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.
  •  31
    Precis of The Case for Contextualism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3): 675-677. 2012.
  •  120
    Review of Knowledge and its limits
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (4): 573-577. 2002.
  •  23
    Laat me vanaf het begin duidelijk maken welke betekenis ik wel — en niet — aan de term “universalisme” zal hechten. Zoals ik de term gebruik, heeft “universalisme” betrekking op het standpunt dat alle menselijke wezens uiteindelijk gered zullen worden en bij Christus eeuwig leven zullen mogen genieten. Dit standpunt is verenigbaar met de opvatting dat God vele mensen na hun dood zal straffen. Vele universalisten nemen aan dat er van Goddelijke vergelding sprake zal zijn, hoewel enkelen daar well…Read more
  •  139
    A few years back, I participated in the Spindell Conference in Memphis, and gave a paper, “How Can We Know That We’re Not Brains in Vats?” (available on-line at: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/Spindell.htm). The bulk of that paper concerned responses to skepticism. I pursued an unusually radical criticism of the often-criticized “Putnam-style” responses to skepticism. To put it rather enigmatically, I argued that such responses don’t work even if they work! And I compared such responses with the…Read more
  •  44
    Plantinga construes the “atheologian” as claiming that “the conjunction of these two propositions is necessarily false, false in every possible world,” while Plantinga “aims to show that there is a possible world in which (1) and (2) are both true.”.
  •  392
    Contextualism, contrastivism, and X-Phi surveys
    Philosophical Studies 156 (1): 81-110. 2011.
    I will here sharply oppose all the phases of the story Schaffer & Knobe tell. In Part 1 we will look at the supposed empirical case against standard contextualism, and in Part 2 we will investigate Schaffer & Knobe’s supposed empirical case for the superiority of contrastivism over standard contextualism.
  •  228
    Single scoreboard semantics
    Philosophical Studies 119 (1-2): 1-21. 2004.
    What happens to the "conversational score" when speakers in a conversation push the score for a context-sensitive term in different directions? In epistemology, contextualists are often construed as holding that both the skeptic ("You don't know!") and her opponent ("Oh, yes I do!") speak truthfully when they debate. This assumes a "multiple scoreboards" version of contextualism. But contextualists themselves typically opt for "single scoreboard" views on which such apparently competing claims r…Read more
  •  781
    Assertion, knowledge, and context
    Philosophical Review 111 (2): 167-203. 2002.
    This paper uses the knowledge account of assertion (KAA) in defense of epistemological contextualism. Part 1 explores the main problem afflicting contextualism, what I call the "Generality Objection." Part 2 presents and defends both KAA and a powerful new positive argument that it provides for contextualism. Part 3 uses KAA to answer the Generality Objection, and also casts other shadows over the prospects for anti-contextualism.
  •  180
    Now you know it, now you don’t
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5 91-106. 2000.
    Resistance to contextualism comes in the form of many very different types of objections. My topic here is a certain group or family of related objections to contextualism that I call “Now you know it, now you don’t” objections. I responded to some such objections in my “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” a few years back. In what follows here, I will expand on that earlier response in various ways, and, in doing so, I will discuss some aspects of David Lewis’s recent paper, “Elusive Know…Read more
  •  181
    Insensitivity is back, baby!
    Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1): 161-187. 2010.
  •  20
    Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 945-949. 1993.
  •  83
    Work in progress. Will probably split into two papers, and then, perhaps, later, will be brought back together, along with other material, into something larger. (All this only if it works out OK!).
  •  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..