•  435
    To resolve the lottery paradox, the “no-justification account” proposes that one is not justified in believing that one's lottery ticket is a loser. The no-justification account commits to what I call “the Harman-style skepticism”. In reply, proponents of the no-justification account typically downplay the Harman-style skepticism. In this paper, I argue that the no-justification reply to the Harman-style skepticism is untenable. Moreover, I argue that the no-justification account is epistemicall…Read more
  •  338
    Reconsidering the Alleged Cases of Knowledge from Falsehood
    Philosophical Investigations 44 (2): 151-162. 2020.
    A number of philosophers have recently proposed several alleged cases of “knowledge from falsehood,” i.e., cases of inferential knowledge epistemised by an inference with a false crucial premise. This paper examines such cases and argues against interpreting them as cases of knowledge from falsehood. Specifically, I argue that the inferences in play in such cases are in no position to epistemise their conclusions.
  •  294
    On the Problem of Deviant Realizations
    Theoria 87 (5): 1250-1269. 2021.
    Recent literature has seen a surging interest in the modal principle involved in the Gettier-style thought experiments. According to the necessitation thesis, the modal principle underlying the Gettier-style thought experiments takes the form of a principle of necessitation. It is widely agreed that the necessitation thesis is seriously threatened by the problem of deviant realizations. Based on the Gricean pragmatic theory of communication, I defend the necessitation thesis against the problem …Read more
  •  276
    Reasons As Evidence Against Ought-Nots
    Philosophical Papers 49 (3): 431-455. 2021.
    Reasons evidentialism is the view that normative reasons can be analyzed in terms of evidence about oughts (i.e., propositions concerning whether or not S ought to phi). In this paper, I defend a new reason-evidentialist account according to which normative reasons are evidence against propositions of the form S ought not to phi. The arguments for my view have two strands. First of all, I argue that my view can account for three difficulty cases, cases where (i) a fact is both a reason for S to …Read more
  •  226
    Knowledge and Pragmatic Factors
    NTU Philosophical Review 58 165-198. 2019.
    The stakes-shifting cases suggest that pragmatic factors such as stakes play an important role in determining our intuitive judgments of whether or not S knows that p. This seems to be in conflict with intellectualism, according to which pragmatic factors in general should not be taken into account, when considering whether or not S knows that p. This paper develops a theory of judgments of knowledge status that reconciles intellectualism with our intuitive judgments regarding the stakes-shiftin…Read more
  •  217
    On Two Recent Arguments against Intellectualism
    NCCU Philosophical Journal 43 35-68. 2020.
    Several authors have recently argued against intellectualism, the view that one’s epistemic position with respect to p depends exclusively on one’s truth-relevant factors with respect to p. In this paper, I first examine two prominent arguments for the anti-intellectualist position and find both of them wanting. More precisely, I argue that these arguments, by themselves, are underdetermined between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. I then manifest the intuitive plausibility of intellect…Read more
  •  197
    It is widely accepted that our initial intuitions regarding knowledge attributions in stakes-shifting cases (e.g., Cohen’s Airport) are best explained by standards variantism, the view that the standards for knowledge may vary with contexts in an epistemically interesting way. Against standards variantism, I argue that no prominent account of the standards for knowledge can explain our intuitions regarding stakes-shifting cases. I argue that the only way to preserve our initial intuitions regard…Read more
  •  195
    Some cases show that counterfactual conditionals (‘counterfactuals’ for short) are inherently ambiguous, equivocating between forward-tracking and backtracking counterfactu- als. Elsewhere, I have proposed a causal modeling semantics, which takes this phenomenon to be generated by two kinds of causal manipulations. (Lee 2015; Lee 2016) In an important paper (Hiddleston 2005), Eric Hiddleston offers a different causal modeling semantics, which he claims to be able to explain away the inherent amb…Read more
  •  189
    Knowledge Is (Still) the Norm of Assertion
    NCCU Philosophical Journal 37 33-74. 2017.
