University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1990
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
  •  6
    This chapter contains section titled: Sensitivity Accounts — Direct and Indirect The Attack by Counterexample on Sensitivity Accounts — And Why SCA Seems on the Right Track Nonetheless Sosa's Safety Account Sosa's Account as a Sensitivity Account — and His Counterexamples Safety and the Problem of True/True Subjunctives Other Formulations of Safety Safety and Strength of Epistemic Position Contextualist Solutions to Skepticism Intuitive Complexity: Do We Know that We're Not Brains in Vats?
  •  12
    Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty
    Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 238-241. 1994.
  •  7
    The appearance of ignorance
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Keith DeRose presents, develops, and defends original solutions to two of the stickiest problems in epistemology: skeptical hypotheses and the lottery problem. He deploys a powerful version of contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards for the attribution of knowledge vary with context.
  •  35
    Précis of The Appearance of Ignorance: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 2
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (1): 1-3. 2020.
    The Appearance of Ignorance develops and champions contextualist solutions to the puzzles of skeptical hypotheses and of lotteries. It is argued that, at least by ordinary standards for knowledge, we do know that skeptical hypotheses are false, and that we’ve lost the lottery. Accounting for how it is that we know that skeptical hypotheses are false and why it seems that we don’t know that they’re false tells us a lot, both about what knowledge is and how knowledge attributions work. Along the w…Read more
  •  25
    Replies to Commentators
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (1): 68-104. 2020.
    Replies are given to comments, questions, and objections to The Appearance of Ignorance. The reply to Robin McKenna focuses mainly on his questions of whether, with the skeptical argument I’m focused on, a strong enough appearance of ignorance is generated to require an account of that appearance, and whether, to the extent that we do need to account for that appearance, we might do so without contextualism by adopting a solution proposed by Ernest Sosa. The reply to Michael Blome-Tillman focuse…Read more
  •  14
    Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 945-949. 1993.
  •  32
    Replies to Commentators
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (3): 284-320. 2019.
    Replies are given to comments, questions, and objections to The Appearance of Ignorance. The reply to Robin McKenna focuses mainly on his questions of whether, with the skeptical argument I’m focused on, a strong enough appearance of ignorance is generated to require an account of that appearance, and whether, to the extent that we do need to account for that appearance, we might do so without contextualism by adopting a solution proposed by Ernest Sosa. The reply to Michael Blome-Tillman focuse…Read more
  •  28
    Précis of The Appearance of Ignorance: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 2
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (3): 321-323. 2019.
    The Appearance of Ignorance develops and champions contextualist solutions to the puzzles of skeptical hypotheses and of lotteries. It is argued that, at least by ordinary standards for knowledge, we do know that skeptical hypotheses are false, and that we’ve lost the lottery. Accounting for how it is that we know that skeptical hypotheses are false and why it seems that we don’t know that they’re false tells us a lot, both about what knowledge is and how knowledge attributions work. Along the w…Read more
  • Solving the Skeptical Problem
    In Keith DeRose & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader, Oup Usa. 1995.
  •  3
    Knowledge and its Limits
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (4): 573-577. 2002.
  • Knowledge, Epistemic Possibility, and Scepticism
    Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 1990.
    In Chapter 1, I defend contextualism--the view that the standards for knowing that a subject must live up to in order for sentences attributing knowledge to her to be true vary according to various features of the contexts in which these sentences are uttered. ;In Chapter 2, I propose and defend a hypothesis as to the truth conditions of epistemic modal statements; I argue that if it is epistemically possible from a subject's point of view that not-p, then she does not know that p; and, since, a…Read more
  •  9
    Keith DeRose presents, develops, and defends original solutions to two of the stickiest problems in epistemology: skeptical hypotheses and the lottery problem. He deploys a powerful version of contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards for the attribution of knowledge vary with context.
  •  571
    Contextualism: An explanation and defense
    In John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 187--205. 1998.
    In epistemology, “contextualism” denotes a wide variety of more-or-less closely related positions according to which the issues of knowledge or justification are somehow relative to context. I will proceed by first explicating the position I call contextualism, and distinguishing that position from some closely related positions in epistemology, some of which sometimes also go by the name of “contextualism”. I’ll then present and answer what seems to many the most pressing of the objections to c…Read more
  •  140
    exactly as the essay appears in Skepticism. It's pretty close, though. In the version that appears in the book, page references to other essays in Skepticism refer to page numbers in the book, while below page references are, for the most part, to the original place of publication of the essays referred to. Also, I below make one correction (in red) of a factual error..
