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44Accuracy-First Epistemology and Scientific ProgressErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11. 2024.The accuracy-first program attempts to ground epistemology in the norm that one’s beliefs should be as accurate as possible, where accuracy is measured using a scoring rule. We argue that considerations of scientific progress suggest that such a monism about epistemic value is untenable. In particular, we argue that counterexamples to the standard scoring rules are ubiquitous in the history of science, and hence that these scoring rules cannot be regarded as a precisification of our intuitive co…Read more
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2Tom Sawyer as Philosopher: Lying and Deception on the MississippiIn David Kyle Johnson (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 1349-1371. 2022.Several eminent philosophers – including Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon, and Roderick Chisholm – have done important work on what lies are and how they can be used to deceive us. It is less well known that Mark Twain also made important contributions to this area of applied epistemology. In addition to writing two notable essays on lying, he created one of the most quintessential and versatile liars in all of literature, Tom Sawyer. Episodes from the novels (and films) featuring this charact…Read more
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The truth about lyingIn Heather L. Rivera & Alexander E. Hooke (eds.), The Twilight Zone and philosophy: a dangerous dimension to visit, Open Court. 2018.
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51Simulation and self-locationSynthese 202 (6): 1-13. 2023.It is possible that you are living in a simulation—that your world is computer-generated rather than physical. But how likely is this scenario? Bostrom and Chalmers each argue that it is moderately likely—neither very likely nor very unlikely. However, they adopt an unorthodox form of reasoning about self-location uncertainty. Our main contention here is that Bostrom’s and Chalmers’ premises, when combined with orthodoxy about self-location, yields instead the conclusion that you are almost cert…Read more
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Tom Petty Didn't Really Need to KnowIn Randall E. Auxier & Megan A. Volpert (eds.), Tom Petty and Philosophy: We Need to Know, Open Court Publishing. 2019.
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7On Playing Cowboys and IndiansIn James South & Kimberly Engels (eds.), Westworld and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.Westworld is built on pretense. Philosophers have been interested in pretense and deception. Deception is another sort of pretense. This chapter answers whether it is morally permissible to deceive artificial intelligences just so that humans can play Cowboys and Indians. The delicate equilibrium of Westworld begins to fall apart as some of the hosts figure out the truth about themselves and their world. But that just injects a new level of pretense into the story. In order to hide their awakeni…Read more
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58Information Ethics and the Library ProfessionIn K. E. Himma & H. T. Tavani (eds.), The handbook of information and computer ethics, Wiley. pp. 221-244. 2008.We consider the mission of the librarian as an information provider and the core value that gives this mission its social importance. Our focus here is on those issues that arise in relation to the role of the librarian as an information provider. In particular, we focus on questions of the selection and organization of information, which bring up issues of bias, neutrality, advocacy, and children's rights to access information.
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The greatest liar has his believers: the social epistemology of political lyingIn Emily Crookston, David Killoren & Jonathan Trerise (eds.), Ethics in Politics: The Rights and Obligations of Individual Political Agents, Routledge. 2017.
