context dependence concerns what it is to believe a proposition. I then discuss three potential sources of PCD and two potential sources of ACD. Given the nature of this article, my discussion will provide only an overview of these vari…Read more
  •  156
    Understanding and belief
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 559-580. 1998.
    A natural view is that linguistic understanding is a source of justification or evidence: that beliefs about the meaning of a text or speech act are prima facie justified when based on states of understanding. Neglect of this view is largely due to the widely held assumption that understanding a text or speech act consists in knowledge or belief. It is argued that this assumption rests, in part, on confusing occurrent states of understanding and dispositions to understand. It is then argued that…Read more
  •  127
    Knowledge and understanding
    Mind and Language 16 (5). 2001.
    Some philosophical proposals seem to die hard. In a recent paper, Jason Stanley has worked to resurrect the description theory of reference, at least as it might apply to natural kind terms like ‘elm’ (Stanley, 1999). The theory’s founding idea is that to understand ‘elm’ one must know a uniquely identifying truth about elms. Famously, Hilary Putnam showed that ordinary users of ‘elm’ may understand it while lacking such knowledge, and may even be unable to distinguish elms from beeches (Putnam,…Read more
  •  147
    The common ground in an inquiry consists of what the participants agree on, at least for the sake of the inquiry. The relations between the factual and linguistic components of common ground are notoriously difficult to trace. I clarify them by exploring how modal disagreements – disagreements about how things might be – interact with the linguistic and the factual common ground. I argue that modal agreement is essential to common ground of any kind.
  •  55
    Rule-Following and Realism (review)
    Philosophical Review 108 (3): 425. 1999.
    Ebbs’s aim is to “come to terms with and move beyond currently entrenched ways of looking at central topics in the philosophy of language and mind”. The entrenched perspectives are Metaphysical Realism, the view that “we can make ‘objective’ assertions only if we can ‘grasp’ metaphysically independent ‘truth conditions”’, and Scientific Naturalism, “Quine’s view that ‘it is within science itself that reality is to be identified and described”’. Ebbs intends to replace these with what he calls th…Read more