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3609The Ship of Theseus PuzzleIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 158-174. 2020.Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-t…Read more
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1873Nothing at Stake in KnowledgeNoûs 53 (1): 224-247. 2019.In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some …Read more
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284De Pulchritudine non est Disputandum? A cross‐cultural investigation of the alleged intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgmentMind and Language 34 (3): 317-338. 2019.Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment.…Read more
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165The Gettier Intuition from South America to AsiaJournal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
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153A semantic approach to comparative verisimilitudeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4): 563-581. 1995.The importance of the comparative notion of versimilitude, or truthlikeness, for a realist conception of knowledge follows from two modest ‘realist’ assumptions, namely, that the aim of an enquiry, as an enquiry, is the truth of some matter; and that one false theory may realize this aim better than another. However, there seem to be two ways in which one (false) theory can realize this aim better than another. One (false) theory can be closer to the truth than another either by being prepondera…Read more
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96Cornerstones: You’d better believe themSynthese 189 (2): 1-23. 2012.Crispin Wright’s “Unified Strategy” for addressing some familiar sceptical paradoxes exploits a subtle distinction between two different ways in which we can be related to a proposition: (full-blown) belief and (mere) acceptance. The importance of the distinction for his strategy stems from his conviction that we cannot acquire any kind of evidence, either empirical or a priori, for the “cornerstones” of our cognitive projects, i.e., for those basic presuppositions of our inquiries that we must …Read more
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90Truth and Justification: A Difference that Makes a DifferencePhilosophia 43 (1): 217-232. 2015.Apparently, aiming to comply with the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the proposition that P is true’ can hardly differ from aiming to comply with the norm ‘Believe that P if and only if the proposition that P is epistemically justified’. So one may be tempted to agree with Richard Rorty that the distinction between truth and justification is pragmatically useless because it cannot make any difference ‘when the question is about what I should believe now’. I resist this conclusion by arguing…Read more
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87Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregard…Read more
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79IntroductionSynthese 189 (2): 221-234. 2012.This Introduction to the special issue on “Skepticism and Justification” provides a background to the nine articles collected here and a detailed summary of each, which highlights their interconnections and relevance to the debate at the heart of the issue
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65Ideal Epistemic Situations and the Accessibility of Realist TruthErkenntnis 58 (1): 13-29. 2003.There is a widespread opinion that the realist idea that whether a proposition is true or false typically depends on how things are independently of ourselves is bound to turn truth, in Davidson's words, into “something to which humans can never legitimately aspire”. This opinion accounts for the ongoing popularity of “epistemic” theories of truth, that is, of those theories that explain what it is for a proposition (or statement, or sentence, or what have you) to be true or false in terms of so…Read more
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45One often hears the claim that fact-based versions of the correspondence theory of truth face a disruptive dilemma: ‘if all true propositions correspond to the same fact, the notion is useless, and if every [true] proposition corresponds to a distinct fact, then the notion becomes idle’ (Engel 2002, 21). The assumption underlying this claim is that all conceptions of facts can be assigned to either of two categories. The first includes those conceptions according to which facts are so coarse-gra…Read more
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44Contrastive Hinge EpistemologyTheoria 87 (5): 1222-1249. 2021.Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1222-1249, October 2021.
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39A Minimalist Solution to Jørgensen's DilemmaRatio Juris 12 (1): 59-79. 1999.This article develops a fresh approach to Jørgensen's Dilemma on the basis of Paul Horwich's “minimalist” view that our notion of truth is implicitly defined by the instances of the equivalence schema “The proposition that p is true if and only if p.” The “deflationary” claim that the truth predicate, far from referring to any deep property of propositions, merely plays the logical function of enabling us to take certain attitudes (e.g., acceptance or rejection) towards propositions the content …Read more
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38Guest Editors' PrefaceDiscipline Filosofiche 22 (2): 5-6. 2012.This is the guest editors' preface to the Discipline Filosofiche special issue on Knowledge and Justification.
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35Extended Rationality: Some Queries about Warrant, Epistemic Closure, Truth and ScepticismInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (4): 258-271. 2017._ Source: _Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 258 - 271 This contribution to the symposium on Annalisa Coliva’s _Extended Rationality_ is largely sympathetic with the moderate view of the structure of epistemic warrant which is defended in the book. However, it takes issue with some aspects of Coliva’s Wittgenstein-inspired ‘hinge epistemology’, focussing especially on her conception of propositional warrant, her treatment of epistemic closure, her antirealist conception of truth, and the significance of her…Read more
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33A Contrastivist Response to Gerken’s Arguments for False PositivesActa Analytica 36 (2): 311-322. 2020.In this paper, I defend epistemological contrastivism—the view that propositional knowledge is a three-place, contrastive relation between an agent, a proposition and a contrast term—against two a priori arguments recently offered by Mikkel Gerken for the conclusion that intuitive judgements exhibiting a contrast effect on knowledge ascriptions are false positives. I show that the epistemic argument for false positives begs the question against contrastivism by assuming the independently implaus…Read more
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31Knowing the Facts: A Contrastivist Account of the Referential Opacity of Knowledge AttributionsIn Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History, Palgrave. pp. 401-420. 2018.The view that propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts is prima facie rather appealing, especially for realistically minded philosophers, but it is difficult to square with the referential opacity of knowledge attributions of the form ‘S knows that p’. For how could Lois Lane know that Superman can fly and ignore that Clark Kent can fly if knowledge is a two-place relation between an agent and a fact and the fact that Superman can fly just is the fact that Clark Kent can fly? Giorgio Volpe …Read more
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30Interworld DisagreementErkenntnis 86 (6): 1585-1598. 2019.Disagreement plays an important role in several philosophical debates, with intuitions about ordinary or exotic cases of agreement and disagreement being invoked to support or undermine competing semantic, epistemological and metaphysical views. In this paper we discuss cases of interworld doxastic disagreement, that is to say, cases of doxastic disagreement supposedly obtaining between individuals inhabiting different possible worlds, in particular between an individual inhabiting the actual wo…Read more
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28Perspectives on Post-TruthSocial Epistemology 37 (2): 141-149. 2023.This opening piece of the special issue ‘Perspectives on Post-Truth’ aims to accomplish three tasks. First, and foremost, it highlights the issue’s distinctive feature, namely its variegated approach to post-truth. The leading idea in assembling it has been to draw on different methodologies, theoretical approaches, and competences, in order to gain a fine-grained understanding of the post-truth condition and to develop an effective toolkit to address the most pressing challenges it poses to our…Read more
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28Truth is One (No Need for Pluralism)Erkenntnis 1-19. forthcoming.In this paper, I discuss the currently most popular argument for alethic pluralism, maintaining that the so-called scope problem provides no compelling reason for abandoning the traditional view that truth is one and the same (substantive) property across the various regions of thought or discourse in which it is ascribed or denied to the things we think or say. I disarm the argument by showing that the scope problem does not arise for a number of non-deflationary, monistic views of truth that m…Read more
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14Minimalism and Normative Reasoning: A Reply to Sean CoyleRatio Juris 15 (3): 319-327. 2002.This paper defends the “minimalist” solution to Jørgensen’s dilemma against the objections raised by Coyle (2002). As most of these objections stem from a misconstrual of the account of truth that underlies the minimalist solution, the paper is largely an attempt to provide a clearer statement of the “minimal theory of truth,” a sharper characterization of the features that distinguish it from other deflationary views, and a careful presentation of the minimalist account of the logical role of t…Read more
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Perché non siamo cervelli in una vasca: Putnam, Popper e il realismoRivista di Filosofia 82 (3): 369-397. 1991.
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Alcune considerazioni sui presupposti epistemologia della sociologia della scienza attualeEpistemologia 20 (2): 297-318. 1997.
Bologna, Italy
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |