•  43
    Connaissance et enjeux pratiques
    RÉPHA, revue étudiante de philosophie analytique 1 13-19. 2009.
  •  193
    Knowledge and Prizes
    In Artūrs Logins & Jacques-Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality…Read more
  •  745
    What is Rational Belief?
    Noûs. forthcoming.
    A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's …Read more
  •  197
    Justification as ignorance and epistemic Geach principles
    Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 1-7. 2022.
    Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance shows how a strongly internalist conception of justification can be derived from a strongly externalist conception of knowledge, given an identification of justification with second-order ignorance and a set of structural principles concerning knowing and being in a position to know. Among these principles is an epistemic analogue of the Geach modal schema which states that one is always in a position to know that one doesn’t know p or in a position t…Read more
  •  297
    N-1 Guilty Men
    In The Future of Normativity, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    We discuss the difficulties that arise for standard reasons-first theories by looking at a case in which an agent who seems initially to know that n individuals are responsible for wrongdoing learns that n-1 are guilty. On the one hand, if this agent can retain their initial knowledge, it seems the agent should be able to believe in at least n-1 cases that the relevant subject is culpable, blame this agent for wrongdoing, and punish accordingly. Since we're not primarily interested in objective …Read more
  •  490
    Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false
    Philosophical Studies 179 (3): 801-827. 2021.
    Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue tha…Read more
  •  396
    Inexact Knowledge 2.0
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (8): 1-19. 2020.
    Many of our sources of knowledge only afford us knowledge that is inexact. When trying to see how tall something is, or to hear how far away something is, or to remember how long something lasted, we may come to know some facts about the approximate size, distance or duration of the thing in question but we don’t come to know exactly what its size, distance or duration is. In some such situations we also have some pointed knowledge of how inexact our knowledge is. That is, we can knowledgeably p…Read more
  •  1592
    Defeaters as Indicators of Ignorance
    In Mona Simion & Jessica Brown (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    In this paper, we propose a new theory of rationality defeat. We propose that defeaters are "indicators of ignorance", evidence that we’re not in a position to know some target proposition. When the evidence that we’re not in a position to know is sufficiently strong and the probability that we can know is too low, it is not rational to believe. We think that this account retains all the virtues of the more familiar approaches that characterise defeat in terms of its connection to reasons to bel…Read more
  •  1237
    Justification, knowledge, and normality
    Philosophical Studies 177 (6): 1593-1609. 2020.
    There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view faces two serious ch…Read more
  •  13
    Mathématiques
    with Jean-Marc Rohrbasser, Jean-Marie Nicolle, and Vincent Dolisi
    Revue de Synthèse 124 (1): 271-284. 2003.
  •  578
    Knowledge-First Evidentialism about Rationality
    In Fabian Dorsch & Julien Dutant (eds.), The New Evil Demon Problem, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Knowledge-first evidentialism combines the view that it is rational to believe what is supported by one's evidence with the view that one's evidence is what one knows. While there is much to be said for the view, it is widely perceived to fail in the face of cases of reasonable error—particularly extreme ones like new Evil Demon scenarios (Wedgwood, 2002). One reply has been to say that even in such cases what one knows supports the target rational belief (Lord, 201x, this volume). I spell out t…Read more
  •  362
    The value and normative role of knowledge
    Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel. 2014.
    Why does knowledge matter? Two answers have been influential in the recent literature. One is that it has value: knowledge is one of the goods. Another is that it plays a significant normative role: knowledge is the norm of action, belief, assertion, or the like. This paper discusses whether one can derive one of the claims from the other. That is, whether assuming the idea that knowledge has value — and some defensible general hypotheses about norms and values —, we could derive the claim that …Read more
  •  242
    Two Notions Of Safety
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2010.
    Timothy Williamson (1992, 224–5) and Ernest Sosa (1996) have ar- gued that knowledge requires one to be safe from error. Something is said to be safe from happening iff it does not happen at “close” worlds. I expand here on a puzzle noted by John Hawthorne (2004, 56n) that suggests the need for two notions of closeness. Counterfac- tual closeness is a matter of what could in fact have happened, given the specific circumstances at hand. The notion is involved in the semantics for counterfactuals …Read more
  •  13
  •  910
    While it is generally believed that justification is a fallible guide to the truth, there might be interesting exceptions to this general rule. In recent work on bridge-principles, an increasing number of authors have argued that truths about what a subject ought to do are truths we stand in some privileged epistemic relation to and that our justified normative beliefs are beliefs that will not lead us astray. If these bridge-principles hold, it suggests that justification might play an interest…Read more
  •  200
    The Case for Infallibilism
    In C. Penco, M. Vignolo, V. Ottonelli & C. Amoretti (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy, Genoa: University of Genoa. pp. 59-84. 2007.
