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11Sosa, Safety, Sensitivity, and Skeptical HypothesesIn John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa: And His Critics, Wiley-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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52Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of ScepticismPhilosophical Review 102 (4): 604. 1993.
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21Moore and Wittgenstein on CertaintyPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 238-241. 1994.
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14The 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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41Replies 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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51Précis 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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19Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 945-949. 1993.
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41Précis 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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42Replies 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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Solving the Skeptical ProblemIn Keith DeRose & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Skepticism: a contemporary reader, Oxford University Press. 1999.
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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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92Delusions 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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331“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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56Ought 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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49Assertion, 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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59The 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 (Festschrift for Nicholas Wolterstorff), 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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156Simple '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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55Contextualism and Knowledge AttributionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4): 913-929. 1992.
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128This is the text for a presentation I gave at the Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, D.C. on December 28, 1998. It was written very quickly, and I haven't had time to go back and fix it up, but I probably won't have time to fix it up any time soon, and several people have requested copies, so I don't see any harm in making it available. Please remember that it is a draft, and don't quote it without permission.
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81Relevant Alternatives and the Content of Knowledge AttributionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (1): 193-197. 1996.In “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” I argue that advocates of the “Relevant Alternatives” theory of knowledge fall into certain mistakes result if they tie the content of a knowledge attribution, on a given occasion of use, too tightly to what the range of relevant alternatives is on that occasion, and I sketch an alternative approach to the issues involved that avoids such mistakes. In “The Shifting Content of Knowledge Attributions,” Anthony Brueckner charges that my own account of …Read more
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46The key test cases for deciding between my brand of contextualism and Jennifer Nagel’s brand of invariantism are the third-person examples. As matters currently stand, first-person cases, like my original Bank cases (pp. 1-2), are pretty useless here. Nagel can agree that the speaker’s claim to “know” in Case A and his admission that he doesn’t “know” in Case B are both true; she just accepts a different account of why it is that both assertions can be, and are, true, according to which it is be…Read more
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176Virtually all monotheistic religions profess that there is a divine being who is extremely powerful, knowledgeable, and good. The evils of this world present various challenges for such religions. The starkest challenge is directed toward views that posit a being whose power, knowledge, and goodness are not just immense, but are as great as can be: an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being (for short, an oopg being). For it would seem that such a being would have the power, the knowled…Read more
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23The Problem with Subject‐Sensitive InvariantismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2): 346-350. 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, and so does not demand a contextualist treatment. According to SSI, the varying …Read more
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75How Can We Know that We're Not Brains in Vats?Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (S1): 121-148. 2000.This should be fairly close to the text of this paper as it appears in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000), Spindel Conference Supplement: 121-148.
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243The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 1Oxford University Press. 2009.Contextualism has been hotly debated in recent epistemology and philosophy of language. The Case for Contextualism is a state-of-the-art exposition and defense of the contextualist position, presenting and advancing the most powerful arguments in favor of the view and responding to the most pressing objections facing it.
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |