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34I present a puzzle about inquiry and discuss two potential solutions. The puzzle stems from two equally compelling sets of data suggesting that, on the one hand, there’s something epistemically defective with inquiring into questions that don’t have true answers. On the other hand, however, there can be scenarios in which we are epistemically permitted to inquire into questions that don’t have true answers. How is it that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers can both be defectiv…Read more
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140Rational Hypothesis: Inquiry Direction Without EvidencePhilosophical Topics. forthcoming.There are scenarios in which letting one’s own views on the question whether p direct one’s inquiry into that question brings about individual and collective epistemic benefits. However, these scenarios are also such that one’s evidence doesn’t support believing one’s own views. So, how to vindicate the epistemic benefits of directing one’s inquiry in such an asymmetric way, without asking one to hold a seemingly irrational doxastic attitude? To answer this question, the paper understands asymme…Read more
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264Provisional AttitudesIn Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley Blackwell. forthcoming.
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453Higher-Order Evidence and the Duty To Double-CheckNoûs. forthcoming.The paper proposes an account of the rational response to higher-order evidence whose key claim is that whenever we acquire such evidence we ought to engage in the inquiring activity of double-checking. Combined with a principle that establishes a connection between rational inquiry and rational belief retention, the account offers a novel explanation of the alleged impermissibility of retaining one’s belief in the face of higher-order evidence. It is argued that this explanation is superior to …Read more
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276Reasoning Simplifying AttitudesEpisteme 20 (3): 722-735. 2023.Several philosophers maintain that outright belief exists because it plays a reasoning simplifying role (Holton 2008; Ross and Schroeder 2014; Staffel 2019; Weisberg 2020). This claim has been recently contested, on the grounds that credences also can simplify reasoning (Dinges 2021). This paper takes a step back and asks: what features of an attitude explain its alleged ability to simplify reasoning? The paper contrasts two explanations, one in terms of dispositions and the other in terms of re…Read more
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10Il disaccordo: riflessione critica tra epistemologia e filosofia del linguaggioAracne editrice int.le S.r.l.. 2014.
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63What do propositions explain? Inflationary vs. deflationary perspectives and the case of singular propositionsSynthese 200 (2): 1-21. 2022.In this paper we take up the question of the explanatory significance of the notion of propositional content. Our first goal is to disentangle two types of approach: According to what we call inflationism, propositions should be taken seriously enough to expect explanatory payoffs from them. The alternative deflationary approach rejects this claim. Our second goal is to explore the inflationism vs. deflationism contrast in depth by focusing on the distinction between singular and general proposi…Read more
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471Questions of Reference and the Reflexivity of First-Person ThoughtJournal of Philosophy 119 (11): 628-640. 2022.Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is expla…Read more
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471Permissivism and the Truth ConnectionErkenntnis 88 (2): 641-656. 2023.Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates…Read more
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449Disagreement unhinged, constitutivism styleMetaphilosophy 52 (3-4): 402-415. 2021.Hinge epistemology has to dispel the worry that disagreeing over hinges is rationally inert. Building on a companion piece (Coliva and Palmira 2020), this paper offers a constitutivist solution to the problem of rational inertia by maintaining that a Humean sceptic and a hinge epistemologist disagree over the correct explication of the concept of epistemic rationality. The paper explores the implications of such a solution. First, it clarifies in what sense a disagreement over hinges would be a …Read more
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189Review of Singular Thought and Mental Files, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2020. 2020.
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23Expert Deference About The Epistemic and Its Metaepistemological Significance – AddendumCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 554-554. 2020.
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21Correction to: Immunity, thought insertion, and the first-person conceptPhilosophical Studies 177 (12): 3861-3861. 2020.In the original publication of the article, the funding information was inadvertently missed out. The information is provided in this Correction.
