•  2
    Passing the Epistemic Buck
    with Anne Https://Orcidorg Meylan
    In Jonathan Way, Conor McHugh & Daniel Whiting (eds.), Metaepistemology, . 2018.
  •  44
    A minimal constraint on normative reasons seems to be that if some fact is a reason for an agent to φ (act, believe, or feel), the agent could come to know that fact. This constraint is threatened by a well-known type of counterexamples. Self-effacing reasons are facts that intuitively constitute reasons for an agent to φ, but that if they were to become known, they would cease to be reasons for that agent. The challenge posed by self-effacing reasons bears important structural similarities with…Read more
  •  233
    Cross-linguistic Studies in Epistemology
    with Jie Gao
    In Kurt Sylvan, Matthias Steup, Ernest Sosa & Jonathan Dancy (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
    Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of cross-linguistic data discussed by con…Read more
  •  47
    Justification and gradability
    Philosophical Studies 180 (7): 2051-2077. 2023.
    Recently some epistemologists have approached the question whether epistemic justification comes in degrees from a linguistic perspective. Drawing insights from linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives, they investigate whether epistemic occurrences of ‘justified’ are gradable and if yes what type of gradability they involve. These authors conclude that the adjective passes standard tests for gradability, but they classify it as belonging to different categories: as either an absolute or a rel…Read more
  •  24
    Il paradosso della conoscibilità
    Padova University Press. 2022.
    Il paradosso della conoscibilità è un semplice argomento che partendo da premesse piuttosto modeste giunge alla sorprendente conclusione che vi sono verità inconoscibili; verità che è impossibile sapere non già per limiti fisici o cognitivi, ma nemmeno in linea di principio. L’argomento sembra dimostrare l’esistenza di limiti necessari ed ineludibili del sapere umano. Tale conclusione è apparentemente in grado di confutare un gran numero di teorie filosofiche quali per esempio l’idealismo trasce…Read more
  •  68
    What the doctor should do: perspectivist duties for objectivists about ought
    Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1523-1544. 2022.
    Objectivism is the view that how an agent ought to act depends on all kinds of facts, regardless of the agent’s epistemic position with respect to them. One of the most important challenges to this view is constituted by certain cases involving specific conditions of uncertainty—so-called three-options cases. In these cases it seems overwhelmingly plausible that an agent ought to do what is recommendable given her limited perspective, even though the agent knows that this is not objectively the …Read more
  •  13
    In defense of a moderate skeptical invariantism
    In Christos Kyriacou & Kevin Wallbridge (eds.), Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered, Routledge Series in Epistemology. pp. 129-153. 2021.
    The aim of the present contribution is to defend a specific version of moderate skeptical invariantism, which I call Practical Skeptical Invariantism (PSI). The view is a form of skepticism to the extent that it denies knowledge of many facts that we ordinarily think or claim to know. It is moderate to the extent that it is supposed to be compatible with a quite weak, non-radical form of skepticism. According to this view, the threshold on evidential support required for knowledge should be part…Read more
  •  637
    Do we really need a knowledge-based decision theory?
    with Jie Gao
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 7031-7059. 2021.
    The paper investigates what type of motivation can be given for adopting a knowledge-based decision theory. KBDT seems to have several advantages over competing theories of rationality. It is commonly argued that this theory would naturally fit with the intuitive idea that being rational is doing what we take to be best given what we know, an idea often supported by appeal to ordinary folk appraisals. Moreover, KBDT seems to strike a perfect balance between the problematic extremes of subjectivi…Read more
  •  467
    Potential perspectivism is the view that what an agent ought to do (believe, like, fear, … ) depends primarily on facts that are potentially available to her. I consider a challenge to this view. Potentially accessible facts do not always agglomerate over conjunction. This implies that one can fail to have relevant access to a set of facts as a whole but have access to proper subsets of it, each of which can support different incompatible responses. I argue that potential perspectivism has no un…Read more
  •  24
    On the generality argument for the knowledge norm
    Synthese 197 (8): 3459-3480. 2020.
    An increasingly popular view in contemporary epistemology holds that the most fundamental norm governing belief is knowledge. According to this norm one shouldn’t believe what one doesn’t know. A prominent argument for the knowledge norm appeals to the claim that knowledge is the most general condition of epistemic assessment of belief, one entailing all other conditions under which we epistemically assess beliefs (truth, evidence, reliability…). This norm would provide an easy and straightforwa…Read more
  •  5
    Commonality Reconsidered: On the Common Source of Epistemic Standards
    In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 165-184. 2016.
  •  1071
    Belief, Credence and Statistical Evidence
    with Jie Gao
    Theoria 86 (4): 500-527. 2020.
    According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the target proposition is given such evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to statistical evidence as rational credence. The a…Read more
  • Passing the epistemic buck
    In Conor McHugh, Daniel Whiting & Jonathan Way (eds.), Metaepistemology, . pp. 46-66. 2018.
    While buck-passing accounts are widely discussed in the literature, there have been surprisingly few attempts to apply buck-passing analyses to specific normative domains such as aesthetics and epistemology. In particular, there have been very few works which have tried to provide complete and detailed buck-passing analyses of epistemic values and norms. These analyses are, however, both interesting and important. On the one hand, they can bring to the surface the advantages and difficulties of …Read more
  •  38
    Justification, Conformity, and the Norm of Belief
    Dialogue 59 (3): 497-525. 2020.
    Selon une thèse populaire en épistémologie contemporaine, une croyance est justifiée si, et seulement si, elle est une connaissance. Les défenseurs de cette thèse soutiennent également que la connaissance est la norme fondamentale de la croyance et que la conformité à cette norme est à la fois nécessaire et suffisante pour la justification. Je conteste l’affirmation selon laquelle la simple conformité à une norme suffit à justifier une croyance. La justification exige la conformité pour des rais…Read more
  •  71
    Are epistemic reasons perspective-dependent?
    Philosophical Studies 176 (12): 3253-3283. 2019.
    This paper focuses on the relation between epistemic reasons and the subject’s epistemic perspective. It tackles the questions of whether epistemic reasons are dependent on the perspective of the subject they are reasons for, and if so, whether they are dependent on the actual or the potential perspective. It is argued that epistemic reasons are either independent or minimally dependent on the subject’s epistemic perspective. In particular, I provide three arguments supporting the conclusion tha…Read more
  •  26
    An increasingly popular view in contemporary epistemology holds that the most fundamental norm governing belief is knowledge. According to this norm one shouldn’t believe what one doesn’t know. A prominent argument for the knowledge norm appeals to the claim that knowledge is the most general condition of epistemic assessment of belief, one entailing all other conditions under which we epistemically assess beliefs. This norm would provide an easy and straightforward explanation of why we assess …Read more
  •  46
    Moderate Skeptical Invariantism
    Erkenntnis 85 (4): 841-870. 2020.
    I introduce and defend a view about knowledge that I call Moderate Skeptical Invariantism. According to this view, a subject knows p only if she is practically certain that p, where practical certainty is defined as the confidence a rational subject would have to have for her to believe that p and act on p no matter the stakes. I do not provide a definitive case for this view, but I argue that it has several explanatory advantages over alternative views and I show how it can avoid two pressing p…Read more
  •  59
    Benjamin Kiesewetter has recently provided an argument to the effect that necessarily, if one has decisive reason to φ, then one has sufficient reason to believe that she herself has decisive reason to φ. If sound, this argument has important implications for several debates in contemporary normative philosophy. I argue that the main premise in the argument is problematic and should be rejected. According to this premise (PRR), necessarily, one can respond correctly to all the decisive reasons o…Read more
  •  485
    Revisionary Epistemology
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8): 755-779. 2015.
    What is knowledge? What should knowledge be like? Call an epistemological project that sets out to answer the first question ‘descriptive’ and a project that sets out to answer the second question ‘normative’. If the answers to these two questions don’t coincide—if what knowledge should be like differs from what knowledge is like—there is room for a third project we call ‘revisionary’. A revisionary project starts by arguing that what knowledge should be differs from what knowledge is. It then p…Read more
  •  39
    Belief, Correctness and Constitutivity
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1084-1106. 2017.
    Some philosophers have argued that a standard of correctness is constitutive of the concept or the essence of belief. By this claim they mean, roughly, that a mental state is a belief partially in virtue of being correct if and only if its content is true. In this paper I provide a new argument in support of the constitutivity of the correctness standard for belief. I first argue that the standard expresses a conceptual necessity. Then I argue that, since conceptual necessities are such in virtu…Read more
  •  26
    The thesis includes six essays, each corresponding to a chapter, which have the target of widening the discussion on the limits of knowability through the consideration of some general problematics and the discussion of specific topics. The work is composed of two parts, each of three chapters. In the first part, the discussion is focused on a perspective proper of the philosophy of language. In particular, I consider the discussion on the limits of knowability from the point of view of the deba…Read more
  •  67
    Dispositionalist accounts of belief define beliefs in terms of specific sets of dispositions. In this article, I provide a blind-spot argument against these accounts. The core idea of the argument is that beliefs having the form [p and it is not manifestly believed that p] cannot be manifestly believed. This means that one cannot manifest such beliefs in one’s assertions, conscious thoughts, actions, behaviours, or any other type of activity. However, if beliefs are sets of dispositions, they mu…Read more
  •  46
    A logical argument known as Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability, starting from the assumption that every truth is knowable, leads to the consequence that every truth is also actually known. Then, given the ordinary fact that some true propositions are not actually known, it concludes, by modus tollens, that there are unknowable truths. The main literature on the topic has been focusing on the threat the argument poses to the so called semantic anti-realist theories, which aim to epistemically charact…Read more
  •  218
    The Knowability Paradox is a logical argument to the effect that, if there are truths not actually known, then there are unknowable truths. Recently, Alexander Paseau and Bernard Linsky have independently suggested a possible way to counter this argument by typing knowledge. In this article, we argue against their proposal that if one abstracts from other possible independent considerations supporting reasons for typing knowledge and considers the motivation for a type-theoretic approach with re…Read more
  •  87
    Is there an epistemic norm of practical reasoning?
    Philosophical Studies 174 (9): 2137-2166. 2017.
    A recent view in contemporary epistemology holds that practical reasoning is governed by an epistemic norm. Evidence for the existence of this norm is provided by the ways in which we assess our actions and reasoning on the basis of whether certain epistemic conditions are satisfied. Philosophers disagree on what this norm is—whether it is knowledge, justified belief or something else. Nobody however challenges the claim that practical reasoning is governed by such a norm. I argue that assuming …Read more
  •  53
    Introduction
    with Julien Dutant and Anne Https://Orcidorg Meylan
    Synthese 194 (5): 1427-1431. 2017.
  •  45
    Belief and correctness
    Dissertation, . 2012.
    The overall objective of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of the standard of correctness of belief. According to this standard, a belief is correct if and only if the believed proposition is true. My analysis consists in the investigation of a set of aspects and properties of the correctness standard of belief. The main point argued in this dissertation is that the correctness standard of belief is a standard of conformity to the satisfaction conditions of a representational function …Read more