•  34
    Corroboration
    American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2): 131-148. 2023.
    Corroborating evidence supports a proposition that is already supported by other initial evidence. It bolsters or confirms the original body of evidence. Corroboration has striking psychological and epistemic force: It potently affects how people do and should assess the target proposition. This essay investigates the distinctive powers of corroborating evidence. Corroboration does not simply increase the quantifiable probability of the adjudicated claim. Drawing on the relevant alternatives fra…Read more
  •  26
    Pragmatism, skepticism, and over-compatibilism: on Michael Hannon’s What’s the Point of Knowledge?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Function-first approaches illuminate phenomena by investigating their functional roles. I first describe virtues of this approach. By foregrounding normal instances of knowledge, for example, function-first theorising offers a much-needed corrective to epistemology's counterexample-driven momentum towards increasingly byzantine, marginal cases. And epistemic practices are shaped by human limitations, needs, vices, and power relations. These non-ideal, naturalistic forces of embodied sociality fo…Read more
  •  665
    We Forge the Conditions of Love
    In Abrol Fairweather & Carlos Montemayor (eds.), Linguistic Luck: Safeguards and Threats to Linguistic Communication, Oxford University Press. 2023.
    This essay is not about what love is. It is about what self-ascriptions of love do. People typically self-ascribe romantic love when a nexus of feelings, beliefs, attitudes, values, commitments, experiences, and personal histories matches their conception of romantic love. But what shapes this conception? And (how) can we adjudicate amongst conflicting conceptions? Self-ascriptions of love do not merely describe the underlying nexus of attitudes and beliefs. They also change it. This essay desc…Read more
  •  40
    Profiling and Proof: Are Statistics Safe?
    Philosophy 95 (2): 161-183. 2020.
    Many theorists hold that outright verdicts based on bare statistical evidence are unwarranted. Bare statistical evidence may support high credence, on these views, but does not support outright belief or legal verdicts of culpability. The vignettes that constitute the lottery paradox and the proof paradox are marshalled to support this claim. Some theorists argue, furthermore, that examples of profiling also indicate that bare statistical evidence is insufficient for warranting outright verdicts…Read more
  •  69
    The safe, the sensitive, and the severely tested: a unified account
    with Brian Zaharatos
    Synthese 200 (5): 1-33. 2022.
    This essay presents a unified account of safety, sensitivity, and severe testing. S’s belief is safe iff, roughly, S could not easily have falsely believed p, and S’s belief is sensitive iff were p false S would not believe p. These two conditions are typically viewed as rivals but, we argue, they instead play symbiotic roles. Safety and sensitivity are both valuable epistemic conditions, and the relevant alternatives framework provides the scaffolding for their mutually supportive roles. The re…Read more
  •  562
    Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than by character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry. Proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify, however, on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies…Read more
  •  521
    Ephecticism is the tendency towards suspension of belief. Epistemology often focuses on the error of believing when one ought to doubt. The converse error—doubting when one ought to believe—is relatively underexplored. This essay examines the errors of undue doubt. I draw on the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose and remedy undue doubts about rape accusations. Doubters tend to invoke standards for belief that are too demanding, for example, and underestimate how farfetched uneliminated …Read more
  •  331
    Legal Evidence and Knowledge
    In Clayton Littlejohn & Maria Lasonen Aarnio (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. forthcoming.
    This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. I t…Read more
  •  242
    Antisocial Modelling
    In Alfano Mark, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. forthcoming.
    This essay replies to Michael Morreau and Erik J. Olsson’s ‘Learning from Ranters: The Effect of Information Resistance on the Epistemic Quality of Social Network Deliberation’. Morreau and Olsson use simulations to suggest that false ranters—agents who do not update their beliefs and only ever assert false claims—do not diminish the epistemic value of deliberation for other agents and can even be epistemically valuable. They argue conclude that “Our study suggests that including [false] ranters…Read more
  •  7
    Virtue-theoretic approaches to the theory of knowledge aim to explain the nature and value of knowledge by appeal to the cognitive character of the agent. Robust virtue epistemology holds that knowledge is ‘true belief attained through cognitive ability’, and that no other conditions, such as an additional anti-luck condition, are needed to capture the nature and value of knowledge. In this thesis I defend robust virtue epistemology. In chapter one I outline criteria of adequacy for an account o…Read more
  •  1180
    The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief…Read more
  •  1002
    The “She Said, He Said” Paradox and the Proof Paradox
    In Zachary Hoskins and Jon Robson (ed.), Truth and Trial, . forthcoming.
    This essay introduces the ‘she said, he said’ paradox for Title IX investigations. ‘She said, he said’ cases are accusations of rape, followed by denials, with no further significant case-specific evidence available to the evaluator. In such cases, usually the accusation is true. Title IX investigations adjudicate sexual misconduct accusations in US educational institutions; I address whether they should be governed by the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard of proof or the higher ‘clear an…Read more
  •  1648
    The Reasonable and the Relevant: Legal Standards of Proof
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 47 (3): 288-318. 2019.