  •  107
    Plantinga, Presumption, Possibility, and the Problem of Evil
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4). 1991.
    My topic is Alvin Plantinga’s ’solution’ to one of the many forms that the problem of evil takes: the modal abstract form. This form of the problem is abstract in that it does not deal with the amounts or kinds of evil which exist, but only with the fact that there is some evil or other. And it is modal in that it concerns the compossibility of the following propositions, not any evidential relation between them: God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly goodand There is evil in the world.
  •  109
    A critical examination of Alvin Plantinga's attempted defense against the dreaded "Great Pumpkin Objection" to his theistic-belief-as-properly-basic religious epistemology.
  •  111
    Lewis on ‘Might’ and ‘Would’ Counterfactual Conditionals
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (3): 413-418. 1994.
    Letting denote ‘would’ counterfactual conditionals like If I had looked in my pocket, I would have found a penny and letting denote ‘might’ counterfactual conditionals like If I had looked in my pocket, I might have found a penny,David Lewis’s thesis regarding the connection between these two types of conditionals is that.
  •  312
    I present the features of the ordinary use of 'knows' that make a compelling case for the contextualist account of that verb, and I outline and defend the methodology that takes us from the data to a contextualist conclusion. Along the way, the superiority of contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism is defended, and, in the final section, I answer some objections to contextualism.
  •  460
    Epistemic possibilities
    Philosophical Review 100 (4): 581-605. 1991.
  •  120
    Can it be that it would have been even though it might not have been?
    Philosophical Perspectives 13 385-413. 1999.
    The score was tied in the bottom of the ninth, I was on third base, and there was only one out when Bubba hit a towering fly ball to deep left-center. Although I’m no speed-demon, the ball was hammered so far that I easily could have scored the winning run if I had tagged up. But I didn’t. I got caught up in the excitement and stupidly played it half way, standing between third and home until I saw the center fielder make his spectacular catch, after which I had to return sheepishly to third. Th…Read more
  •  262
    Fortunately for those of us who work on the topic, Ernie Sosa has devoted much of his (seemingly inexhaustible) intellectual energy to the problem of philosophical skepticism. And to great effect. With the three exceptions of Peter Unger, whose 1975 Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism is a grossly under-appreciated classic of epistemology; Timothy Williamson, whose 2000 Knowledge and its Limits is, I hope, on its way to being a less underappreciated classic; and Thomas Reid, I have benefitted more …Read more
  •  29
    ``Assertion, Knowledge, and Context"
    Philosophical Review 111 (2): 167-203. 2002.
    This paper brings together two positions that for the most part have been developed and defended independently of one another: contextualism about knowledge attributions and the knowledge account of assertion.
  •  7
    Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 238-241. 1998.
  •  265
    Ought we to follow our evidence?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 697-706. 2000.
    fits our evidence.[1] I will propose some potential counter-examples to test this evidentialist thesis. My main intention in presenting the “counter-examples” is to better understand Feldman’s evidentialism, and evidentialism in general. How are we to understand what our evidence is, how it works, and how are we to understand the phrase “epistemically ought to believe” such that evidentialism might make sense as a plausible thesis in light of the examples? Of course, we may decide that there’s n…Read more
  •  127
    Though he’s perhaps best known for his work on vagueness, Timothy Williamson also produced a series of outstanding papers in epistemology in the late 1980's and the 1990's. Knowledge and its Limits brings this work together. The result is, in my opinion, the best book in epistemology to come out since 1975.
  •  687
    Knowledge, assertion and lotteries
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4). 1996.
    In some lottery situations, the probability that your ticket's a loser can get very close to 1. Suppose, for instance, that yours is one of 20 million tickets, only one of which is a winner. Still, it seems that (1) You don't know yours is a loser and (2) You're in no position to flat-out assert that your ticket is a loser. "It's probably a loser," "It's all but certain that it's a loser," or even, "It's quite certain that it's a loser" seem quite alright to say, but, it seems, you're in no posi…Read more
  •  44
    ``The Conditionals of Deliberation"
    Mind 119 (473): 1-42. 2010.
    Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between ‘straightforward’ future-directed conditionals like ‘If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby’ and ‘ “were”ed-u…Read more
  •  35
    Deterrent threats: What can matter (review)
    Philosophical Studies 67 (3). 1992.