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7Sosa, Safety, Sensitivity, and Skeptical HypothesesIn John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa and His Critics, Blackwell. 2004.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?
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69Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of ScepticismPhilosophical Review 102 (4): 604. 1993.
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15Moore and Wittgenstein on CertaintyPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 238-241. 1994.
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12The appearance of ignoranceOxford 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.
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32Replies to CommentatorsInternational 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
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42Précis of The Appearance of Ignorance: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 2International 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
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15Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 945-949. 1993.
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34Replies to CommentatorsInternational 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
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32Précis of The Appearance of Ignorance: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 2International 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
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Solving the Skeptical ProblemIn Keith DeRose & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader, Oup Usa. 1995.
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Knowledge, Epistemic Possibility, and ScepticismDissertation, 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
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14The Appearance of Ignorance: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 2Oxford 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.
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91Delusions of Knowledge Concerning God's ExistenceIn Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Dani Rabinowitz (eds.), Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 288-301. 2018.
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2Questioning evidentialismIn Trent Dougherty (ed.), Evidentialism and its Discontents, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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22Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 238-241. 1998.
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236The problem with subject-sensitive invariantismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2). 2004.Thomas Blackson does not question that my argument in section 2 of “Assertion, Knowledge and Context” establishes the conclusion that the standards that comprise a truth-condition for “I know that P” vary with context, but does claim that this does not suffice to validly demonstrate the truth of contextualism, because this variance in standards can be handled by what we will here call Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI), and so does not demand a contextualist treatment. According to SSI, the va…Read more
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281Gradable adjectives: A defence of pluralismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (1): 141-160. 2008.This paper attacks the Implicit Reference Class Theory of gradable adjectives and proposes instead a ?pluralist? approach to the semantics of those terms, according to which they can be governed by a variety of different types of standards, one, but only one, of which is the group-indexed standards utilized by the Implicit Reference Class Theory
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24Can It Be That It Would Have Been Even Though It Might Not Have Been?Noûs 33 (s13): 385-413. 1999.
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327“Bamboozled by Our Own Words”: Semantic Blindness and Some Arguments Against ContextualismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2). 2006.The best grounds for accepting contextualism concerning knowledge attributions are to be found in how knowledge-attributing (and knowledge-denying) sentences are used in ordinary, nonphilosophical talk: What ordinary speakers will count as “knowledge” in some non-philosophical contexts they will deny is such in others. Contextualists typically appeal to pairs of cases that forcefully display the variability in the epistemic standards that govern ordinary usage: A “low standards” case (henceforth…Read more
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52Ought We to Follow Our Evidence?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 697-706. 2000.My focus will be on Richard Feldman’s claim that what we epistemically ought to believe is what fits our evidence. 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 …Read more
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198I should be clear at the outset about what I'll mean -- and won't mean -- by "universalism." As I'll use it, "universalism" refers to the position that eventually all human beings will be saved and will enjoy everlasting life with Christ. This is compatible with the view that God will punish many people after death, and many universalists accept that there will be divine retribution, although some may not. What universalism does commit one to is that such punishment won't last forever. Universal…Read more
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43Assertion, Knowledge, and ContextPhilosophical 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.
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180The Conditionals of DeliberationMind 119 (473): 1-42. 2010.Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) 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 * …Read more
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50Direct warrant realismIn Andrew Dole & Andrew Chignell (eds.), God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge University Press. 2005.Direct Realism often emerges as a solution to a certain type of problem. Hume and, especially, Berkeley, wielding some of the most powerful arguments of 18th Century philosophy, forcefully attacked the notion that there could be good inferences from the occurrence of one’s sensations to the existence of external, mind-independent bodies. Given the success of these attacks, and also given the assumption, made by Berkeley and arguably by Hume as well, that our knowledge of and rational belief in t…Read more
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151Simple 'might's, indicative possibilities and the open futurePhilosophical Quarterly 48 (190): 67-82. 1998.are ambiguous. In the mouth of someone who cannot remember whether it was Michael, or rather someone else, who was top scorer, can express the epistemic possibility that Michael led the league in scoring. But from someone who knows that Michael did not even play last season, but is wondering what would have happened if he had, means something quite different. Now where it has this quite different meaning, may still turn out to be the expression of some epistemic possibility. Perhaps where does not…Read more
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53Contextualism and Knowledge AttributionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 913-929. 1992.
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |