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84Navigating Skepticism: Cognitive Insights and Bayesian Rationality in Pinillos’ Why We DoubtInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism. forthcoming.Pinillos’ Why We Doubt presents a powerful critique of such global skeptical assertions as “I don’t know I am not a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)” by introducing a cognitive mechanism that is sensitive to error possibilities and a Bayesian rule of rationality that this mechanism is designed to approximate. This multifaceted argument offers a novel counter to global skepticism, contending that our basis for believing such premises is underminable. In this work, we engage with Pinillos’ adoption of Bayesia…Read more
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83Salient Alternatives in PerspectiveAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (4): 792-810. 2020.This paper empirically investigates how perspective bears on putative salient alternative effects on knowledge ascriptions. Some theoretical accounts predict salient alternative effects in both fir...
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166This is an appendix containing the stimulus materials for the experiments reported in the paper ‘Salient Alternatives in Perspective.’
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59Framing how we think about disagreementPhilosophical Studies 175 (10): 2539-2566. 2018.Disagreement is a hot topic right now in epistemology, where there is spirited debate between epistemologists who argue that we should be moved by the fact that we disagree and those who argue that we need not. Both sides to this debate often use what is commonly called “the method of cases,” designing hypothetical cases involving peer disagreement and using what we think about those cases as evidence that specific normative theories are true or false, and as reasons for believing as such. With …Read more
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3Knowledge, certainty, and skepticism: A cross-cultural studyIn Stephen Stich, Masaharu Mizumoto & Eric McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 187-214. 2017.We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositi…Read more
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1066Salience and Epistemic Egocentrism: An Empirical StudyIn James R. Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 97-117. 2014.Jennifer Nagel (2010) has recently proposed a fascinating account of the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge in conversational contexts in which unrealized possibilities of error have been mentioned. Her account appeals to epistemic egocentrism, or what is sometimes called the curse of knowledge, an egocentric bias to attribute our own mental states to other people (and sometimes our own future and past selves). Our aim in this paper is to investigate the empirical merits of Nagel’s hypoth…Read more
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88Counterfeit testimony: lies, trust, and the exchange of informationPhilosophical Studies 173 (11): 3101-3117. 2016.Most explanations of the rational authority of testimony provide little guidance when evaluating individual pieces of testimony. In practice, however, we are remarkably sensitive to the varying epistemic credentials of testimony: extending trust when it is deserved, and withholding it when it is not. A complete account of the epistemology of testimony should, then, have something to say about when it is that testimony is trustworthy. In the typical case, to judge someone trustworthy requires jud…Read more
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56Epistemic Free Riders and Reasons to Trust TestimonySocial Epistemology 29 (3): 270-279. 2015.Sinan Dogramaci has recently developed a view according to which the function of epistemic evaluations—like calling someone’s behavior “rational” or “irrational”—is to encourage or discourage the behavior evaluated. This view promises to explain the rational authority of testimony, by describing a social practice that promotes the coordination of epistemic procedures across a community. We argue that Dogramaci’s view is unsatisfactory, for two reasons. First, the social practice at its heart is …Read more
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University of New England (United States)Department of History and PhilosophyOther faculty (Postdoc, Visiting, etc)
PhilPapers Editorships
Foundations of Experimental Philosophy |