•  614
    Deliberation and Group Disagreement
    In Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & J. Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement, Routledge. pp. 9-45. 2020.
    Suppose an inquiring group wants to let a certain view stand as the group's view. But there’s a problem: the individuals in that group do not initially all agree with one another about what the correct view is. What should the group do, given that it wants to settle on a single answer, in the face of this kind of intragroup disagreement? Should the group members deliberate and exchange evidence and then take a vote? Or, given the well-known ways that evidence exchange can go wrong, e.g., by exac…Read more
  •  487
    Epistemic dependence and cognitive ability
    Synthese 197 (7): 2895-2912. 2017.
    In a series of papers, Jesper Kallestrup and Duncan Pritchard argue that the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive success because of cognitive ability (robust virtue epistemology) is incompatible with the idea that whether or not an agent’s true belief amounts to knowledge can significantly depend upon factors beyond her cognitive agency (epistemic dependence). In particular, certain purely modal facts seem to preclude knowledge, while the contribution of other agents’ cognitive abilities seems …Read more
  •  476
    The Epistemology of Group Disagreement: An Introduction
    with Fernandfo Broncano-Berrocal and J. Adam Carter
    In Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & J. Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement, Routledge. pp. 1-8. 2020.
    This is an introduction to the volume The Epistemology of Group Disagreement (Routledge, forthcoming), (eds.) F. Broncano-Berrocal and J.A. Carter.
  •  343
    Luck as Risk
    In Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck, Routledge. 2019.
    The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that luck is a risk-involving phenomenon. I start by explaining why this hypothesis is prima facie plausible in view of the parallelisms between luck and risk. I then distinguish three ways to spell it out: in probabilistic terms, in modal terms, and in terms of lack of control. Before evaluating the resulting accounts, I explain how the idea that luck involves risk is compatible with the fact that risk concerns unwanted events whereas luck can …Read more
  •  336
    Is lucky belief justified?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The main lesson from Gettier cases is that while one cannot know a proposition by luck, one can hold a lucky true belief justifiedly. Possibly because the latter is taken for granted, the relationship between epistemic justification and epistemic luck has been less discussed. The paper investigates whether luck can undermine doxastic justification, and if so, how and to what extent. It is argued that, as in the case of knowledge, beliefs can fall short of justification due to luck. Moreover, it …Read more
  •  173
    Pluralistic Summativism about Group Belief
    In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2024.
    In what sense do groups have beliefs? This paper provides a novel answer to this question by combining pluralism and summativism about group belief. The resulting view is called pluralistic summativism. The paper starts by critically assessing the three main debates in the literature—the disputes between monism and pluralism, summativism and non-summativism, and believism and rejectionism—and draws a general methodological lesson for the summativism/non-summativism debate—namely, that intuitions…Read more
  •  168
    Lies and Deception: A Failed Reconciliation
    Logos and Episteme 4 (2): 227-230. 2013.
    The traditional view of lying says that lying is a matter of intending to deceive others by making statements that one believes to be false. Jennifer Lackey has recently defended the following version of the traditional view: A lies to B just in case (i) A states that p to B, (ii) A believes that p is false and (iii) A intends to be deceptive to B in stating that p. I argue that, despite all the virtues that Lackey ascribes to her view, conditions (i), (ii) and (iii) are not sufficient for lying…Read more
  •  136
    Is Safety In Danger?
    Philosophia 42 (1): 1-19. 2014.
    In “Knowledge Under Threat” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2012), Tomas Bogardus proposes a counterexample to the safety condition for knowledge. Bogardus argues that the case demonstrates that unsafe knowledge is possible. I argue that the case just corroborates the well-known requirement that modal conditions like safety must be relativized to methods of belief formation. I explore several ways of relativizing safety to belief-forming methods and I argue that none is adequate: if me…Read more
  •  129
    Anti-luck (Too Weak) Virtue Epistemology
    Erkenntnis 79 (4): 733-754. 2014.
    I argue that Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck virtue epistemology is insufficient for knowledge. I show that Pritchard fails to achieve the aim that motivates his adoption of a virtue-theoretic condition in the first place: to guarantee the appropriate direction of fit that known beliefs have. Finally, I examine whether other virtue-theoretic accounts are able to explain what I call the direction of fit problem
  •  111
    A robust enough virtue epistemology
    Synthese 194 (6). 2017.
    What is the nature of knowledge? A popular answer to that long-standing question comes from robust virtue epistemology, whose key idea is that knowing is just a matter of succeeding cognitively—i.e., coming to believe a proposition truly—due to an exercise of cognitive ability. Versions of robust virtue epistemology further developing and systematizing this idea offer different accounts of the relation that must hold between an agent’s cognitive success and the exercise of her cognitive abilitie…Read more
  •  90
    Group polarization—roughly, the tendency of groups to incline towards more extreme positions than initially held by their individual members— has been rigorously studied by social psychol- ogists, though in a way that has overlooked important philosophical questions about this phenomenon which remain unexplored. Two such salient questions are metaphysical and epistemological, respectively. From a metaphysical point of view, can group polarization, understood as an epistemic feature of a group, b…Read more
  •  87
    No Luck in the Distance: A Reply to Freitag
    Theoria 82 (1): 89-100. 2015.
    In a recent article in this journal, Wolfgang Freitag argues that Gettier-style cases that are based on the notion of “distant” epistemic luck cannot be ruled out as cases of knowledge by modal conditions such as safety or sensitivity. I argue that safety and sensitivity can be easily fixed and that Freitag provides no convincing reason for the existence of “distant” epistemic luck
  •  85
    Epistemic Luck
    In Edward Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge. 1998.
    In almost any domain of endeavour, successes can be attained through skill, but also by dumb luck. An archer’s wildest shots occasionally hit the target. Against enormous odds, some fair lottery tickets happen to win. The same goes in the case of purely cognitive or intellectual endeavours. As inquirers, we characteristically aim to believe truly rather than falsely, and to attain such standings as knowledge and understanding. Sometimes such aims are attained with commendable competence, but of …Read more
  •  77
    Purifying impure virtue epistemology
    Philosophical Studies 175 (2): 385-410. 2018.
    A notorious objection to robust virtue epistemology—the view that an agent knows a proposition if and only if her cognitive success is because of her intellectual virtues—is that it fails to eliminate knowledge-undermining luck. Modest virtue epistemologists agree with robust virtue epistemologists that if someone knows, then her cognitive success must be because of her intellectual virtues, but they think that more is needed for knowledge. More specifically, they introduce independently motivat…Read more
  •  75
    Knowledge and tracking revisited
    Analysis 78 (3): 396-405. 2018.
    An explanatorily powerful approach to the modal dimension of knowledge is Robert Nozick’s idea that knowledge stands in a tracking relation to the world. However, pinning down a specific modal condition has proved elusive. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis and a positive proposal. The root of the problem, I argue, is the unquestioned assumption that tracking is a matter of directly preserving conformity between what is believed and what is the case in certain possible worlds. My proposal is tha…Read more
  •  75
    Luck as Risk and the Lack of Control Account of Luck
    Metaphilosophy 46 (1): 1-25. 2015.
    This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering…Read more
  •  57
    This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we argue that given Sosa’s account of full aptness according to which a performance is fully apt only if safe from failure, this thesis can’t be true. We th…Read more
  •  56
    Difficulty and knowledge
    In Christoph Kelp & John Greco (eds.), Virtue Theoretic Epistemology: New Methods and Approaches, Cambridge University Press. 2020.
  •  52
  •  49
    Luck
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2016.
    Winning a lottery, being hit by a stray bullet, or surviving a plane crash, all are instances of a mundane phenomenon: luck. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it … Continue reading Luck →.
  •  46
    The lottery problem is the problem of explaining why mere reflection on the long odds that one will lose the lottery does not yield knowledge that one will lose. More generally, it is the problem of explaining why true beliefs merely formed on the basis of statistical evidence do not amount to knowledge. Some have thought that the lottery problem can be solved by appeal to a violation of the safety principle for knowledge, i.e., the principle that if S knows that p, not easily would S have belie…Read more
  •  33
    Luck as Risk and the Lack of Control Account of Luck
    In Duncan Pritchard & Lee John Whittington (eds.), The Philosophy of Luck, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 3-27. 2015.
    This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering…Read more
  •  30
    Disagreement and epistemic improvement
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 14641-14665. 2021.
    This paper proposes a methodological turn for the epistemology of disagreement, away from focusing on highly idealized cases of peer disagreement and towards an increased focus on disagreement simpliciter. We propose and develop a normative framework for evaluating all cases of disagreement as to whether something is the case independently of their composition—i.e., independently of whether they are between peers or not. The upshot will be a norm of disagreement on which what one should do when …Read more
  •  27
    Collective Epistemic Luck
    Acta Analytica 37 (1): 99-119. 2021.
    A platitude in epistemology is that an individual’s belief does not qualify as knowledge if it is true by luck. Individuals, however, are not the only bearers of knowledge. Many epistemologists agree that groups can also possess knowledge in a way that is genuinely collective. If groups can know, it is natural to think that, just as true individual beliefs fall short of knowledge due to individual epistemic luck, true collective beliefs may fall short of knowledge because of collective epistemic…Read more
  •  26
    Well-Founded Belief and Perceptual Justification
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3): 367-377. 2016.
    According to Alan Millar, justified beliefs are well-founded beliefs. Millar cashes out the notion of well-foundedness in terms of having an adequate reason to believe something and believing it for that reason. To make his account of justified belief compatible with perceptual justification he appeals to the notion of recognitional ability. It is argued that, due to the fact that Millar’s is a knowledge-first view, his appeal to recognitional abilities fails to offer an explanatory account of f…Read more
  •  19
    Group‐deliberative competences and group knowledge
    Philosophical Issues 32 (1): 268-285. 2022.
    Under what conditions is a group belief resulting from deliberation constitutive of group knowledge? What kinds of competences must a deliberating group manifest when settling a question so that the resulting collective belief can be considered group knowledge? In this paper, we provide an answer to the second question that helps make progress on the first question. In particular, we explain the epistemic normativity of deliberation-based group belief in terms of a truth norm and an evidential n…Read more