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Phenomenal conservatism and cognitive penetration: The ‘Bad Basis’ counterexamplesIn Chris Tucker (ed.), Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism, Oxford University Press Usa. 2013.
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Four-Dimensionalism and the Puzzles of CoincidenceIn Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics:Volume 3: Volume 3, Oxford University Press Uk. 2007.
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127Truth and EpistemologyIn John Turri (ed.), Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa, Springer. pp. 127--145. 2013.In Sect. 1 of this chapter, Matthew McGrath examines Sosa's work on the nature of truth. Sosa's chief purpose is to determine what sort of theory of truth is appropriate for truth-centered epistemology -- an epistemology that takes truth to be the goal of inquiry and which explains key epistemic notions in terms of truth. While Sosa refutes arguments from Putnam and Davidson against the correspondence theory, he is hesitant to endorse it because he doubts we have a clear enough grasp of what cor…Read more
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152Is Suspension of Judgment a Question-Directed Attitude? No, not Really (3rd ed.)In Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. 2013.In what follows, I’ll discuss several approaches to suspension. As we’ll see, the issue of whether and in what sense(s) suspension is *question-directed* is important to developing an adequate account. I will argue that suspension isn’t question-directed in the way that curiosity, wondering, and inquiry are. The most promising approach, in my view, takes suspension to be an agential matter; it involves the will. As we’ll see, this view makes sense of a lot of familiar facts about suspension, and…Read more
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121Kornblith on Epistemic NormativityIn Luis Oliveira & Joshua DiPaolo (eds.), Kornblith and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.Kornblith’s “Epistemic Normativity” is a classic in the now voluminous literature on the source of epistemic normativity. His account is as simple as it is bold: the source is desire, not a desire for true belief, or knowledge, but any set of desires. No matter what desires you have, so long as you are a being of a kind that employs beliefs in cost-benefit analysis, certain sorts of truth-centered epistemic norms will have normative force for you. We can distinguish two questions about epistemic…Read more
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150Nonsubjectivism About How Things SeemIn Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles, Routledge. 2023.We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being …Read more
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881Radical Knowledge MinimalismLogos and Episteme 14 (2): 223-227. 2023.We argue that knowledge doesn‘t require any of truth, justification, or belief. This is so for four primary reasons. First, each of the three conditions has been subject to convincing counterexamples. In addition, the resultant account explains the value of knowledge, manifests important theoretical virtues (in particular, simplicity), and avoids commitment to skepticism.
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70Perceptual Capacities: Questions for SchellenbergAnalysis 79 (4): 730-739. 2019.According to Schellenberg’s capacitism, perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities to discriminate and single out particulars, including objects, events and property instances. To say that perception is so constituted, for her, is to say that perceptual states have the content, phenomenal character, and evidential force they do in virtue of the fact that they are yielded by employing perceptual capacities.1 1
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209Critical study of John Hawthorne's knowledge and lotteries and Jason Stanley's knowledge and practical interests (review)Noûs 43 (1): 178-192. 2009.No Abstract
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22Scott Soames: Understanding TruthPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 410-417. 2002.
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194Knowing What Things Look Like: A reply to ShieberInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.In ‘Knowing What Things Look Like,’ I argued against the immediacy of visual objectual knowledge, i.e. visual knowledge that a thing is F, for an object category F, such as avocado, tree, desk, etc. Joseph Shieber proposes a challenging dilemma in reply. Either knowing what Fs look like requires having concepts such as looks or it doesn’t. Either way my argument fails. If knowing what Fs look like doesn’t require having such concepts, then he claims we can give an immediacy-friendly anti-intelle…Read more
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Having false reasonsIn Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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50Contemporary epistemology: an anthology (edited book)Wiley. 2019.A rigorous, authoritative new anthology which brings together some of the most significant contemporary scholarship on the theory of knowledge Carefully-calibrated and judiciously-curated, this strong and contemporary new anthology builds upon Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) by drawing a concise and well-balanced selection of higher-level readings from a large, diverse, and evolving body of research. Includes 17 readings that represent a broad and vital part of…Read more
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336Undercutting Defeat: When it Happens and Some Implications for EpistemologyIn Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, Oxford University Press. pp. 201-222. 2021.Although there is disagreement about the details, John Pollock’s framework for defeat is now part of the received wisdom in analytic epistemology. Recently, however, cracks have appeared in the consensus, particularly on the understanding of undercutting defeat. While not questioning the existence of undercutting defeat, Scott Sturgeon argues that undercutting defeat operates differently from rebutting. Unlike the latter, undercutting defeat, Sturgeon claims, occurs only in conjunction with cert…Read more
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446A limitation on agency in judgmentSynthese 200 (2): 1-21. 2022.To many, judgment has seemed a locus of cognitive agency, a kind of cognitive mental act. In one minimal sense, judgment is something one does. I consider whether judgment is more robustly agential: is it a kind of action done with an aim? The most attractive version of this sort of position takes judging that p to affirming that p with an alethic aim, an aim such as affirming truly. I argue that such views have unacceptable consequences. Acts done with aims, in general, can be based only indire…Read more
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332Epistemic Norms for WaitingPhilosophical Topics 49 (2): 173-201. 2021.Although belief formation is sometimes automatic, there are occasions in which we have the power to put it off, to wait on belief-formation. Waiting in this sense seems assessable by epistemic norms. This paper explores what form such norms might take: the nature and their content. A key question is how these norms relate to epistemic norms on belief-formation: could we have cases in which one ought to believe that p but also ought to wait on forming a belief on whether p? Plausibly not. But if …Read more
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3Arguing for shifty epistemologyIn Jessica Brown & Mikkel Gerken (eds.), Knowledge Ascriptions, Oxford University Press. pp. 55--74. 2012.Shifty epistemologists allow that the truth value of “knowledge”-ascriptions can vary not merely because of such differences, but because of factors not traditionally deemed to matter to whether someone knows, like salience of error possibilities and practical stakes. Thus, contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are both examples. This paper examines two strategies for arguing for shifty epistemology: the argument-from-instances strategy, which attempts to show that the truth-value o…Read more
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40Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (1): 239-242. 2001.Mark Balaguer has written a provocative and original book. The book is as ambitious as a work of philosophy of mathematics could be. It defends both of the dominant views concerning the ontology of mathematics, Platonism and Anti-Platonism, and then closes with an argument that there is no fact of the matter which is right.
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156Précis of Knowledge in an Uncertain World (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2): 441-446. 2012.
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1129Being neutral: Agnosticism, inquiry and the suspension of judgmentNoûs 55 (2): 463-484. 2021.Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism…Read more
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208Clarifying Pragmatic Encroachment: A Reply to Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne on Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and StakesOxford Studies in Epistemology 6. 2019.This chapter addresses concerns that pragmatic encroachers are committed to problematic knowledge variance. It first replies to Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne’s new putative problem cases, which purport to show that pragmatic encroachment is committed to problematic variations in knowledge depending on what choices are available to the potential knower. It argues that the new cases do not provide any new reasons to be concerned about the pragmatic encroacher’s commitment to knowledge-varian…Read more
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16The Justification of Memory Beliefs: Evidentialism, Reliabilism, ConservatismIn Hilary Kornblith & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Goldman and his Critics, Blackwell. pp. 69-87. 2016.This chapter follows Conee and Feldman in assuming the traditional conception of the mental. Thus, the author takes it that mentalistic evidentialism is inconsistent with process reliabilism. It examines Goldman's critique of evidentialism's account of the justification of memory beliefs and discusses a problem for Goldman's own reliabilist account of memory beliefs. The chapter distinguishes two sorts of epistemic status at issue and not usually clearly separated in these debates, historical ju…Read more
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59The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics of PredicationMind 113 (450): 379-383. 2004.
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96Jessica Brown: Fallibilism: Evidence and KnowledgeJournal of Philosophy 116 (11): 637-644. 2019.
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315Pragmatic encroachment: It's not just about knowledgeEpisteme 9 (1): 27-42. 2012.There is pragmatic encroachment on some epistemic status just in case whether a proposition has that status for a subject depends not only on the subject's epistemic position with respect to the proposition, but also on features of the subject's non-epistemic, practical environment. Discussions of pragmatic encroachment usually focus on knowledge. Here we argue that, barring infallibilism, there is pragmatic encroachment on what is arguably a more fundamental epistemic status – the status a prop…Read more
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1065Evidence, pragmatics, and justificationPhilosophical Review 111 (1): 67-94. 2002.Evidentialism is the thesis that epistemic justification for belief supervenes on evidential support. However, we claim there are cases in which, even though two subjects have the same evidential support for a proposition, only one of them is justified. What make the difference are pragmatic factors, factors having to do with our cares and concerns. Our argument against evidentialism is not based on intuitions about particular cases. Rather, we aim to provide a theoretical basis for rejectin…Read more
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76Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2019.According to philosophical lore, epistemological orthodoxy is a purist epistemology in which epistemic concepts such as belief, evidence, and knowledge are characterized to be pure and free from practical concerns. In recent years, the debate has focused narrowly on the concept of knowledge and a number of challenges have been posed against the orthodox, purist view of knowledge. While the debate about knowledge is still a lively one, the pragmatic exploration in epistemology has just begun. Thi…Read more
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380Sosa on epistemic value: a Kantian obstacleSynthese 197 (12): 5287-5300. 2018.In recent work, Sosa proposes a comprehensive account of epistemic value based on an axiology for attempts. According to this axiology, an attempt is better if it succeeds, better still if it is apt (i.e., succeeds through competence), and best if it is fully apt, (i.e., guided to aptness by apt beliefs that it would be apt). Beliefs are understood as attempts aiming at the truth. Thus, a belief is better if true, better still if apt, and best if fully apt. I raise a Kantian obstacle for Sosa’s …Read more
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636Having False ReasonsIn Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion, Oxford University Press. pp. 59-80. 2013.
Brown University
PhD
St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Meta-Ethics |
PhilPapers Editorships
Epistemology |