•  8
    Belief, Knowledge and Practical Matters
    Zhejiang University Press. 2024.
    This book takes purism about knowledge as the default position and defends it from the challenges of pragmatic encroachment. The book is divided into two parts, a negative and a positive one. The negative part critically examines existing purist strategies in response to pragmatic encroachment. The positive part provides a new theory of how practical factors can systematically influence our confidence and explores some implications of such influence. In particular, it provides a new purist expla…Read more
  •  206
    Varieties of Pragmatic Encroachment
    In Kurt Sylvan, Matthias Steup, Ernest Sosa & Jonathan Dancy (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
    According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards p has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the agent. Pragmatic encroachment comes in many varieties. This survey article provides an overview of different kinds of pragmatic encroachment. It focuses on three dimensions under which kinds of …Read more
  •  233
    Cross-linguistic Studies in Epistemology
    In Kurt Sylvan, Matthias Steup, Ernest Sosa & Jonathan Dancy (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
    Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of cross-linguistic data discussed by con…Read more
  •  327
    According to evidentialist views, credence in a proposition p should be proportional to the degree of evidential support that one has in favor of p. However, empirical evidence suggests that our credences are systematically sensitive to practical factors. In this article, I provide a cost–benefit analysis of credences' practical sensitivity. The upshot of this analysis is that credences sensitive to practical factors fare better than practically insensitive ones along several dimensions. All thi…Read more
  •  637
    Do we really need a knowledge-based decision theory?
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 7031-7059. 2021.
    The paper investigates what type of motivation can be given for adopting a knowledge-based decision theory. KBDT seems to have several advantages over competing theories of rationality. It is commonly argued that this theory would naturally fit with the intuitive idea that being rational is doing what we take to be best given what we know, an idea often supported by appeal to ordinary folk appraisals. Moreover, KBDT seems to strike a perfect balance between the problematic extremes of subjectivi…Read more
  •  559
    Credal sensitivism: threshold vs. credence-one
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    According to an increasingly popular view in epistemology and philosophy of mind, beliefs are sensitive to contextual factors such as practical factors and salient error possibilities. A prominent version of this view, called credal sensitivism, holds that the context-sensitivity of belief is due to the context-sensitivity of degrees of belief or credence. Credal sensitivism comes in two variants: while credence-one sensitivism (COS) holds that maximal confidence (credence one) is necessary for …Read more
  •  198
    Default Assumption, Hinge Commitment and the Closure Principle
    Journal of Dialectics of Nature 42 (5): 17-22. 2020.
    This paper focuses on a potential problem with Sosa’s theory of default assumption, viz., the alleged incompatibility of this theory with the closure principle. Given the similarity between the notion of default assumption and Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge commitment, I suggest that two influential hinge epistemologies including Wright’s entitlement theory and Pritchard’s non-belief theory provide resources for possible solutions to the problem. I argue that default assumption should be classif…Read more
  •  754
    Self-deception is typically considered epistemically irrational, for it involves holding certain doxastic attitudes against strong counter-evidence. Pragmatic encroachment about epistemic rationality says that whether it is epistemically rational to believe, withhold belief or disbelieve something can depend on perceived practical factors of one’s situation. In this paper I argue that some cases of self-deception satisfy what pragmatic encroachment considers sufficient conditions for epistemic r…Read more
  •  1071
    Belief, Credence and Statistical Evidence
    Theoria 86 (4): 500-527. 2020.
    According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the target proposition is given such evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to statistical evidence as rational credence. The a…Read more
  •  57
    Belief, knowledge and action
    Dissertation, University of Edinburgh. 2016.
    In this thesis, I explore a number of epistemological issues concerning the relations between knowledge, belief and practical matters. In particular, I defend a view, which I call credal pragmatism. This view is compatible with moderate invariantism, a view that takes knowledge to depend exclusively on truth-relevant factors and to require an invariant epistemic standard of knowledge that can be quite easily met. The thesis includes a negative and a positive part. In the negative part I do two t…Read more
  •  687
    Credal pragmatism
    Philosophical Studies 176 (6): 1595-1617. 2019.
    According to doxastic pragmatism, certain perceived practical factors, such as high stakes and urgency, have systematic effects on normal subjects’ outright beliefs. Upholders of doxastic pragmatism have so far endorsed a particular version of this view, which we may call threshold pragmatism. This view holds that the sensitivity of belief to the relevant practical factors is due to a corresponding sensitivity of the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief. According to…Read more
  •  172
  •  705
    Rational Action without Knowledge (and vice versa)
    Synthese 194 (6): 1901-1917. 2017.
    It has been argued recently that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. This norm can be formulated as a bi-conditional: it is appropriate to treat p as a reason for acting if and only if you know that p. Other proposals replace knowledge with warranted or justified belief. This paper gives counter-examples of both directions of any such bi-conditional. To the left-to-right direction: scientists can appropriately treat as reasons for action propositions of a theory they believe to be fals…Read more
  •  27
    Correction to: Credal pragmatism
    Philosophical Studies 176 (6): 1619-1619. 2019.
    In the original publication of the article, Table 1 was incorrectly published. The corrected table is give below.
  •  723
    Does Contextualism Hinge on A Methodological Dispute?
    with Mikkel Gerken and Stephen B. Ryan
    In Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. pp. 81-93. 2017.
    In this entry, we provide an overview of some of the methodological debates surrounding contextualism and consider whether they are, in effect, based on an underlying methodological dispute. We consider three modes of motivation of epistemic contextualism including i) the method of cases, ii) the appeal to linguistic analogies and iii) the appeal to conceptual analogies and functional roles. We also consider the methodological debates about contextualism arising from experimental philosophy. We …Read more
  •  516
    One challenge for moderate invariantists is to explain why we tend to deny knowledge to subjects in high stakes when the target propositions seem to be inappropriate premises for practical reasoning. According to an account suggested by Williamson, our intuitive judgments are erroneous due to an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between first-order and higher-order knowledge: the high-stakes subject lacks the latter but possesses the former. In this paper, I provide three objections…Read more