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2979Phenomenal ConservatismAnalysis 75 (2): 296-309. 2015.I review recent work on Phenomenal Conservatism, the position introduced by Michael Huemer according to which if it seems that P to a subject S, in the absence of defeaters S has thereby some degree of justification for believing P.
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2003Goldman and Siegel on the epistemic aims of educationJournal of Philosophy of Education 54 (3): 492-506. 2020.Philosophers have claimed that education aims at fostering disparate epistemic goals. In this paper we focus on an important segment of this debate involving conversation between Alvin Goldman and Harvey Siegel. Goldman claims that education is essentially aimed at producing true beliefs. Siegel contends that education is essentially aimed at fostering both true beliefs and, independently, critical thinking and rational belief. Although we find Siegel’s position intuitively more plausible than G…Read more
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1825Skepticism and Epistemic Closure: Two Bayesian AccountsInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (1): 1-25. 2017.This paper considers two novel Bayesian responses to a well-known skeptical paradox. The paradox consists of three intuitions: first, given appropriate sense experience, we have justification for accepting the relevant proposition about the external world; second, we have justification for expanding the body of accepted propositions through known entailment; third, we do not have justification for accepting that we are not disembodied souls in an immaterial world deceived by an evil demon. The f…Read more
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1674In defence of dogmatismPhilosophical Studies 172 (1): 261-282. 2015.According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn’t rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how eviden…Read more
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1649Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Williamson on Knowledge, Oxford: OUP (2009) (review)Mind 121 (484): 1069-1073. 2012.
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1293Defeaters in current epistemology: introduction to the special issueSynthese 195 (7): 2845-2854. 2018.
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1281Inferential seemings and the problem of reflective awarenessCanadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (2): 253-271. 2019.Phenomenal conservatism (PC) is the internalist view that non-inferential justification rests on appearances. PC’s advocates have recently argued that seemings are also required to explain inferential justification. The most general and developed view to this effect is Huemer (2016)’s theory of inferential seemings (ToIS). Moretti (2018) has shown that PC is affected by the problem of reflective awareness, which makes PC open to sceptical challenges. In this paper I argue that ToIS is afflicted …Read more
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1274Evidence of expert's evidence is evidenceEpisteme 13 (2): 208-218. 2016.John Hardwig has championed the thesis (NE) that evidence that an expert EXP has evidence for a proposition P, constituted by EXP’s testimony that P, is not evidence for P itself, where evidence for P is generally characterized as anything that counts towards establishing the truth of P. In this paper, I first show that (NE) yields tensions within Hardwig’s overall view of epistemic reliance on experts and makes it imply unpalatable consequences. Then, I use Shogenji-Roche’s theorem of transitiv…Read more
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1273Chris Tucker (ed.), Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism, NY: OUP (2013) (review)Philosophical Quarterly 64 (255): 364-366. 2014.
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1183The dogmatist, Moore's proof and transmission failureAnalysis 74 (3): 382-389. 2014.According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, if you have an experience as if P, you acquire immediate prima facie justification for believing P. Pryor contends that dogmatism validates Moore’s infamous proof of a material world. Against Pryor, I argue that if dogmatism is true, Moore’s proof turns out to be non-transmissive of justification according to one of the senses of non-transmissivity defined by Crispin Wright. This type of non-transmissivity doesn’t deprive dogmatism of its apparent antisceptica…Read more
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1142Wright, Okasha and Chandler on transmission failureSynthese 184 (3): 217-234. 2012.Crispin Wright has given an explanation of how a first time warrant can fall short of transmitting across a known entailment. Formal epistemologists have struggled to turn Wright’s informal explanation into cogent Bayesian reasoning. In this paper, I analyse two Bayesian models of Wright’s account respectively proposed by Samir Okasha and Jake Chandler. I argue that both formalizations are unsatisfactory for different reasons, and I lay down a third Bayesian model that appears to me to capture t…Read more
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1106In this chapter I introduce and analyse the tenets of phenomenal conservatism, and discuss the problem of the nature of appearances. After that, I review the asserted epistemic merits phenomenal conservatism and the principal arguments adduced in support of it. Finally, I survey objections to phenomenal conservatism and responses by its advocates. Some of these objections will be scrutinised and appraised in the next chapters.
