•  249
    Seeking safety in knowledge
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 97 186-214. 2023.
    Knowledge demands more than accuracy: epistemologists are broadly agreed that those who know are non-accidentally right, satisfying some kind of safety condition. However, it is hard to formulate any adequate account of safety, and harder still to explain exactly why we care about it. This paper approaches the problem by looking at a concrete human cognitive capacity, face recognition, to see where epistemic safety shows up in it. Drawing on new models in artificial intelligence, and making a ca…Read more
  •  9
    Knowledge and Reliability
    In Brian P. McLaughlin & Hilary Kornblith (eds.), Goldman and His Critics, Wiley. 2016.
    This chapter examines the best‐known intuitive counterexamples that have been pressed against Alvin Goldman's reliabilist theory of knowledge, and argues that something is wrong with them. It discusses the possibility that these intuitions might accord equally well with a more extreme externalist view, Williamson's “knowledge‐first” approach. Reliabilism has been examined largely in contrast to internalism, but its strengths and weaknesses arguably come into sharper focus if compare it with more…Read more
  •  5
    Many critics of Locke have worried that restricting knowledge to relationships among ideas would bar knowledge from extending to the outer reality which "corresponds to" these ideas. The question of how well Locke can answer such concerns leads us into a number of peculiar and intriguing passages on knowledge and the relationships between perception, reality, pain, and pleasure. This chapter examines what John Locke has to say about sensitive knowledge, to investigate several ways in which his r…Read more
  •  687
    Natural Curiosity
    In Artūrs Logins & Jacques-Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Curiosity is evident in humans of all sorts from early infancy, and it has also been said to appear in a wide range of other animals, including monkeys, birds, rats, and octopuses. The classical definition of curiosity as an intrinsic desire for knowledge may seem inapplicable to animal curiosity: one might wonder how and indeed whether a rat could have such a fancy desire. Even if rats must learn many things to survive, one might expect their learning must be driven by simpler incentives, such …Read more
  •  291
    Michael Bergmann’s important new book on scepticism is attractively systematic and thorough. He places familiar ideas under an exceptionally bright spotlight, e.
  •  1206
    Mindreading in conversation
    Cognition 210 (C): 104618. 2021.
    How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attribu…Read more
  •  662
    The distinctive character of knowledge
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences. forthcoming.
    Because knowledge entails true belief, it is can be hard to explain why a given action is naturally seen as driven by one of these states as opposed to the other. A simpler and more radical characterization of knowledge helps to solve this problem while also shedding some light on what is special about social learning.
  •  36
    Albert Casullo, A Priori Justification (review)
    Philosophical Review 115 (2): 251-255. 2006.
  •  772
    Losing knowledge by thinking about thinking
    In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, Oxford University Press. pp. 69-92. 2021.
    Defeat cases are often taken to show that even the most securely-based judgment can be rationally undermined by misleading evidence. Starting with some best-case scenario for perceptual knowledge, for example, it is possible to undermine the subject’s confidence in her sensory faculties until it becomes unreasonable for her to persist in her belief. Some have taken such cases to indicate that any basis for knowledge is rationally defeasible; others have argued that there can be unreasonable know…Read more
  •  1307
    Epistemic Territory
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 93 67-86. 2019.
  •  886
    The Psychological Dimension of the Lottery Paradox
    In Igor Douven (ed.), The Lottery Paradox, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
    The lottery paradox involves a set of judgments that are individually easy, when we think intuitively, but ultimately hard to reconcile with each other, when we think reflectively. Empirical work on the natural representation of probability shows that a range of interestingly different intuitive and reflective processes are deployed when we think about possible outcomes in different contexts. Understanding the shifts in our natural ways of thinking can reduce the sense that the lottery paradox…Read more
  •  816
    The Psychology of Epistemic Judgment
    In Sarah K. Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, 2nd Edition, . forthcoming.
    Human social intelligence includes a remarkable power to evaluate what people know and believe, and to assess the quality of well- or ill-formed beliefs. Epistemic evaluations emerge in a great variety of contexts, from moments of deliberate private reflection on tough theoretical questions, to casual social observations about what other people know and think. We seem to be able to draw systematic lines between knowledge and mere belief, to distinguish justified and unjustified beliefs, and to r…Read more
  •  623
    The Attitude of Knowledge (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3): 678-685. 2012.
    Contribution to a symposium on Keith DeRose's The Case for Contextualism, Volume 1.
  •  4793
    Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3): 495-527. 2012.
    Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and …Read more
  •  1038
    When and why does it matter whether we can give an explicit justification for what we believe? This paper examines these questions in the light of recent empirical work on the social functions served by our capacity to reason, in particular, Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning.
  •  11604
    Knowledge and Reliability
    In Hilary Kornblith & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Alvin Goldman and his Critics, Blackwell. pp. 237-256. 2016.
    Internalists have criticised reliabilism for overlooking the importance of the subject's point of view in the generation of knowledge. This paper argues that there is a troubling ambiguity in the intuitive examples that internalists have used to make their case, and on either way of resolving this ambiguity, reliabilism is untouched. However, the argument used to defend reliabilism against the internalist cases could also be used to defend a more radical form of externalism in epistemology.
  •  2324
    Epistemic intuitions
    Philosophy Compass 2 (6). 2007.
    We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone’s condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. L…Read more
  •  1056
    Sensitive Knowledge: Locke on Sensation and Skepticism
    In Matthew Stuart (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Locke, Blackwell. pp. 313-333. 2016.
    In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke insists that all knowledge consists in perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. However, he also insists that knowledge extends to outer reality, claiming that perception yields ‘sensitive knowledge’ of the existence of outer objects. Some scholars have argued that Locke did not really mean to restrict knowledge to perceptions of relations within the realm of ideas; others have argued that sensitive knowledge is not strictly speaki…Read more
  •  371
    Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of thinking about error
    Philosophical Quarterly 60 (239): 286-306. 2010.
    Epistemologists generally agree that the stringency of intuitive ascriptions of knowledge is increased when unrealized possibilities ofenor are mentioned. Non-sceptical invanantists (Williamson, Hawthorne) think it a mistake to yield in such cases to the temptation to be more stringent, but they do not deny that we feel it. They contend that the temptation is best explained as the product of a psychological bias known as the availability heuristic. I argue against the availability explanation, a…Read more
  •  192
    The Empiricist Conception of Experience
    Philosophy 75 (293). 2000.
    One might think that a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience would require us to give up any claim to nontrivial a priori knowledge. One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge -- if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as, say, a memory or daydream. This paper argues that, surprisingly enough, we can f…Read more
  •  6370
    Knowledge as a Mental State
    Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4 275-310. 2013.
    In the philosophical literature on mental states, the paradigmatic examples of mental states are beliefs, desires, intentions, and phenomenal states such as being in pain. The corresponding list in the psychological literature on mental state attribution includes one further member: the state of knowledge. This article examines the reasons why developmental, comparative and social psychologists have classified knowledge as a mental state, while most recent philosophers--with the notable exceptio…Read more
  •  929
    Empiricism
    In Sarkar Pfeifer (ed.), The Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2006.
    Having assigned experience this exclusive role in justification, empiricists then have a range of views concerning the character of experience, the semantics of our claims about unobservable entities, the nature of empirical confirmation, and the possibility of non-empirical warrant for some further class of claims, such as those accepted on the basis of linguistic or logical rules. Given the definitive principle of their position, empiricists can allow that we have knowledge independent of expe…Read more
  •  1267
    Mindreading in Gettier Cases and Skeptical Pressure Cases
    In Jessica Brown & Mikkel Gerken (eds.), Knowledge Ascriptions, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    To what extent should we trust our natural instincts about knowledge? The question has special urgency for epistemologists who want to draw evidential support for their theories from certain intuitive epistemic assessments while discounting others as misleading. This paper focuses on the viability of endorsing the legitimacy of Gettier intuitions while resisting the intuitive pull of skepticism – a combination of moves that most mainstream epistemologists find appealing. Awkwardly enough, the…Read more
  •  491
    Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    Human beings naturally desire knowledge. But what is knowledge? Is it the same as having an opinion? Highlighting the major developments in the theory of knowledge from Ancient Greece to the present day, Jennifer Nagel uses a number of simple everyday examples to explore the key themes and current debates of epistemology.
  •  1449
    The Psychological Basis of the Harman-Vogel Paradox
    Philosophers' Imprint 11 1-28. 2011.
    Harman’s lottery paradox, generalized by Vogel to a number of other cases, involves a curious pattern of intuitive knowledge ascriptions: certain propositions seem easier to know than various higher-probability propositions that are recognized to follow from them. For example, it seems easier to judge that someone knows his car is now on Avenue A, where he parked it an hour ago, than to judge that he knows that it is not the case that his car has been stolen and driven away in the last hour. Con…Read more
  •  1289
    Gendler on Alief (review)
    Analysis 72 (4): 774-788. 2012.
    Contribution to a book symposium on Tamar Gendler's Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology.