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40External world scepticism and self scepticismPhilosophical Studies 180 (2): 591-607. 2023.A general trend in recent philosophical and empirical work aims to undermine various traditional claims regarding the distinctive nature of self-knowledge. So far, however, this work has not seriously threatened the Cartesian claim that (at least some) self-knowledge is immune to the sort of sceptical problem that seems to afflict our knowledge of the external world. In this paper I carry this trend further by arguing that the Cartesian claim is false. This is done by showing that a familiar sce…Read more
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19Putnam’s Proof RevisitedIn Sanjit Chakraborty & James Ferguson Conant (eds.), Engaging Putnam, De Gruyter. pp. 63-88. 2022.
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54Merely superficially contingent a priori knowledge and the McKinsey paradoxSynthese 200 (1): 1-15. 2022.The conclusion of the McKinsey paradox is that certain contingent claims about the external world are knowable a priori. Almost all of the literature on the paradox assumes that this conclusion is unacceptable, and focuses on finding a way of avoiding it. However, there is no consensus that any of these responses work. In this paper I take a different approach, arguing that the conclusion is acceptable. First, I develop our understanding of what Evans calls merely superficially contingent a prio…Read more
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64Semantic self-knowledge and the vat argumentPhilosophical Studies 176 (9): 2289-2306. 2019.Putnam’s vat argument is intended to show that I am not a permanently envatted brain. The argument holds promise as a response to vat scepticism, which depends on the claim that I do not know that I am not a permanently envatted brain. However, there is a widespread idea that the vat argument cannot fulfil this promise, because to employ the argument as a response to vat scepticism I would have to make assumptions about the content of the premises and/or conclusion of the argument that beg the q…Read more
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50Radical interpretation, scepticism, and the possibility of shared errorSynthese 196 (8): 3355-3368. 2019.Davidson argues that his version of interpretivism entails that sceptical scenarios are impossible, thus offering a response to any sceptical argument that depends upon the possibility of sceptical scenarios. It has been objected that Davidson’s interpretivism does not entail the impossibility of sceptical scenarios due to the possibility that interpreter and speaker are in a shared state of massive error, and so this response to scepticism fails. In this paper I show that the objection from the…Read more
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110Closure Scepticism and The Vat ArgumentMind 127 (507): 667-690. 2017.If it works, I can use Putnam’s vat argument to show that I have not always been a brain-in-a-vat. It is widely thought that the vat argument is of no use against closure scepticism – that is, scepticism motivated by arguments that appeal to a closure principle. This is because, even if I can use the vat argument to show that I have not always been a BIV, I cannot use it to show that I was not recently envatted, and it is thought that the claim that I am not justified in thinking that I was not …Read more
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62A response to external world scepticismDissertation, St Andrews and Stirling Joint Program in Philosophy. 2014.In this thesis I give a response to external world scepticism. I first argue that scepticism arises when we accept that it is an empirical question whether I am in a sceptical scenario, that is, a scenario in which my beliefs are coherent, and yet my empirical beliefs are false. The idea that it is an empirical question whether I am in a sceptical scenario gets its plausibility from the realist claim that our empirical beliefs have an objective subject matter. I then attempt to give a response t…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |