•  5
    Pragmatist responses to skepticism about empirical justification have mostly been underwhelming, either presupposing implausible theses like relativism or anti-realism, or else showing our basic empirical beliefs to be merely psychologically inevitable rather than rationally warranted. In this paper I defend a better one: a modified version of an argument by Wilfrid Sellars that we are pragmatically warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true, since their likely trut…Read more
  •  18
    Constitution, Causation, and the Final Opinion: A Puzzle in Peirce's Illustrations
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (3): 237-257. 2023.
    In “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce apparently accepts the causal claim that real physical objects cause us to reach an indefeasible “final opinion” concerning them. In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” he apparently accepts the constitutive claim that for physical objects to be real just is for them to be represented in that opinion. These claims initially seem inconsistent, since causal claims are explanatory and since equivalent claims cannot explain one another. Contrary to prominent suggestion…Read more
  •  259
    Phenomenalism, Skepticism, and Sellars's Account of Intentionality
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (5): 548-558. 2022.
    I take up two questions raised by Luz Christopher Seiberth's meticulous reconstruction of Wilfrid Sellars's theory of intentionality. The first is whether we should regard Sellars as a transcendental phenomenalist in the most interesting sense of the term: as denying that even an ideally adequate conceptual structure would enable us to represent worldly objects as they are in themselves. I agree with Seiberth that the answer is probably yes, but I suggest that this is due not to Sellars's reject…Read more
  •  277
    Sellars's Core Critique of C. I. Lewis: Against the Equation of Aboutness with Givenness
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (1): 106-136. 2022.
    Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do the famous arguments of its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that Lewis’s epistemology is among the positions targeted by Sellars. But this is incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered more trenchant (if already familiar) critiques of Lewis’s epistemology. What is origi…Read more
  •  214
    C. I. Lewis was a Foundationalist After All
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 37 (1): 77-99. 2020.
    While C. I. Lewis was traditionally interpreted as an epistemological foundationalist throughout his major works, virtually every recent treatment of Lewis's epistemology dissents. But the traditional interpretation is correct: Lewis believed that apprehensions of "the given" are certain independently of support from, and constitute the ultimate warrant for, objective empirical beliefs. This interpretation proves surprisingly capable of accommodating apparently contrary textual evidence. The non…Read more
  •  296
    Sellars’ metaethical quasi-realism
    Synthese 197 (5): 2215-2243. 2020.
    In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-lingui…Read more