•  2064
    The Introspective Model of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming
    Philosophical Review 131 (2): 169-213. 2022.
    This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action”. Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge”. I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine knowledge requires freedom from a form of doxastic conflict. I propose that, in Wang’s view, a person is free from th…Read more
  •  1762
    Higher-order metaphysics and propositional attitudes
    In Peter Fritz & Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-order Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    According to relationism, for Alice to believe that some rabbits can speak is for Alice to stand in a relation to a further entity, some rabbits can speak. But what could this further entity possibly be? Higher-order metaphysics seems to offer a simple, natural answer. On this view (roughly put), expressions in different syntactic categories (for instance: names, predicates, sentences) in general denote entities in correspondingly different ontological categories. Alice's belief can thus be unde…Read more
  •  1279
    What Is the “Unity” in the “Unity of Knowledge and Action”?
    Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 21 (4): 569-603. 2022.
    AbstractThis essay argues for a new interpretation of the notion of “unity” in Yangming’s 王陽明 famous doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action” (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). I distinguish two parts of Wang’s doctrine: one concerning training (gong fu 工夫), and one concerning the “original natural condition” of knowledge and action (ben ti 本體). I focus on the latter aspect of the doctrine, and argue that Wang holds, roughly, that a person exhibits knowledge in its original natural condition if and o…Read more
  •  1181
    Classical Opacity
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 524-566. 2019.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  1134
    Perspectivism
    Noûs 55 (3): 623-648. 2021.
    Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitu…Read more
  •  1123
    Uncommon Knowledge
    Mind 127 (508): 1069-1105. 2018.
    Some people commonly know a proposition just in case they all know it, they all know that they all know it, they all know that they all know that they all know it, and so on. They commonly believe a proposition just in case they all believe it, they all believe that they all believe it, they all believe that they all believe that they all believe it, and so on. A long tradition in economic theory, theoretical computer science, linguistics and philosophy has held that people have some approximati…Read more
  •  1061
    People with Common Priors Can Agree to Disagree
    Review of Symbolic Logic 8 (1): 11-45. 2015.
    Robert Aumann presents his Agreement Theorem as the key conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some prior μ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates on the prior by conditionali…Read more
  •  1020
    Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope
    Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (6): 1235-1275. 2022.
    Among philosophers, Fregeanism and sententialism are widely considered two of the leading theories of the semantics of attitude reports. Among linguists, these approaches have received little recent sustained discussion. This paper aims to bridge this divide. I present a new formal implementation of Fregeanism and sententialism, with the goal of showing that these theories can be developed in sufficient detail and concreteness to be serious competitors to the theories which are more popular amon…Read more
  •  977
    The coordinated attack scenario and the electronic mail game are two paradoxes of common knowledge. In simple mathematical models of these scenarios, the agents represented by the models can coordinate only if they have common knowledge that they will. As a result, the models predict that the agents will not coordinate in situations where it would be rational to coordinate. I argue that we should resolve this conflict between the models and facts about what it would be rational to do by rejectin…Read more
  •  942
    The difficult phrase ὅ ποτε ὄν ἐστι (hereafter ‘OPO’), which occurs in key passages in Aristotle’s discussions of blood and of time, has long vexed interpreters of Aristotle. This paper proposes a new interpretation of OPO, which resolves some textual and interpretative problems about Aristotle’s theories of blood and of time. My interpretation will also shed light on more general issues in Aristotle’s metaphysics. In the passages I will discuss, Aristotle takes both blood and time to be example…Read more
  •  848
    Prospects for a Naive Theory of Classes
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 58 (4): 461-506. 2017.
    The naive theory of properties states that for every condition there is a property instantiated by exactly the things which satisfy that condition. The naive theory of properties is inconsistent in classical logic, but there are many ways to obtain consistent naive theories of properties in nonclassical logics. The naive theory of classes adds to the naive theory of properties an extensionality rule or axiom, which states roughly that if two classes have exactly the same members, they are identi…Read more
  •  822
    Common Knowledge
    In Marija Jankovic & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality, . pp. 181-195. 2018.
    An opinionated introduction to philosophical issues connected to common knowledge.
  •  785
    An action is agentially perfect if and only if, if a person tries to perform it, they succeed, and, if a person performs it, they try to. We argue that trying itself is agentially perfect: if a person tries to try to do something, they try to do it; and, if a person tries to do something, they try to try to do it. We show how this claim sheds new light on the logical structure of intentional action, on the question of whether basic actions are tryings, and on the notion of “options” in decision …Read more
  •  768
    Closed Structure
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (6): 1249-1291. 2021.
    According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, w…Read more
  •  737
    Conceptions of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming
    Oxford Studies in Epistemology 7. 2023.
    This paper studies one aspect of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s (王陽明 1472-1529) celebrated doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). Wang states that his doctrine does not apply to all knowledge, but only to an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes calls “genuine knowledge” (zhen zhi 真知). But what is “genuine knowledge”? I develop and compare four different interpretations of this notion: the perceptual, practical, normative and introspecti…Read more
  •  727
    Sense, reference and substitution
    Philosophical Studies 177 (4): 947-952. 2020.
    We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference does not reconcile a classical logic of identity with apparent counterexamples to it involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs.
  •  697
    Extended Preferences and Interpersonal Comparisons of Well‐being
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3): 636-667. 2016.
    An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that these theories cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi () attempts to respond to this objection by appeal to so-called extended preferences: very roughly, preferences over situations whose description includes agents’ preferences. This paper examines the prospects for defending the preference-satisfaction theory via this extended preferences program. We argue…Read more
  •  626
    I respond to P. J. Ivanhoe's criticisms of my translation of a key passage in Wang Yangming.
  •  613
    Can modalities save naive set theory?
    with Peter Fritz, Tiankai Liu, and Dana Scott
    Review of Symbolic Logic 11 (1): 21-47. 2018.
  •  572
    Revisionist reporting
    Philosophical Studies 178 (3): 755-783. 2020.
    Several theorists have observed that attitude reports have what we call “revisionist” uses. For example, even if Pete has never met Ann and has no idea that she exists, Jane can still say to Jim ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis in ten lessons’ if Pete believes all 6-year-olds can learn to play tennis in ten lessons and it is part of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge that Ann is a 6-year-old. Jane’s assertion seems acceptable because the claim she reports Pete as believing is entaile…Read more
  •  548
    Aggregating extended preferences
    Philosophical Studies 174 (5): 1163-1190. 2017.
    An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that they cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi :434, 1953) attempts to solve this problem by appeal to people’s so-called extended preferences. This paper presents a new problem for the extended preferences program, related to Arrow’s celebrated impossibility theorem. We consider three ways in which the extended-preference theorist might avoid this problem, and recommend tha…Read more
  •  499
    I present a problem for an influential argument of Chen Lai's, and argue that Wang Yangming may have believed that all "motivating concerns" are actions. (The archived version is a Chinese preprint; the published Chinese version is available by the external link in the entry. An English version is available on my website.)
  •  497
    A translation of two untranslated epistolary exchanges of Wang Yangming, which provide a record of how he understood the doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action after 1521.
  •  490
    Standard State Space Models of Unawareness
    Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge 15. 2015.
    The impossibility theorem of Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini has been thought to demonstrate that standard state-space models cannot be used to represent unawareness. We first show that Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini do not establish this claim. We then distinguish three notions of awareness, and argue that although one of them may not be adequately modeled using standard state spaces, there is no reason to think that standard state spaces cannot provide models of the other two notions. In fact, stan…Read more
  •  407
    Fine-grained semantics for attitude reports
    Semantics and Pragmatics 14 (1). 2021.
    I observe that the “concept-generator” theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003), Anand (2006), and Charlow and Sharvit (2014) does not predict an intuitive true interpretation of the sentence “Plato did not believe that Hesperus was Phosphorus”. In response, I present a simple theory of attitude reports which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which names which intuitively name the same thing may have distinct compositional semantic values. This simple theory solves the proble…Read more
  •  386
    Are LLMs cultural technologies like photocopiers or printing presses, which transmit information but cannot create new content? A challenge for this idea, which we call "bibliotechnism", is that LLMs often do generate entirely novel text. We begin by defending bibliotechnism against this challenge, showing how novel text may be meaningful only in a derivative sense, so that the content of this generated text depends in an important sense on the content of original human text. We go on to present…Read more
  •  337
    This paper introduces the axiom of Negative Dominance, stating that if a lottery f is strictly preferred to a lottery g, then some outcome in the support of f is strictly preferred to some outcome in the support of g. It is shown that if preferences are incomplete on a sufficiently rich domain, then this plausible axiom, which holds for complete preferences, is incompatible with an array of otherwise plausible axioms for choice under uncertainty. In particular, in this setting, Negative Dominanc…Read more
  •  246
    Agreement and Equilibrium with Minimal Introspection
    Dissertation, Oxford University. 2014.
    Standard models in epistemic game theory make strong assumptions about agents’ knowledge of their own beliefs. Agents are typically assumed to be introspectively omniscient: if an agent believes an event with probability p, she is certain that she believes it with probability p. This paper investigates the extent to which this assumption can be relaxed while preserving some standard epistemic results. Geanakoplos (1989) claims to provide an Agreement Theorem using the “truth” axiom, together wit…Read more
  •  245
    Share the Sugar
    with Christian Tarsney and Dean Spears
    We provide a general argument against value incomparability, based on a new style of impossibility result. In particular, we show that, against plausible background assumptions, value incomparability creates an incompatibility between two very plausible principles for ranking lotteries: a weak "negative dominance" principle (to the effect that Lottery 1 can be better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2) and a weak form of ex…Read more