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Cogito and MooreSynthese 202 (1): 1-27. 2023.Self-verifying judgments like _I exist_ seem rational, and self-defeating ones like _It will rain, but I don’t believe it will rain_ seem irrational_._ But one’s evidence might support a self-defeating judgment, and fail to support a self-verifying one. This paper explains how it can be rational to defy one’s evidence if judgment is construed as a mental performance or act, akin to inner assertion. The explanation comes at significant cost, however. Instead of causing or constituting beliefs, ju…Read more
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Self-Knowledge Requirements and Moore's ParadoxPhilosophical Review 130 (2): 227-262. 2021.Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding M…Read more
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Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian TheaterOxford Studies in Epistemology 6. 2019.According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in r…Read more
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What’s the matter with epistemic circularity?Philosophical Studies 171 (2): 177-205. 2014.If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitimate to verify the source’s reliability by appealing to that source’s own testimony. Is this because it is illegitimate to trust a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever? Or is there a distinctive problem with appealing to the source’s testimony on the matter of that source’s own reliability? After distinguishing between two kinds of epistemically illegitimate circularity—bootstrappi…Read more
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Internalism, Stored Beliefs, and Forgotten EvidenceIn Sanford Goldberg & Stephen Wright (eds.), Memory and Testimony: New Essays in Epistemology, . forthcoming.
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Graded RatifiabilityJournal of Philosophy 119 (2): 57-88. 2022.
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Inferential Justification and the Transparency of BeliefNoûs 50 (1): 184-212. 2016.This paper critically examines currently influential transparency accounts of our knowledge of our own beliefs that say that self-ascriptions of belief typically are arrived at by “looking outward” onto the world. For example, one version of the transparency account says that one self-ascribes beliefs via an inference from a premise to the conclusion that one believes that premise. This rule of inference reliably yields accurate self-ascriptions because you cannot infer a conclusion from a premi…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology of Mind |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Language |