    Infallibilism is the claim that knowledge requires that one satisfies some infallibility condition. I spell out three distinct such conditions: epistemic, evidential and modal infallibility. Epistemic infallibility turns out to be simply a consequence of epistemic closure, and is not infallibilist in any relevant sense. Evidential infallibilism i s unwarranted but it is not an satisfactory characterization of the infallibilist intuition. Modal infallibility, by contrast, captures the core infall…Read more
  •  53
    Introduction
    with Davide Fassio and Anne Https://Orcidorg Meylan
    Synthese 194 (5): 1427-1431. 2017.
  •  100
    The Value and Expected Value of Knowledge
    Dialogue 51 (1): 141-162. 2012.
    ABSTRACT: Meno’s Thesis—the idea that knowing something is better than merely having a true belief about it—is incompatible with the joint claims that believing the truth is the sole source of the value of knowledge and true belief and knowledge are equally successful in believing the truth. Recent answers to that so-called “swamping” problem reject either or. This paper rejects Meno’s Thesis instead, as relying on a confusion between expected value and value proper. The proposed solution relies…Read more
  •  1170
    How to be an Infallibilist
    Philosophical Issues 26 (1): 148-171. 2016.
    When spelled out properly infallibilism is a viable and even attractive view. Because it has long been summary dismissed, however, we need a guide on how to properly spell it out. The guide has to fulfil four tasks. The first two concern the nature of knowledge: to argue that infallible belief is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for knowledge. The other two concern the norm of belief: to argue that knowledge is necessary, and that it is sufficient, for justified certainty. With such a guide…Read more
  •  5076
    The legend of the justified true belief analysis
    Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1): 95-145. 2015.
    There is a traditional conception of knowledge but it is not the Justified True Belief analysis Gettier attacked. On the traditional view, knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. A mark of truth is a truth-entailing property: a property that only true beliefs can have. It is discernible if one can always tell that a belief has it, that is, a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes…Read more
  •  319
    In Defence of Swamping
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (4): 357-366. 2013.
    The Swamping Problem shows that two claims are incompatible: the claim that knowledge has more epistemic value than mere true belief and a strict variant of the claim that all epistemic value is truth or instrumental on truth. Most current solutions reject. Carter and Jarvis and Carter, Jarvis and Rubin object instead to a principle that underlies the problem. This paper argues that their objections fail and the problem stands. It also outlines a novel solution which rejects. By carefully distin…Read more
  •  83
    Delegation, subdivision, and modularity: How rich is conceptual structure?
    with Damián Justo, Benoît Hardy-Vallée, David Nicolas, and Benjamin Q. Sylvand
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (6): 683-684. 2003.
    Contra Jackendoff, we argue that within the parallel architecture framework, the generality of language does not require a rich conceptual structure. To show this, we put forward a delegation model of specialization. We find Jackendoff's alternative, the subdivision model, insufficiently supported. In particular, the computational consequences of his representational notion of modularity need to be clarified.
  •  626
    Williamson (2000a) has argued that posi- tive introspection is incompatible with in- exact knowledge. His argument relies on a margin-for-error requirement for inexact knowledge based on a intuitive safety prin- ciple for knowledge, but leads to the counter- intuitive conclusion that no possible creature could have both inexact knowledge and posi- tive introspection. Following Halpern (2004) I put forward an alternative margin-for-error requirement that preserves the safety require- ment while b…Read more
  •  7
    The New Evil Demon Problem (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  104
    This article is concerned with a statistical proposal due to James R. Beebe for how to solve the generality problem for process reliabilism. The proposal is highlighted by Alvin I. Goldman as an interesting candidate solution. However, Goldman raises the worry that the proposal may not always yield a determinate result. We address this worry by proving a dilemma: either the statistical approach does not yield a determinate result or it leads to trivialization, i.e. reliability collapses into tru…Read more
  •  19
    Qu’est-ce que la connaissance?
    Librairie Philosophique Vrin. 2010.
    Dans cet ouvrage, l'auteur discute d'abord un un ensemble d'idees de sens commun qui permettent de mieux cerner la notion de connaissance: nous savons beaucoup de choses, ce que nous savons ne vient pas toujours des sciences, tout ce que nous savons est vrai, la connaissance est le but de l'enquete, on ne doit croire et affirmer que ce que l'on sait, on ne doit agir que sur la base de ce que l'on sait, la connaissance a de la valeur. Il donne ensuite une vue d'ensemble des debats contemporains e…Read more