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39Deceiving versus manipulating: An evidence‐based definition of deceptionAnalytic Philosophy 65 (2): 223-240. 2024.What distinguishes deception from manipulation? Cohen (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96, 483 and 2018) proposes a new answer and explores its ethical implications. Appealing to new cases of “non‐deceptive manipulation” that involve intentionally causing a false belief, he offers a new definition of deception in terms of communication that rules out these counterexamples to the traditional definition. And, he leverages this definition in support of the claim that deception “carries heavier …Read more
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46Accuracy, conditionalization, and probabilismSynthese 198 (5): 4017-4033. 2019.Accuracy-based arguments for conditionalization and probabilism appear to have a significant advantage over their Dutch Book rivals. They rely only on the plausible epistemic norm that one should try to decrease the inaccuracy of one’s beliefs. Furthermore, conditionalization and probabilism apparently follow from a wide range of measures of inaccuracy. However, we argue that there is an under-appreciated diachronic constraint on measures of inaccuracy which limits the measures from which one ca…Read more
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54Animal deception and the content of signalsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 87 (C): 114-124. 2021.In cases of animal mimicry, the receiver of the signal learns the truth that he is either dealing with the real thing or with a mimic. Thus, despite being a prototypical example of animal deception, mimicry does not seem to qualify as deception on the traditional definition, since the receiver is not actually misled. We offer a new account of propositional content in sender-receiver games that explains how the receiver is misled by mimicry. We show that previous accounts of deception, and of prop…Read more
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181The Epistemic Threat of DeepfakesPhilosophy and Technology 34 (4): 623-643. 2020.Deepfakes are realistic videos created using new machine learning techniques rather than traditional photographic means. They tend to depict people saying and doing things that they did not actually say or do. In the news media and the blogosphere, the worry has been raised that, as a result of deepfakes, we are heading toward an “infopocalypse” where we cannot tell what is real from what is not. Several philosophers have now issued similar warnings. In this paper, I offer an analysis of why dee…Read more
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27Social Epistemology and the Digital DivideCRPIT '03: Selected Papers From Conference on Computers and Philosophy 37 79-84. 2003.The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to information technology. One of the main reasons why the digital divide is an important issue is that access to information technology has a tremendous impact on people's ability to acquire knowledge. According to Alvin Goldman (1999), the project of social epistemology is to identify policies and practices that have good epistemic consequences. In this paper, I argue that this sort of approach to social epistemology can help us to decide on …Read more
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28Reuben Hersh. Proving is convincing and explaining. Educational studies in mathematics, vol. 24 , pp. 389–399. - Philip J. Davis. Visual theorems. Educational studies in mathematics, vol. 24 , pp. 333–344. - Gila Hanna and H. Niels Jahnke. Proof and application. Educational studies in mathematics, vol. 24 , pp. 421–438. - Daniel Chazan. High school geometry students' justification for their views of empirical evidence and mathematical proof. Educational studies in mathematics vol. 24 ,pp. 359–387 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 63 (3): 1196-1200. 1998.Reviewed Works:Reuben Hersh, Proving is Convincing and Explaining.Philip J. Davis, Visual Theorems.Gila Hanna, H. Niels Jahnke, Proof and Application.Daniel Chazan, High School Geometry Students' Justification for Their Views of Empirical Evidence and Mathematical Proof.
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6What To Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues by Coady, David: Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, x + 202, US $93.95 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2): 391-394. 2014.No abstract
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12Probabilistic Proofs and the Collective Epistemic Goals of MathematiciansIn Collective Epistemology. pp. 157-175. 2011.Mathematicians only use deductive proofs to establish that mathematical claims are true. They never use inductive evidence, such as probabilistic proofs, for this task. Don Fallis (1997 and 2002) has argued that mathematicians do not have good epistemic grounds for this complete rejection of probabilistic proofs. But Kenny Easwaran (2009) points out that there is a gap in this argument. Fallis only considered how mathematical proofs serve the epistemic goals of individual mathematicians. Easwara…Read more
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8What is Disinformation?Library Trends 63 (3): 401-426. 2015.Prototypical instances of disinformation include deceptive advertising (in business and in politics), government propaganda, doctored photographs, forged documents, fake maps, internet frauds, fake websites, and manipulated Wikipedia entries. Disinformation can cause significant harm if people are misled by it. In order to address this critical threat to information quality, we first need to understand exactly what disinformation is. This paper surveys the various analyses of this concept that h…Read more
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Mathematical Proof and the Reliability of DNA EvidenceThe American Mathematical Monthly 103 (6): 491-497. 1996.
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109The Brier Rule Is not a Good Measure of Epistemic UtilityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (3): 576-590. 2016.Measures of epistemic utility are used by formal epistemologists to make determinations of epistemic betterness among cognitive states. The Brier rule is the most popular choice among formal epistemologists for such a measure. In this paper, however, we show that the Brier rule is sometimes seriously wrong about whether one cognitive state is epistemically better than another. In particular, there are cases where an agent gets evidence that definitively eliminates a false hypothesis, but where t…Read more
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95The Reliability of Randomized AlgorithmsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2): 255-271. 2000.Recently, certain philosophers of mathematics (Fallis [1997]; Womack and Farach [(1997]) have argued that there are no epistemic considerations that should stop mathematicians from using probabilistic methods to establish that mathematical propositions are true. However, mathematicians clearly should not use methods that are unreliable. Unfortunately, due to the fact that randomized algorithms are not really random in practice, there is reason to doubt their reliability. In this paper, I analyze…Read more
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107An Objectivist Argument for ThirdismAnalysis 68 (2): 149-155. 2008.Bayesians take “definite” or “single-case” probabilities to be basic. Definite probabilities attach to closed formulas or propositions. We write them here using small caps: PROB(P) and PROB(P/Q). Most objective probability theories begin instead with “indefinite” or “general” probabilities (sometimes called “statistical probabilities”). Indefinite probabilities attach to open formulas or propositions. We write indefinite probabilities using lower case “prob” and free variables: prob(Bx/Ax). The …Read more
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313Bullshitting, Lying, and Indifference toward TruthErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4 277-309. 2017.This paper is about some of the ways in which people sometimes speak while be- ing indifferent toward what they say. We argue that what Harry Frankfurt called ‘bullshitting’ is a mode of speech marked by indifference toward inquiry, the coop- erative project of reaching truth in discourse. On this view bullshitting is character- ized by indifference toward the project of advancing inquiry by making progress on specific subinquiries, represented by so-called questions under discussion. This ac- c…Read more
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81Accuracy-based arguments for conditionalization and probabilism appear to have a significant advantage over their Dutch Book rivals. They rely only on the plausible epistemic norm that one should try to decrease the inaccuracy of one's beliefs. Furthermore, it seems that conditionalization and probabilism follow from a wide range of measures of inaccuracy. However, we argue that among the measures in the literature, there are some from which one can prove conditionalization, others from which on…Read more
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45Shedding Light on Keeping People in the DarkTopics in Cognitive Science 12 (2): 535-554. 2018.We want to keep hackers in the dark about our passwords and our credit card numbers. We want to keep potential eavesdroppers in the dark about our private communications with friends and business associates. This need for secrecy raises important questions in epistemology (how do we do it?) and in ethics (should we do it?). In order to answer these questions, it would be useful to have a good understanding of the concept of keeping someone in the dark. Several philosophers (e.g., Bok, 1983; Cars…Read more
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135Toward a formal analysis of deceptive signalingSynthese 196 (6): 2279-2303. 2019.Deception has long been an important topic in philosophy. However, the traditional analysis of the concept, which requires that a deceiver intentionally cause her victim to have a false belief, rules out the possibility of much deception in the animal kingdom. Cognitively unsophisticated species, such as fireflies and butterflies, have simply evolved to mislead potential predators and/or prey. To capture such cases of “functional deception,” several researchers Machiavellian intelligence II, Cam…Read more
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A Defense of a Probabilistic Method of Establishing Mathematical TruthsDissertation, University of California, Irvine. 1995.One of the primary goals of mathematicians is to establish new mathematical truths. Toward this end, mathematicians are almost invariably theorem provers. However, there are several methods other than writing down a proof which seem to achieve this epistemic goal of establishing mathematical truths. For instance, Michael Rabin describes a probabilistic test for primality which establishes to an arbitrarily high degree of certainty that a number is prime. Nevertheless, the vast majority of mathem…Read more
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26Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice, by Thomas L. Carson (review)Mind 120 (480): 1232-1237. 2011.
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16Goldman on Probabilistic InferencePhilosophical Studies 109 (3). 2002.In his recent book, Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman claims to have established that if a reasoner starts with accurate estimates of the reliability of new evidence and conditionalizes on this evidence, then this reasoner is objectively likely to end up closer to the truth. In this paper, I argue that Goldman's result is not nearly as philosophically significant as he would have us believe. First, accurately estimating the reliability of evidence – in the sense that Goldman requires – …Read more
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Northeastern UniversityDepartment of Philosophy and Religion
Khoury College of Computer SciencesProfessor
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Information |
Philosophy of Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Deception |