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1105When warrant transmits and when it doesn’t: towards a general frameworkSynthese 190 (13): 2481-2503. 2013.In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright’s analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that W…Read more
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1056Problems for Wright's entitlement theoryIn Luca Moretti & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Non-Evidentialist Epistemology, Brill. pp. 121-138. 2021.Crispin Wright’s entitlement theory holds that we have non-evidential justification for accepting propositions of a general type––which Wright calls “cornerstones”––that enables us to acquire justification for believing other propositions––those that we take to be true on the grounds of ordinary evidence. Entitlement theory is meant by Wright to deliver a forceful response to the sceptic who argues that we cannot justify ordinary beliefs. I initially focus on strategic entitlement, which is one …Read more
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1026Entitlement, epistemic risk and scepticismEpisteme 18 (4): 576-586. 2021.Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn’t elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright’s contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don’t remove…Read more
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965Phenomenal conservatism and the problem of reflective awarenessAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3): 267-280. 2018.This paper criticizes phenomenal conservatism––the influential view according to which a subject S’s seeming that P provides S with defeasible justification for believing P. I argue that phenomenal conservatism, if true at all, has a significant limitation: seeming-based justification is elusive because S can easily lose it by just reflecting on her seemings and speculating about their causes––I call this the problem of reflective awareness. Because of this limitation, phenomenal conservatism do…Read more
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945Antirealism and the Conditional Fallacy: The Semantic ApproachJournal of Philosophical Logic 43 (4): 761-783. 2014.The expression conditional fallacy identifies a family of arguments deemed to entail odd and false consequences for notions defined in terms of counterfactuals. The antirealist notion of truth is typically defined in terms of what a rational enquirer or a community of rational enquirers would believe if they were suitably informed. This notion is deemed to entail, via the conditional fallacy, odd and false propositions, for example that there necessarily exists a rational enquirer. If these cons…Read more
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915Assessing concept possession as an explicit and social practiceJournal of Philosophy of Education 51 (4): 801-816. 2017.We focus on issues of learning assessment from the point of view of an investigation of philosophical elements in teaching. We contend that assessment of concept possession at school based on ordinary multiple-choice tests might be ineffective because it overlooks aspects of human rationality illuminated by Robert Brandom’s inferentialism––the view that conceptual content largely coincides with the inferential role of linguistic expressions used in public discourse. More particularly, we argue t…Read more
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829Phenomenal Conservatism and Bergmann’s DilemmaErkenntnis 80 (6): 1271-1290. 2015.In this paper we argue that Michael Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism—the internalist view according to which our beliefs are prima facie justified if based on how things seems or appears to us to be—doesn’t fall afoul of Michael Bergmann’s dilemma for epistemological internalism. We start by showing that the thought experiment that Bergmann adduces to conclude that is vulnerable to his dilemma misses its target. After that, we distinguish between two ways in which a mental state can contribute t…Read more
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829Epistemic Entitlement, Epistemic Risk and LeachingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3): 566-580. 2023.One type of argument to sceptical paradox proceeds by making a case that a certain kind of metaphysically “heavyweight or “cornerstone” proposition is beyond all possible evidence and hence may not be known or justifiably believed. Crispin Wright has argued that we can concede that our acceptance of these propositions is evidentially risky and still remain rationally entitled to those of our ordinary knowledge claims that are seemingly threatened by that concession. A problem for Wright’s propos…Read more
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790Non-Evidentialist Epistemology: Introduction and OverviewIn .. pp. 1-24. 2021.This is the introduction to Moretti, Luca and Nikolaj Pedersen (eds), Non-Evidentialist Epistemology. Brill. Contributors: N. Ashton, A. Coliva, J. Kim, K. McCain, A. Meylan, L. Moretti, S. Moruzzi, J. Ohlorst, N. Pedersen, T. Piazza, L. Zanetti.