    In this paper, I defend the thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion. I first examine three prominent “counterexamples”: false assertion, selfless assertion, and assertion based on mere justified true belief. I argue that they all fail to square well with our ordinary intuitions. However, the contemporary debate over the norm of assertion depends heavily on the method of counterexamples, whose crux is to prompt our intuitions regarding the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of a certai…Read more
  •  80
    We construct a causal-modeling semantics for both indicative and counterfactual conditionals. As regards counterfactuals, we adopt the orthodox view that a counterfactual conditional is true in a causal model M just in case its consequent is true in the submodel M∗, generated by intervening in M, in which its antecedent is true. We supplement the orthodox semantics by introducing a new manipulation called extrapolation. We argue that an indicative conditional is true in a causal model M just in …Read more
  •  60
    On the Standards-Variantist Solution to Skepticism
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 173-198. 2017.
    The skeptical puzzle consists of three independently plausible yet jointly inconsistent claims: (A) S knows a certain ordinary proposition op; (B) S does not know the denial of a certain skeptical hypothesis sh; and (C) S knows that op only if S knows that not- sh. The variantist solution (to the skeptical puzzle) claims that (A) and not-(B) are true in the ordinary context, but false in the skeptical one. Epistemic contextualism has offered a standards-variantist solution, which is the most pro…Read more
  •  53
    Counterfactuals are inherently ambiguous in the sense that the same counterfactual may be true under one mode of counterfactualization but false under the other. Many have regarded the ambiguity of counterfactuals as consisting in the distinction between forward-tracking and backtracking counterfactuals. This is incorrect since the ambiguity persists even in cases not involving backtracking counterfactualization. In this paper, I argue that causal modeling semantics has the resources enough for …Read more
  •  28
    According to the no-miracle argument, scientific realism is the only view that does not render the predictive success of scientific theories miraculous. Against the no-miracle argument, selectionists argue that the predictive success of scientific theories is a product of them being subject to a selection process that weeds out predictively unsuccessful theories. Against selectionism, I argue that the selectionist explanation is not an alternative to the realist one. More precisely, I draw on a …Read more
  •  27
    Philosophers have long analyzed the truth-condition of counterfactual conditionals in terms of the possible-worlds semantics advanced by Lewis [13] and Stalnaker [23]. In this paper, I argue that, from the perspective of philosophical semantics, the causal modeling semantics proposed by Pearl [17] and others (e.g., Briggs [3]) is more plausible than the Lewis-Stalnaker possible-worlds semantics. I offer two reasons. First, the possible-worlds semantics has suffered from a specific type of counte…Read more
  •  18
    On the Distinctive Value of Knowledge
    In Syraya Chin-Mu Yang & Robert H. Myers (eds.), Donald Davidson on Action, Mind and Value, Springer. pp. 107-127. 2020.
    Intuitively, knowledge is distinctively valuable, i.e., knowledge is more valuable than any of its proper parts. Call it “the distinctive value thesis.” Recently, the distinctive value thesis has been forcefully challenged by three arguments, which I call “the swamping argument,” “the generalized swamping argument,” and “the ad hoc argument,” respectively. These three arguments rely on what I will call “epistemic veritism,” the view that the distinctive value of knowledge is parasitic on the val…Read more
  •  7
    Philosophical Logic: Current Trends in Asia: Proceedings of Awpl-Tplc 2016 (edited book)
    with Syraya Chin-Mu Yang and Hiroakira Ono
    Springer. 2017.
    This volume brings together a group of logic-minded philosophers and philosophically oriented logicians, mainly from Asia, to address a variety of logical and philosophical topics of current interest, offering a representative cross-section of the philosophical logic landscape in early 21st-century Asia. It surveys a variety of fields, including modal logic, epistemic logic, formal semantics, decidability and mereology. The book proposes new approaches and constructs more powerful frameworks, su…Read more