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8879Intellectual Humility: Owning Our LimitationsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3): 509-539. 2017.What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle
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2922Content Focused Epistemic InjusticeOxford Studies in Epistemology 7 48-70. 2023.There has been extensive discussion of testimonial epistemic injustice, the phenomenon whereby a speaker’s testimony is rejected due to prejudice regarding who they are. But people also have their testimony rejected or preempted due to prejudice regarding what they communicate. Here, the injustice is content focused. We describe several cases of content focused injustice, and we theoretically interrogate those cases by building up a general framework through which to understand them as a genuine…Read more
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2309Finding middle ground between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility: Development and assessment of the limitations-owning intellectual humility scalePersonality and Individual Differences 124 184-193. 2018.Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess …Read more
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1262The Puzzle of Humility and DisparityIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. pp. 72-83. 2020.Suppose that you are engaging with someone who is your oppressor, or someone who espouses a heinous view like Nazism or a ridiculous view like flat-earthism. In contexts like these, there is a disparity between you and your interlocutor, a dramatic normative difference across which you are in the right and they are in the wrong. As theorists of humility, we find these contexts puzzling. Humility seems like the *last* thing oppressed people need and the *last* thing we need in dealing with tho…Read more
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1081Epistemic ValueIn Andrew Cullison (ed.), A Companion to Epistemology, Continuum Press. pp. 270-287. 2010.Epistemology is normative. This normativity has been widely recognized for a long time, but it has recently come into direct focus as a central topic of discussion. The result is a recent and large turn towards focusing on epistemic value. I’ll start by describing some of the history and motivations of this recent value turn. Then I’ll categorize the work within the value turn into three strands, and I’ll discuss the main writings in those strands. Finally, I’ll explore some themes that are rip…Read more
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1051Curiosity was FramedPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (3): 664-687. 2010.This paper explores the nature of curiosity from an epistemological point of view. First it motivates this exploration by explaining why epistemologists do and should care about what curiosity is. Then it surveys the relevant literature and develops a particular approach
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977Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and ExpansionJournal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (3): 444-466. 2024.A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might *prohibit* having certain inquiring attitudes (``norms of restriction''), while ignoring those that might *require* having them (``norms of expansion''). We aim to address that omission by offering a framework that gen…Read more
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963Bullshit QuestionsAnalysis 83 (2): 299-304. 2023.This paper argues that questions can be bullshit. First it explores some shallowly interrogative ways in which that can happen. Then it shows how questions can also be bullshit in a way that’s more deeply interrogative.
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932Can There Be a Knowledge-First Ethics of Belief?In Rico Vitz & Jonathan Matheson (eds.), The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, Oxford University Press. 2014.This article critically examines numerous attempts to build a knowledge-first ethics of belief. These theories specify a number of potential "knowledge norms for belief".
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887One Kind of AskingPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (266). 2017.This paper extends several themes from recent work on norms of assertion. It does as much by applying those themes to the speech act of asking. In particular, it argues for the view that there is a species of asking which is governed by a certain norm, a norm to the effect that one should ask a question only if one doesn’t know its answer.
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598WisdomIn Sven Bernecker & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2010.This paper argues that epistemologists should theorize about wisdom and critically examines a number of attempts to do as much. It then builds and argues for a particular theory of what wisdom is.
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594The Paradox of the QuestionPhilosophical Studies 154 (1): 149-159. 2011.What is the best question to ask an omniscient being? The question is intriguing; is it also paradoxical? We discuss several versions of what Ned Markosian calls the paradox of the question and suggest solutions to each of those puzzles. We then offer some practical advice about what do if you ever have the opportunity to query an omniscient being.
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556Some Epistemic Roles for CuriosityIn Ilhan Inan, Lani Watson, Dennis Whitcomb & Safiye Yigit (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 217-238. 2018.I start with a critical discussion of some attempts to ground epistemic normativity in curiosity. Then I develop three positive proposals. The first of these proposals is more or less purely philosophical; the second two reside at the interdisciplinary borderline between philosophy and psychology. The proposals are independent and rooted in different literatures. Readers uninterested in the first proposal (and the critical discussion preceding it) may nonetheless be interested in the second tw…Read more
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518One wage of unknowabilitySynthese 190 (3): 339-352. 2013.Suppose for reductio that I know a proposition of the form <p and I don’t know p>. Then by the factivity of knowledge and the distribution of knowledge over conjunction, I both know and do not know p ; which is impossible. Propositions of the form <p and I don’t know p> are therefore unknowable. Their particular kind of unknowability has been widely discussed and applied to such issues as the realism debate. It hasn’t been much applied to theories of the nature of knowledge. That is what I’m goi…Read more
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501Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?Metaphilosophy 54 (1): 54-54. 2022.
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389Evoked Questions and Inquiring AttitudesPhilosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.Drawing inspiration from the notion of evocation employed in inferential erotetic logic, we defend an ‘evoked questions norm’ on inquiring attitudes. According to this norm, it is rational to have an inquiring attitude concerning a question only if that question is evoked by your background information. We offer two arguments for this norm. First, we develop an argument from convergence. Insights from several independent literatures (20th-century ordinary-language philosophy, inferential eroteti…Read more
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298Social Epistemology: Essential Readings (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in epistemology.
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297Intellectual Humility in Interdisciplinary Projects: Analysis and MeasurementJournal of Psychology and Christianity 38 (3): 160-163. 2019.
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247Grounding and OmniscienceIn Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2008.I’m going to argue that omniscience is impossible and therefore that there is no God. The argument turns on the notion of grounding. After illustrating and clarifying that notion, I’ll start the argument in earnest. The first step will be to lay out five claims, one of which is the claim that there is an omniscient being, and the other four of which are claims about grounding. I’ll prove that these five claims are jointly inconsistent. Then I’ll argue for the truth of each of them except the cla…Read more
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181Commentary on “Can a good philosophical contribution be made just by asking a question?”Metaphilosophy 54 (1): 55-60. 2022.This paper explains some of the reasoning behind “Can a Good Philosophical Contribution Be Made Just by Asking a Question?,” a paper which consists solely in its title and which is published in the same issue of the journal as the present paper. The method for explaining that reasoning consists in making available a lightly edited version of a letter the authors sent to the editors when submitting the title-only paper. The editors permitted publication of that paper on the condition that the aut…Read more
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176Lysistrata's Lament: Interrogative Analogues of Testimonial InjusticeIn Aaron Creller & Jonathan Matheson (eds.), Inquiry: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. forthcoming.When a person commits a testimonial injustice, the unjust thing they do consists in their reaction to an assertion (theorists diverge on the details; paradigmatically the relevant unjust thing consists in prejudicially refraining from believing the assertion). Whatever reactions to questions are analogous to these reactions to assertions, those things are "interrogative injustices". I explore some models of those things and apply them to some non-ideal cases. One of the models appeals to…Read more
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135Wisdom bibliographyOxford Bibliographies Online. 2010.Recent philosophy features remarkably little work on the nature of wisdom. The following is a bibliography of that work, or at least the important-seeming parts of it that I’ve managed to uncover. I’ve also included some work from the history of philosophy, and from a few neighboring fields. Suggested additions would be very appreciated.
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112Williamson on justificationPhilosophical Studies 138 (2). 2008.Timothy Williamson has a marvelously precise account of epistemic justification in terms of knowledge and probability. I argue that the account runs aground on certain cases involving the probability values 0 and 1.
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106Intentionality - naturalization ofIn M. Binder, N. Hirokawa, U. Windhorst & H. Hirsch (eds.), Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. pp. 1993-1996. 2008.States that are about things are intentional, that is, they have content. The precise nature of intentional states is a matter of dispute.What makes some states, but not others, intentional? Of those states that are intentional, what makes them about what they are about as opposed to something else, i.e. what gives them their specific content?
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95An epistemic value theoryDissertation, Rutgers. 2007.For any normative domain, we can theorize about what is good in that domain. Such theories include utilitarianism, a view about what is good morally. But there are many domains other than the moral; these include the prudential, the aesthetic, and the intellectual or epistemic. In this last domain, it is good to be knowledgeable and bad to ignore evidence, quite apart from the morality, prudence, and aesthetics of these things. This dissertation builds a theory that stands to the epistemic domai…Read more
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50Factivity Without SafetyPacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1): 143-149. 2008.I summarize Timothy Williamson's theory of knowledge, construct some counterexamples to it, and try to diagnose the problem in virtue of which those counterexamples arise. Then I consider possible responses. It turns out that only one of those responses is tenable, and that that response renders Williamson's theory a continuous piece of, rather than a radical paradigmatic break from, recent mainstream work in the theory of knowledge.
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35Review of Vincent F. Hendricks, Duncan Pritchard (eds.), New Waves in Epistemology (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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1Grounding and OmniscienceOxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 4 (1). 2012.I’m going to argue that omniscience is impossible and therefore that there is no God. The argument turns on the notion of grounding. After illustrating and clarifying that notion, I’ll start the argument in earnest. The first step will be to lay out five claims, one of which is the claim that there is an omniscient being, and the other four of which are claims about grounding. I’ll prove that these five claims are jointly inconsistent. Then I’ll argue for the truth of each of them except the cla…Read more