•  469
    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
  •  299
    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
  •  282
    Inference as a Mental Act
    In Michael Brent (ed.), Mental Action, . forthcoming.
    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
  •  157
    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
  •  144
    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.
  •  144
    Soames and widescopism
    Philosophical Studies 123 (3). 2005.
    Widescopism, as I call it, holds that names are synonymous with descriptions that are required to take wide scope over modal adverbs. Scott Soames has recently argued that Widescopism is false. He identifies an argument that is valid but which, he claims, a defender of Widescopism must say has true premises and a false conclusion. I argue, first, that a defender of Widescopism need not in fact say that the target arguments conclusion is false. Soames argument that she must confuses, I claim, mod…Read more
  •  143
    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
  •  136
    Alienated Belief
    Dialectica 65 (2): 221-240. 2011.
    This paper argues that it is possible to knowingly believe something while judging that one ought not to believe it and (so) viewing the belief as manifesting a sort of failure. I offer examples showing that such ‘alienated belief’ has several potential sources. I contrast alienated belief with self-deception, incontinent (or akratic) belief and half-belief. I argue that the possibility of alienated belief is compatible with the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person reflection on belief, and …Read more
  •  130
    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
  •  123
    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
  •  107
    Understanding, justification and the a priori
    Philosophical Studies 87 (2): 119-141. 1997.
    What I wish to consider here is how understanding something is related to the justification of beliefs about what it means. Suppose, for instance, that S understands the name “Clinton” and has a justified belief that it names Clinton. How is S’s understanding related to that belief’s justification? Or suppose that S understands the sentence “Clinton is President”, or Jones’ assertive utterance of it, and has a justified belief that that sentence expresses the proposition that Clinton is President, o…Read more
  •  100
    Self‐Consciousness ‐ By Sebastian Rödl (review)
    Philosophical Books 49 (3): 272-274. 2008.
  •  90
    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
  •  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
  •  77
    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
  •  74
    Guidance and Belief
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (S1): 63-90. 2009.
  •  73
    Introduction
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (5-6): 515-517. 2013.
    (2013). Introduction. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 515-517
  •  67
    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
  •  61
    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.
  •  59
    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.
  •  54
    Beliefs and Dispositions
    Journal of Philosophical Research 34 243-262. 2009.
    This paper is about the dispositional difference that demonstrative and indexical beliefs make. More specifically, it is about the dispositional difference between my believing that NN is P (where I am NN) and my believing that I, myself, am P. Identifying a dispositional difference in this kind of case is especially challenging because those beliefs have the very same truth conditions. My question is this: how can a difference in belief that makes no difference to one’s conception of the world …Read more
  •  54
    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
  •  53
    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
  •  53
    The Mind-Body problem is the problem of saying how a person’s mental states and events relate to his bodily ones. How does Oscar’s believing that water is cold relate to the states of his body? Is it itself a bodily state, perhaps a state of his brain or nervous system? If not, does it nonetheless depend on such states? Or is his believing that water is cold independent of his bodily states? And, crucially, what are the notions of dependence and independence at issue here?
  •  46
    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.
  •  35
    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
  •  32
    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
  •  30
    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.