•  85
    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
  •  57
    A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed res…Read more
  •  115
    Easy Practical Knowledge
    with Timothy Kearl
    Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is "easy" in the sense that, by manifesting one's skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about intentional action and knowledge: first, because age…Read more
  •  112
    Knowledge and Conversation
    In Waldomiro Silva Filho (ed.), Epistemology of Conversation, Springer. forthcoming.
    Abstract: Might knowledge normatively govern conversations and not just their discrete constituent thoughts and (assertoric) actions? I answer yes, at least for a restricted class of conversations I call aimed conversations. On the view defended here, aimed conversations are governed by participatory know-how - viz., knowledge how to do what each interlocutor to the conversation shares a participatory intention to do by means of that conversation. In the specific case of conversations that are i…Read more
  •  79
    In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege concedes that, in many ordinary cases, variation in sense is tolerable. In a recent article in this journal, Michaelson and Textor (2023) offer a new interpretation of Frege on the tolerability of sense variation according to which variation in sense is tolerable when the conversation aims at joint action,…Read more
  •  3
    Routledge Handbook of Disagreement (edited book)
    Routledge. 2021.
  •  1
    Knowledge First, (edited book)
    with Emma Gordon and Benjamin Jarvis
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
  •  1
    Socially Extended Epistemology (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  1
    Routledge Handbook of Disagreement (edited book)
    Routledge. forthcoming.
  •  1
    News in brief
    with Lisa Sangoi and Sue Roberts
    Philosophy Now 43 5-5. 2003.
  •  16
    Understanding, Vulnerability, and Risk
    In Óscar Lucas González-Castán (ed.), Cognitive Vulnerability: An Epistemological Approach, De Gruyter. pp. 177-192. 2023.
    A key project in mainstream epistemology investigates the sense in which beliefs are vulnerable to knowledge-undermining luck and/or risk. This chapter will explore a related but largely overlooked question of how and to what extent our grasping connections between propositions is vulnerable to understanding- undermining luck and risk. The result will be a better view of how our attempts to understand the world are vulnerable when they are, and how to better mitigate against such vulnerabilities…Read more
  •  13
    Zeno and the Tortoise
    Philosophy Now 42 47-47. 2003.
  •  18
    You’ll Swing For This!
    Philosophy Now 41 16-17. 2003.
  •  19
    Dilemmas: Test Your Moral Mathematics
    Philosophy Now 41 48-48. 2003.
  •  25
    News in brief
    with Lisa Sangoi and Sue Roberts
    Philosophy Now 43 5-5. 2003.
  •  5
    Virtue Epistemology, Enhancement, and Control
    In Michel Croce & Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (eds.), Connecting Virtues, Wiley. 2018.
    An interesting aspect of Ernest Sosa's (2017) recent thinking is that enhanced performances (for example, the performance of an athlete under the influence of a performance‐enhancing drug) fall short of aptness, and this is because such enhanced performances do not issue from genuine competences on the part of the agent. This paper explores in some detail the implications of such thinking in Sosa's wider virtue epistemology, with a focus on cases of cognitive enhancement. A certain puzzle is the…Read more
  •  4
    (ANTI)‐Anti‐Intellectualism and the Sufficiency Thesis
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3): 374-397. 2016.
    Anti‐intellectualists about knowledge‐how insist that, when an agent S knows how to φ, it is in virtue of some ability, rather than in virtue of any propositional attitudpaes, S has. Recently, a popular strategy for attacking the anti‐intellectualist position proceeds by appealing to cases where an agent is claimed to possess a reliable ability to φ while nonetheless intuitively lacking knowledge‐how to φ. John Bengson and Marc Moffett and Carlotta Pavese have embraced precisely this strategy an…Read more
  •  5
    In a series of recent works, Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson insist that, given the ease by which irreversible destruction is achievable by a morally wicked minority, (i) strictly cognitive bio‐enhancement is currently too risky, while (ii) moral bio‐enhancement is plausibly morally mandatory (and urgently so). This article aims to show that the proposal Savulescu and Persson advance relies on several problematic assumptions about the separability of cognitive and moral enhancement as distin…Read more
  •  198
    Metaepistemology
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Whereas epistemology is the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and commitments made by those who engage in these debates. This entry will focus on a selection of these assumptions and commitments, including whether there are objective epistemic facts; and how to characterize the subject matter and the methodology of epistemology.
  •  1786
    Varieties of externalism
    Philosophical Issues 24 (1): 63-109. 2014.
    Our aim is to provide a topography of the relevant philosophical terrain with regard to the possible ways in which knowledge can be conceived of as extended. We begin by charting the different types of internalist and externalist proposals within epistemology, and we critically examine the different formulations of the epistemic internalism/externalism debate they lead to. Next, we turn to the internalism/externalism distinction within philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In light of the ab…Read more
  •  21
    Telling times: History, emplotment, and truth
    History and Theory 42 (1). 2003.
    In Time, Narrative, and History, David Carr argues against the narrativist claim that our lived experience does not possess the formal attributes of a story; this conclusion can be reinforced from a semiotic perspective. Our experience is mediated through temporal signs that are used again in the construction of stories. Since signs are social entities from the start, this approach avoids a problem of individualism specific to phenomenology, one which Carr takes care to resolve. A semiotic frame…Read more
  •  676
    The modal account of luck revisited
    Synthese 194 (6): 2175-2184. 2017.
    According to the canonical formulation of the modal account of luck [e.g. Pritchard (2005)], an event is lucky just when that event occurs in the actual world but not in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world. This paper argues, with reference to a novel variety of counterexample, that it is a mistake to focus, when assessing a given event for luckiness, on events distributed over just the nearest possible worl…Read more
  •  90
    Semantic inferentialism as (a Form of) active externalism
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (3): 387-402. 2017.
    Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way o…Read more
  •  44
    The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology
    Philosophical Quarterly 63 (250): 184-187. 2013.
    This is a book review of Jason Baehr's 'The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology'.
  •  138
    Recent Work on Moore’s Proof
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 2 (2): 115-144. 2012.
    RRecently, much work has been done on G.E. Moore’s proof of an external world with the aim of diagnosing just where the Proof ‘goes wrong’. In the mainstream literature, the most widely discussed debate on this score stands between those who defend competing accounts of perceptual warrant known as dogmatism and conservativism. Each account implies a different verdict on Moore’s Proof, though both share a commitment to supposing that an examination of premise-conclusion dependence relations will …Read more
  •  165
    Objectual understanding, factivity and belief
    In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 423-442. 2016.
    Should we regard Jennifer Lackey’s ‘Creationist Teacher’ as understanding evolution, even though she does not, given her religious convictions, believe its central claims? We think this question raises a range of important and unexplored questions about the relationship between understanding, factivity and belief. Our aim will be to diagnose this case in a principled way, and in doing so, to make some progress toward appreciating what objectual understanding—i.e., understanding a subject matter …Read more
  •  2843
    Knowledge‐How and Epistemic Luck
    Noûs 49 (3): 440-453. 2013.
    Reductive intellectualists hold that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. For this thesis to hold water, it is obviously important that knowledge-how and knowledge-that have the same epistemic properties. In particular, knowledge-how ought to be compatible with epistemic luck to the same extent as knowledge-that. It is argued, contra reductive intellectualism, that knowledge-how is compatible with a species of epistemic luck which is not compatible with knowledge-that, and thus it is claim…Read more
  •  113
    Not Knowing a Cat is a Cat: Analyticity and Knowledge Ascriptions
    with Martin Peterson and Bart van Bezooijen
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4): 817-834. 2016.
    It is a natural assumption in mainstream epistemological theory that ascriptions of knowledge of a proposition p track strength of epistemic position vis-à-vis p. It is equally natural to assume that the strength of one’s epistemic position is maximally high in cases where p concerns a simple analytic truth. For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that one’s epistemic position vis-à-vis “a cat is a cat” is harder to improve than one’s position vis-à-vis “a cat is on the mat”, and consequent…Read more