•  55
    Ransdell on Socrates, Peirce, and Intellectual Modesty
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (4): 467. 2013.
    “Peirce and the Socratic Tradition” is a bold and suggestive paper. In it, Joseph Ransdell draws out a particular tradition of modesty allegedly exemplified by Socrates, Peirce, and few others in philosophy. At its heart, this tradition involves a clear-headed acceptance of some surprising implications of an obvious fact, viz. that human wisdom cannot involve taking a god’s eye view of things. The elenchus of Socrates and the doubt-belief theory of Peirce, Ransdell thinks, accurately reflect the…Read more
  •  28
    Normativity and Naturalism in “The Fixation of Belief”
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 55 (1): 1-19. 2019.
    In a number of brief discussions, Cheryl Misak has presented a reading of Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief " that preserves both the essay's ambitious naturalism and its sensible normativism. This essay fleshes out Misak's proposal, formulates some challenges to it, and articulates an alternative. Misak's argument rests on the plausible claim that "it is very hard really to settle beliefs". As she interprets this claim, it could also be expressed as "it is very hard really to settle beliefs." Sh…Read more
  •  68
    Structure and Content in “The Will to Believe”
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 51 (3): 320. 2015.
    This paper argues that sustained attention to the highlighted structure of William James's “The Will to Believe” yields surprising insights into the essay. “Highlighted structure” includes James's announcements of his intentions, his section breaks, and, especially, patterns of repetition and contrast within the work. Particular attention is paid to a criticism to which James frequently returns, viz. that evidentialists are driven by their passions to adopt evidentialism. I argue that James does…Read more
  •  143
    How Settled are Settled Beliefs in “The Fixation of Belief”?
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47 (2): 226-247. 2011.
    Despite its prominence in Peirce’s best-known works, the notion of fixed, stable, or settled belief (I will follow Peirce in using these terms more or less interchangeably) has received relatively little explicit attention. Need a belief be permanently stable in order to count as fixed? Or, to take the other extreme, does a belief count as fixed as long as it is currently stable? More fundamentally, what is involved in predicating stability of a belief? Talk of stability suggests a disposition t…Read more
  •  42
    Genuine belief and genuine doubt in Peirce
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (2): 840-853. 2018.
    Peirce makes it clear that doubt and belief oppose one another. But that slogan admits of a weaker and a stronger reading. The weaker reading permits and the stronger reading forbids one to be in a state of doubt and of belief with respect to the same proposition at the same time. The stronger claim is standardly attributed to Peirce, for textual and philosophical reasons. This paper maintains that this standard construal is excessively strong. It argues that the secondary literature tends to pr…Read more
  • Peirce, Psychologism, and the Doubt-Belief Theory of Inquiry
    Dissertation, University of Michigan. 1999.
    Many scholars hold that Peirce came to reject crucial aspects of his best-known and most influential essays, "The Fixation of Belief" and "How To Make Our Ideas Clear." In particular, they claim that Peirce repudiated the doubt-belief theory of inquiry, at least in the form in which he presented it in these papers. The reason most often offered on behalf of this view is that Peirce came to realize that the doubt-belief theory, with its reliance upon such claims as that doubt is irritating and av…Read more
  •  47
    Confidence, Evidential Weight, and the Theory-Practice Divide in Peirce
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52 (2): 285. 2016.
    Through the work of Isaac Levi and others, a tension that lies at the heart of Peirce’s doubt-belief theory of inquiry has received significant attention in recent years. Scholars have struggled to explain on Peirce’s behalf how inquirers are to strike an appropriate balance between believing and doubting. We must acknowledge the breadth and depth of our fallibility without countenancing paper doubts that are at best idle and at worst pernicious. We must rely on our beliefs in inquiry while neve…Read more
  •  64
    The Problem of Evil, by Daniel Speak (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 38 (3): 350-353. 2015.
  •  136
    The metaethics of belief: An expressivist reading of "the will to believe"
    with Nishi Shah
    Social Epistemology 20 (1). 2006.
    We argue that an expressivist interpretation of "The Will to Believe" provides a fruitful way of understanding this widely-read but perplexing document. James approaches questions about our intellectual obligations from two quite different standpoints. He first defends an expressivist interpretation of judgments of intellectual obligation; they are "only expressions of our passional life". Only then does James argue against evidentialism, and both his criticisms of Clifford and his defense of a …Read more
  •  44
    Peirce's Supposed Psychologism
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35 (3). 1999.
  •  2
    Prospects for a Jamesian Expressivism
    William James Studies 10. 2013.
  •  72
    Weight of evidence continues to be a powerful metaphor within formal approaches to epistemology. But attempts to construe the metaphor in precise and useful ways have encountered formidable obstacles. This paper shows that two quite different understandings of evidential weight can be traced back to one 1878 article by C.S. Peirce. One conception, often associated with I.J. Good, measures the balance or net weight of evidence, while the other, generally associated with J.M. Keynes, measures the …Read more
  •  33
    Peirce on God, Reality and Personality
    In Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Springer. pp. 431--440. 2013.
  •  5
    Belief's Own Ethics (review)
    Informal Logic 23 (3): 293-297. 2003.
  •  44
    Putnam, Truth and Informal Logic
    with Daniel H. Cohen
    Philosophica 70 (1): 85-108. 2002.