    According to a common conception of legal proof, satisfying a legal burden requires establishing a claim to a numerical threshold. Beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often glossed as 90% or 95% likelihood given the evidence. Preponderance of evidence is interpreted as meaning at least 50% likelihood given the evidence. In light of problems with the common conception, I propose a new ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for legal standards of proof. Relevant alternative accounts of knowledge…Read more
  •  45
    Wisdom Through Adversity: The Potential Role of Humility
    with Tenelle Porter, Don E. Davis, and Jason Baehr
    Journal of Value Inquiry 53 (3): 475-477. 2019.
    Adversity provides a chance to reckon with, and properly attend to, our limitations. Appreciating one’s limitations is crucial for humility; and developing humility enhances wisdom.
  •  2166
    In order to perform certain actions – such as incarcerating a person or revoking parental rights – the state must establish certain facts to a particular standard of proof. These standards – such as preponderance of evidence and beyond reasonable doubt – are often interpreted as likelihoods or epistemic confidences. Many theorists construe them numerically; beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often construed as 90 to 95% confidence in the guilt of the defendant. A family of influential cas…Read more
  •  3416
    Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes evidentialism, and kindred views, which holds that epistemic justification is determined solely by factors pertaining to evidence and truth. In this essay I explain how beliefs such as ‘that woman is probably an administrative assistant’—based on the evidence that mos…Read more
  •  559
    Robust virtue epistemology holds that knowledge is true belief obtained through cognitive ability. In this essay I explain that robust virtue epistemology faces a dilemma, and the viability of the theory depends on an adequate understanding of the ‘through’ relation. Greco interprets this ‘through’ relation as one of causal explanation; the success is through the agent’s abilities iff the abilities play a sufficiently salient role in a causal explanation of why she possesses a true belief. In th…Read more
  •  416
    Safety’s swamp: Against the value of modal stability
    American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2): 119-129. 2017.
    An account of the nature of knowledge must explain the value of knowledge. I argue that modal conditions, such as safety and sensitivity, do not confer value on a belief and so any account of knowledge that posits a modal condition as a fundamental constituent cannot vindicate widely held claims about the value of knowledge. I explain the implications of this for epistemology: We must either eschew modal conditions as a fundamental constituent of knowledge, or retain the modal conditions but con…Read more
  •  164
    Conciliatory views of peer disagreement hold that when an agent encounters peer disagreement she should conciliate by adjusting her doxastic attitude towards that of her peer. In this paper I distinguish different ways conciliation can be understood and argue that the way conciliationism is typically understood violates the principle of commutativity of evidence. Commutativity of evidence holds that the order in which evidence is acquired should not influence what it is reasonable to believe bas…Read more
  •  865
    Teleologies and the Methodology of Epistemology
    In David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 31-45. 2015.
    The teleological approach to an epistemic concept investigates it by asking questions such as ‘what is the purpose of the concept?’, ‘What role has it played in the past?’, or ‘If we imagine a society without the concept, why would they feel the need to invent it?’ The idea behind the teleological approach is that examining the function of the concept illuminates the contours of the concept itself. This approach is a relatively new development in epistemology, and as yet there are few works exam…Read more
  •  194
    Understanding, Integration, and Epistemic Value
    Acta Analytica 27 (2): 163-181. 2012.
    Understanding enjoys a special kind of value, one not held by lesser epistemic states such as knowledge and true belief. I explain the value of understanding via a seemingly unrelated topic, the implausibility of veritism. Veritism holds that true belief is the sole ultimate epistemic good and all other epistemic goods derive their value from the epistemic value of true belief. Veritism entails that if you have a true belief that p, you have all the epistemic good qua p. Veritism is a plausible …Read more
  •  120
    In Defence of Reasonable Doubt
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 34 (2): 221-241. 2017.
    In criminal trials the state must establish, to a particular standard of proof, the defendant's guilt. The most widely used and important standard of proof for criminal conviction is the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt' standard. But what legitimates this standard, rather than an alternative? One view holds the standard of proof should be determined or justified – at least in large part – by its consequences. In this spirit, Laudan uses crime statistics to estimate risks the average citizen runs of b…Read more
  •  112
    Normalcy and the Contents of Philosophical Judgements
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8): 700-740. 2015.
    Thought experiments as counterexamples are a familiar tool in philosophy. Frequently understanding a vignette seems to generate a challenge to a target theory. In this paper I explore the content of the judgement that we have in response to these vignettes. I first introduce several competing proposals for the content of our judgement, and explain why they are inadequate. I then advance an alternative view. I argue that when we hear vignettes we consider the normal instances of the vignette. If …Read more
  •  45
    Coherence Without Conservation
    Syndicate Philosophy 1 1-8. 2016.
    In Reason and Explanation Ted Poston advances an explanatory coherentist view of justification, according to which the justification of a person’s beliefs consists in how well those beliefs fit within a virtuous explanatory system. Poston argues that epistemic conservatism, which holds that in at least some cases belief itself generates epistemic merit, plays an essential role in such an account. Poston’s version of conservatism holds that “mere belief” – belief in cases of empty symmetrical evi…Read more