•  1288
    Knowledge in an uncertain world * by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath (review)
    Analysis 71 (1): 189-191. 2011.
    A review of Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath's "Knowledge in an Uncertain World."
  •  1182
    One prominent argument for pragmatic encroachment (PE) is that PE is entailed by a combination of a principle that states that knowledge warrants proper practical reasoning, and judgments that it is more difficult to reason well when the stakes go up. I argue here that this argument is unsuccessful. One problem is that empirical tests concerning knowledge judgments in high-stakes situations only sometimes exhibit the result predicted by PE. I argue here that those judgments that appear to suppor…Read more
  •  1111
    Levi's Challenge and Peirce's Theory/Practice Distinction
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48 (1): 51. 2012.
    Isaac Levi targets an implicit tension in C.S. Peirce’s epistemology, one that exists between the need to always be open-minded and aware of our propensity to make mistakes so that we do not “block the road of inquiry,” and the need to treat certain beliefs as infallible and to doubt only in a genuine way so that inquiry can proceed in the first place. Attempts at alleviating this tension have typically involved interpreting Peirce as ascribing different normative standards to different areas of…Read more
  •  1053
    Epistemically Pernicious Groups and the Groupstrapping Problem
    Social Epistemology 33 (1): 61-73. 2018.
    Recently, there has been growing concern that increased partisanship in news sources, as well as new ways in which people acquire information, has led to a proliferation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers: in the former, one tends to acquire information from a limited range of sources, ones that generally support the kinds of beliefs that one already has, while the latter function in the same way, but possess the additional characteristic that certain beliefs are actively reinforced. Here I …Read more
  •  996
    Testifying understanding
    Episteme 14 (1): 103-127. 2017.
    While it is widely acknowledged that knowledge can be acquired via testimony, it has been argued that understanding cannot. While there is no consensus about what the epistemic relationship of understanding consists in, I argue here that regardless of how understanding is conceived there are kinds of understanding that can be acquired through testimony: easy understanding and easy-s understanding. I address a number of aspects of understanding that might stand in the way of being able to acquire…Read more
  •  960
    Peirce on Assertion, Speech Acts, and Taking Responsibility
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52 (1): 21. 2016.
    C.S. Peirce held what is nowadays called a “commitment view” of assertion. According to this type of view, assertion is a kind of act that is determined by its “normative effects”: by asserting a proposition one undertakes certain commitments, typically to be able to provide reason to believe what one is asserting, or, in Peirce’s words, one “takes responsibility” for the truth of the proposition one asserts. Despite being an early adopter of the view, if Peirce’s commitment view of assertion is…Read more
  •  909
    Assertion, practical reasoning, and epistemic separabilism
    Philosophical Studies 172 (7): 1907-1927. 2015.
    I argue here for a view I call epistemic separabilism , which states that there are two different ways we can be evaluated epistemically when we assert a proposition or treat a proposition as a reason for acting: one in terms of whether we have adhered to or violated the relevant epistemic norm, and another in terms of how epistemically well-positioned we are towards the fact that we have either adhered to or violated said norm. ES has been appealed to most prominently in order to explain why ep…Read more
  •  867
    ABSTRACTConventional wisdom holds that there is no lucky knowledge: if it is a matter of luck, in some relevant sense, that one's belief that p is true, then one does not know that p. Here I will argue that there is similarly no lucky understanding, at least in the case of one type of luck, namely environmental luck. This argument has three parts. First, we need to determine how we evaluate whether one has understanding, which requires determining what I will call understanding's evaluative obje…Read more
  •  771
    There have been many discussions recently from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists about group polarization, with online and social media environments in particular receiving a lot of attention, both because of people's increasing reliance on such environments for receiving and exchanging information and because such environments often allow individuals to selectively interact with those who are like-minded. My goal here is to argue that the group epistemologist can facilitate …Read more
  •  734
    Rascals, Triflers, and Pragmatists: Developing a Peircean Account of Assertion
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (2): 1-22. 2017.
    While the topic of assertion has recently received a fresh wave of interest from Peirce scholars, to this point no systematic account of Peirce’s view of assertion has been attempted. We think that this is a lacuna that ought to be filled. Doing so will help make better sense of Peirce’s pragmatism; further, what is hidden amongst various fragments is a robust pragmatist theory of assertion with unique characteristics that may have significant contemporary value. Here we aim to uncover this theo…Read more
  •  555
    Christine Ladd-Franklin on the nature and unity of the proposition
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (2): 231-249. 2021.
    ABSTRACT Although in recent years Christine Ladd-Franklin has received recognition for her contributions to logic and psychology, her role in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, as well as her relationship with American pragmatism, has yet to be fully appreciated. My goal here is to attempt to better understand Ladd-Franklin’s place in the pragmatist tradition by drawing attention to her work on the nature and unity of the proposition. The question concerning the unity of th…Read more
  •  551
    Group understanding
    Synthese 198 (7): 6837-6858. 2019.
    While social epistemologists have recently begun addressing questions about whether groups can possess beliefs or knowledge, little has yet been said about whether groups can properly be said to possess understanding. Here I want to make some progress on this question by considering two possible accounts of group understanding, modeled on accounts of group belief and knowledge: a deflationary account, according to which a group understands just in case most or all of its members understand, and …Read more
  •  486
    Moral Understanding and Cooperative Testimony
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (1): 18-33. 2020.
    It is has been argued that there is a problem with moral testimony: testimony is deferential, and basing judgments and actions on deferentially acquired knowledge prevents them from having moral worth. What morality perhaps requires of us, then, is that we understand why a proposition is true, but this is something that cannot be acquired through testimony. I argue here that testimony can be both deferential as well as cooperative, and that one can acquire moral understanding through cooperative…Read more
  •  447
    Peirce on Intuition, Instinct, and Common Sense
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (2). 2017.
    In addition to being a founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce was a scientist and an empiricist. A core aspect of his thoroughgoing empiricism was a mindset that treats all attitudes as revisable. His fallibilism seems to require us to constantly seek out new information, and to not be content holding any beliefs uncritically. At the same time, Peirce often states that common sense has an important role to play in both scientific and vital inquiry, and that there cannot be any “…Read more
  •  438
    Trusting scientific experts in an online world
    Synthese 200 (1): 1-31. 2022.
    A perennial problem in social epistemology is the problem of expert testimony, specifically expert testimony regarding scientific issues: for example, while it is important for me to know information pertaining to anthropogenic climate change, vaccine safety, Covid-19, etc., I may lack the scientific background required to determine whether the information I come across is, in fact, true. Without being able to evaluate the science itself, then, I need to find trustworthy expert testifiers to lis…Read more
  •  370
    Pragmatic Encroachment and Political Ignorance
    In Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, Routledge. 2021.
    Take pragmatic encroachment to be the view that whether one knows that p is determined at least in part by the practical consequences surrounding the truth of p. This view represents a significant departure from the purist orthodoxy, which holds that only truth-relevant factors determine whether one knows. In this chapter I consider some consequences of accepting pragmatic encroachment when applied to problems of political knowledge and political ignorance: first, that there will be cases in whi…Read more
  •  196
  •  185
    Developing a Model of Groupstrapping: A Response to Baumgaertner and Nguyen
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (8): 32-39. 2019.
    In their responses to my article “Epistemically Pernicious Groups and the Groupstrapping Problem” (Boyd, 2018), Bert Baumgaertner (“Groupstrapping, Boostrapping, and Oops-strapping: A Reply to Boyd”) and C. Thi Nguyen (“Group-strapping, Bubble, or Echo Chamber?”) have raised interesting questions and opened lines of inquiry regarding my discussion of what I hope to be a way to help make sense of how members of groups can continue to hold beliefs that are greatly outweighed by countervailing evid…Read more
  •  86
    Testimonial Epistemic Rights in Online Spaces
    Philosophical Topics 50 (2): 105-126. 2022.
    According to many theories of testimony, acts of testimony confer certain epistemic rights upon recipients, e.g., the right for the recipient to complain or otherwise hold the testifier responsible should the content of that testimony turn out to be false, and the right to “pass the epistemic buck”, such that the recipient can redirect relevant challenges they may encounter back to the testifier. While these discussions do not explicitly exclude testimonial acts that occur online, they do not sp…Read more
  •  32
    Beyond politics: additional factors underlying skepticism of a COVID-19 vaccine
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1): 1-4. 2021.
    Even before it had been developed there had already been skepticism among the general public concerning a vaccine for COVID-19. What are the factors that drive this skepticism? While much has been said about how political differences are at play, in this article I draw attention to two additional factors that have not received as much attention: witnessing the fallibility of the scientific process play out in real time, and a perceived breakdown of the distinction between experts and non-experts…Read more
  • Epistemically Responsible Action
    Dissertation, . 2014.
    We are often, as agents, responsible for the things we do and say. This responsibility can come in a number of different forms: here I propose and defend a view of how we are epistemically responsible for our actions and assertions. In other normative areas, we can be responsible for our actions when those actions violate a norm (for example, we can be morally responsible when we violate some moral norm). I argue that we can similarly be epistemically responsible when we violate a norm of as…Read more