Rutgers - New Brunswick
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
  •  2
    Should Kantians Be Consequentialists?
    In Jussi Suikkanen & John Cottingham (eds.), Essays on Derek Parfit's On What Matters, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
  •  51
    Elijah delmedigo
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  32
    Weighing Lives
    Philosophical Review 116 (4): 663-666. 2007.
  •  229
    Sleeping Beauty, Countable Additivity, and Rational Dilemmas
    Philosophical Review 119 (4): 411-447. 2010.
    Currently, the most popular views about how to update de se or self-locating beliefs entail the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem.2 Another widely held view is that an agent‘s credences should be countably additive.3 In what follows, I will argue that there is a deep tension between these two positions. For the assumptions that underlie the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem entail a more general principle, which I call the Generalized Thirder Principle, and there …Read more
  •  158
    Rethinking the Person-Affecting Principle
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 (4): 428-461. 1998.
  •  7
    Knowledge, Safety, and Meta‐Epistemic Belief
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (3): 550-554. 2018.
    This article raises problems both for the view that safe belief is necessary for knowledge and for the view that it is sufficient. Focusing on ‘meta‐epistemic beliefs,’ or beliefs about the epistemic status of one's own beliefs, it is shown that the necessity claim has counterintuitive implications and that the sufficiency claim implies a contradiction. It is then shown that meta‐epistemic beliefs raise similar problems for a wide range of accounts of knowledge, and hence that they provide a pow…Read more
  •  114
    Divided we fall
    Philosophical Perspectives 28 (1): 222-262. 2014.
  •  92
    All roads lead to violations of countable additivity
    Philosophical Studies 161 (3): 381-390. 2012.
    This paper defends the claim that there is a deep tension between the principle of countable additivity and the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem. The claim that such a tension exists has recently been challenged by Brian Weatherson, who has attempted to provide a countable additivity-friendly argument for the one-third solution. This attempt is shown to be unsuccessful. And it is argued that the failure of this attempt sheds light on the status of the principle of indifference t…Read more
  •  28
    A Qualified Defence of Expected Value Maximization
    Analysis 81 (4): 731-746. 2022.
  •  196
    Against postulating central systems in the mind
    Philosophy of Science 57 (2): 297-312. 1990.
    This paper is concerned with a recent argument of Jerry Fodor's to the effect that the frame problem in artificial intelligence is in principle insoluble. Fodor's argument is based on his contention that the mind is divided between encapsulated modular systems for information processing and 'central systems' for non-demonstrative inference. I argue that positing central systems is methodologically unsound, and in fact involves a muddle that bears a strong family resemblance to the basic error in…Read more
  •  69
    Knowledge Dethroned
    Analytic Philosophy 58 (4): 283-296. 2017.
  •  44
    John Broome, Weighing Lives (review)
    Philosophical Review 116 (4): 663-666. 2007.
  •  88
    Repeatable Artwork Sentences and Generics
    In Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art and Abstract Objects, Oxford University Press. pp. 125. 2013.
    We seem to talk about repeatable artworks, like symphonies, films, and novels, all the time. We say things like, "The Moonlight Sonata has three movements" and "Duck Soup makes me laugh". How are these sentences to be understood? We argue against the simple subject/predicate view, on which the subjects of the sentences refer to individuals and the sentences are true iff the referents of the subjects have the properties picked out by the predicates. We then consider two alternative responses that…Read more
  •  2019
    Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic Encroachment
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2): 259-288. 2014.
    This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a propo…Read more
  •  1345
    Reversibility or Disagreement
    Mind 122 (485): 43-84. 2013.
    The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an impor…Read more