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766Brogaard and Salerno on antirealism and the conditional fallacyPhilosophical Studies 140 (2). 2008.Brogaard and Salerno (2005, Nous, 39, 123–139) have argued that antirealism resting on a counterfactual analysis of truth is flawed because it commits a conditional fallacy by entailing the absurdity that there is necessarily an epistemic agent. Brogaard and Salerno's argument relies on a formal proof built upon the criticism of two parallel proofs given by Plantinga (1982, "Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association", 56, 47–70) and Rea (2000, "Nous," 34, 291–301). If t…Read more
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735Reason and Explanation: A Defense of Explanatory Coherentism. BY TED POSTON (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 208. Price £ 60.) (review)Philosophical Quarterly 67 (266): 204-206. 2017.
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729Logical Pluralism is Compatible with Monism about Metaphysical ModalityAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2): 275-284. 2009.Beall and Restall 2000; 2001; 2006 advocate a comprehensive pluralist approach to logic, which they call Logical Pluralism, according to which there is not one true logic but many equally acceptable logical systems. They maintain that Logical Pluralism is compatible with monism about metaphysical modality, according to which there is just one correct logic of metaphysical modality. Wyatt 2004 contends that Logical Pluralism is incompatible with monism about metaphysical modality. We first sugges…Read more
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713Global Scepticism, Underdetermination and Metaphysical PossibilityErkenntnis 79 (2): 381-403. 2014.I focus on a key argument for global external world scepticism resting on the underdetermination thesis: the argument according to which we cannot know any proposition about our physical environment because sense evidence for it equally justifies some sceptical alternative (e.g. the Cartesian demon conjecture). I contend that the underdetermination argument can go through only if the controversial thesis that conceivability is per se a source of evidence for metaphysical possibility is true. I a…Read more
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659Tal and Comesaña on evidence of evidenceThe Reasoner 10 (5): 38-39. 2016.R. Feldman defends a general principle about evidence the slogan form of which says that ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’. B. Fitelson considers three renditions of this principle and contends they are all falsified by counterexamples. Against both Feldman and Fitelson, J. Comesaña and E. Tal show that the third rendition––the one actually endorsed by Feldman––isn’t affected by Fitelson’s counterexamples, but only because it is trivially true and thus uninteresting. Tal and Comesaña defend a f…Read more
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622Dummett and the problem of the vanishing pastLinguistic and Philosophical Investigations 7 37-47. 2008.Dummett has recently presented his most mature and sophisticated version of justificationism, i.e. the view that meaning and truth are to be analysed in terms of justifiability. In this paper, I argue that this conception does not resolve a difficulty that also affected Dummett’s earlier version of justificationism: the problem that large tracts of the past continuously vanish as their traces in the present dissipate. Since Dummett’s justificationism is essentially based on the assumption that t…Read more
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606In this chapter I introduce the thesis that perceptual appearances are cognitively penetrable and analyse cases made against phenomenal conservatism hinging on this thesis. In particular, I focus on objections coming from the externalist reliabilist camp and the internalist inferentialist camp. I conclude that cognitive penetrability doesn’t yield lethal or substantive difficulties for phenomenal conservatism.
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580The ontological status of minimal entitiesPhilosophical Studies 141 (1). 2008.Minimal entities are, roughly, those that fall under notions defined by only deflationary principles. In this paper I provide an accurate characterization of two types of minimal entities: minimal properties and minimal facts. This characterization is inspired by both Schiffer's notion of a pleonastic entity and Horwich's notion of minimal truth. I argue that we are committed to the existence of minimal properties and minimal facts according to a deflationary notion of existence, and that the ap…Read more
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University of AberdeenReader
APA Central Division
Aberdeen, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Philosophy of Education |
Social Ontology |
Areas of Interest
Critical Theory |
Government and Democracy |