•  220
    Factivism Defended: A Reply to Howard
    Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
  • Are perceptual reasons the objects of perception?
    In Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Søren Overgaard (eds.), In the light of experience: new essays on perception and reasons, Oxford University Press. 2018.
  •  445
    The matter of motivating reasons
    Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1563-1589. 2021.
    It is now standard in the literature on reasons and rationality to distinguish normative reasons from motivating reasons. Two issues have dominated philosophical theorising concerning the latter: (i) whether we should think of them as certain (non-factive) psychological states of the agent – the dispute over Psychologism; and (ii) whether we should say that the agent can Φ for the reason that p only if p – the dispute over Factivism. This paper first introduces a puzzle: these disputes look very…Read more
  •  562
    Moral Worth and Knowing How to Respond to Reasons
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (2): 385-405. 2021.
    It’s one thing to do the right thing. It’s another to be creditable for doing the right thing. Being creditable for doing the right thing requires that one does the right thing out of a morally laudable motive and that there is a non-accidental fit between those two elements. This paper argues that the two main views of morally creditable action – the Right Making Features View and the Rightness Itself View – fail to capture that non-accidentality constraint: the first because it morally credits…Read more
  •  255
    Determined by Reasons: A Competence Account of Acting for a Normative Reason (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279): 429-432. 2020.
    Determined by Reasons: A Competence Account of Acting for a Normative Reason. By Mantel Susanne..)
  •  290
    Review of Susanne Mantel's 'Determined by Reasons' (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
    The primary focus of Susanne Mantel’s excellent 'Determined by Reasons' is to develop a distinctive abilities-based account of acting in response to normative reasons, one which is clearly modelled on extant ability-theoretic accounts of knowledge. This review sketches Mantel’s account and raises a worry: that the account fails to characterise the sort of abilities constitutively involved in responding to reasons because it allows that agents can act for the reason that p even if their belief th…Read more
  •  492
    The Basis of Debasing Scepticism
    Erkenntnis 86 (4): 813-833. 2021.
    This paper purports to provide a fresh cashing out of Debasing Scepticism: the type of Scepticism put on the map in a recent article by Jonathan Schaffer, with a view to demonstrating that the Debasing Sceptic’s argument is not so easily dismissed as many of Schaffer’s commentators have thought. After defending the very possibility of the Debasing Sceptic’s favoured sceptical scenario, I lay out a framework for thinking of the agent’s power to hold their beliefs in the light of reasons which I a…Read more
  •  463
    Knowledgeably Responding to Reasons
    Erkenntnis 85 (3): 673-692. 2020.
    Jennifer Hornsby has defended the Reasons-Knowledge Thesis : the claim that \-ing because p requires knowing that p, where the ‘because’ at issue is a rationalising ‘because’. She defends by appeal to the thought that it provides the best explanation of why the subject in a certain sort of Gettier case fails to be in a position to \ because p. Dustin Locke and, separately, Nick Hughes, present some modified barn-façade cases which seem to constitute counterexamples to and undermine Hornsby’s way…Read more
  •  449
    The Formulation of Disjunctivism About φ-ing for a Reason
    Philosophical Quarterly 69 (275): 235-257. 2018.
    We can contrast rationalising explanations of the form S φs because p with those of the form S φs because S believes that p. According the Common Kind View, the two sorts of explanation are the same. The Disjunctive View denies this. This paper sets out to elucidate the sense in which the Common Kind Theorist asserts, but the Disjunctivist denies, that the two explanations are the same. I suggest that, in the light of the distinction between kinds of explanation and particular explanations, the …Read more
  •  2
    Are Perceptual Reasons the Objects of Perception?
    In Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Morten Overgaard (eds.), In the Light of Experience: New Essays on Perception and Reasons, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    This paper begins with a Davidsonian puzzle in the epistemology of perception and introduces two solutions to that puzzle: the Truth-Maker View (TMV) and the Content Model. The paper goes on to elaborate (TMV), elements of which can be found in the work of Kalderon (2011) and Brewer (2011). The central tenant of (TMV) is the claim that one's reason for one's perceptual belief should, in all cases, be identified with some item one perceives which makes the proposition believed true. I defend an a…Read more
  •  537
    Is believing for a normative reason a composite condition?
    Synthese 196 (9): 3889-3910. 2019.
    Here is a surprisingly neglected question in contemporary epistemology: what is it for an agent to believe that p in response to a normative reason for them to believe that p? On one style of answer, believing for the normative reason that q factors into believing that p in the light of the apparent reason that q, where one can be in that kind of state even if q is false, in conjunction with further independent conditions such as q’s being a normative reason to believe that p. The primary object…Read more
  •  477
    Reflective epistemological disjunctivism
    Episteme 13 (1): 111-132. 2016.
    It is now common to distinguish Metaphysical from Epistemological Disjunctivism. It is equally common to suggest that it is at least not obvious that the latter requires a commitment to the former: at the very least, a suitable bridge principle will need to be identified which takes one from the latter to the former. This paper identifies a plausible-looking bridge principle that takes one from the version of Epistemological Disjunctivism defended by John McDowell and Duncan Pritchard, which I l…Read more
  •  808
    Modest nonconceptualism: Epistemology, phenomenology, and content (review)
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (1-2): 205-208. 2017.
    This review provides an overview of Eva Schmidt's impressively thorough and detailed book on the Conceptualist/Nonconceptualist debate in the philosophy of perception, and briefly sketches two objections to Schmidt. First, I suggest that a certain dilemma for the Conceptualist Schmidt raises in the context of her discussion of the fineness of grain argument is surmountable. Second, I question whether Schmidt's response to the epistemological motivation for Conceptualism is sound.