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386Immunity, thought insertion, and the first-person conceptPhilosophical Studies 177 (12): 3833-3860. 2020.In this paper I aim to illuminate the significance of thought insertion for debates about the first-person concept. My starting point is the often-voiced contention that thought insertion might challenge the thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of psychological properties are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. In the first part of the paper I explain what a thought insertion-based counterexample to this immunity thesis should be like. I th…Read more
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328Expert Deference about the Epistemic and Its Metaepistemological SignificanceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 524-538. 2020.This paper focuses on the phenomenon of forming one’s judgement about epistemic matters, such as whether one has some reason not to believe false propositions, on the basis of the opinion of somebody one takes to be an expert about them. The paper pursues three aims. First, it argues that some cases of expert deference about epistemic matters are suspicious. Secondly, it provides an explanation of such a suspiciousness. Thirdly, it draws the metaepistemological implications of the proposed expla…Read more
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406Defending Nonreductionism About UnderstandingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (3): 222-231. 2019.In this note I defend nonreductionism about understanding by arguing that knowledge is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding. To do so, I examine Paulina Sliwa’s recent (Sliwa 2015, 2017) defence of knowledge-based Reductionism (Reductionism for short). Sliwa claims that one understands why p if and only if one has a sufficient amount of knowledge why p. Sliwa also contends that Reductionism is supported by intuitive verdicts about our uses of ‘understanding why’ and ‘knowing why’. …Read more
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64Introduction to the Special Issue: The Nature and Implications of DisagreementAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 15-28. 2019.Disagreement and the implications thereof have emerged as a central preoccupation of recent analytic philosophy. In epistemology, articles on so-called peer disagreement and its implications have burgeoned and now constitute an especially rich subject of discussion in the field. In moral and political philosophy, moral disagreement has of course traditionally been a crucial argumentative lever in meta-ethical debates, and disagreement over conceptions of the good has been the spark for central c…Read more
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745Inquiry and the doxastic attitudesSynthese 197 (11): 4947-4973. 2020.In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended …Read more
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347Philosophical Equilibrism, Rationality, and the Commitment ChallengeProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (3): 377-385. 2018.Helen Beebee (2018) defends a view of the aims of philosophy she calls ‘equilibrism’. Equilibrism denies that philosophy aims at knowledge and maintains that the collective aim of philosophy is ‘to find what equilibria there are that can withstand examination’ (Beebee 2018, p. 3). In this note, I probe equilibrism by focusing on how disagreement challenges our doxastic commitment to our own philosophical theories. Call this the Commitment Challenge. I argue that the Commitment Challenge comes in…Read more
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22Metaethics, Normativity, and Value : IntroductionLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 11 (2-3): 65-69. 2016.Hichem Naar,Michele Palmira
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565How to Solve the Puzzle of Peer DisagreementAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1): 83-96. 2019.While it seems hard to deny the epistemic significance of a disagreement with our acknowledged epistemic peers, there are certain disagreements, such as philosophical disagreements, which appear to be permissibly sustainable. These two claims, each independently plausible, are jointly puzzling. This paper argues for a solution to this puzzle. The main tenets of the solution are two. First, the peers ought to engage in a deliberative activity of discovering more about their epistemic position vis…Read more
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465Arbitrary reference, numbers, and propositionsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 26 (3): 1069-1085. 2018.Reductionist realist accounts of certain entities, such as the natural numbers and propositions, have been taken to be fatally undermined by what we may call the problem of arbitrary identification. The problem is that there are multiple and equally adequate reductions of the natural numbers to sets (see Benacerraf, 1965), as well as of propositions to unstructured or structured entities (see, e.g., Bealer, 1998; King, Soames, & Speaks, 2014; Melia, 1992). This paper sets out to solve the proble…Read more
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276Arithmetic Judgements, First-Person Judgements and Immunity to Error Through MisidentificationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (1): 155-172. 2018.The paper explores the idea that some singular judgements about the natural numbers are immune to error through misidentification by pursuing a comparison between arithmetic judgements and first-person judgements. By doing so, the first part of the paper offers a conciliatory resolution of the Coliva-Pryor dispute about so-called “de re” and “which-object” misidentification. The second part of the paper draws some lessons about what it takes to explain immunity to error through misidentification…Read more
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615Towards a unified notion of disagreementGrazer Philosophische Studien 88 (1): 139-159. 2013.The recent debate on Semantic Contextualism and Relativism has definitely brought the phenomenon of disagreement under the spotlight. Relativists have considered disagreement as a means to accomplish a defence of their own position regarding the semantics of knowledge attributions, epistemic modals, taste predicates, and so on. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we argue that several specific notions of disagreement can be subsumed under a common “schema” which provides a unified and overa…Read more
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420Towards a pluralist theory of singular thoughtSynthese 195 (9): 3947-3974. 2018.This paper investigates the question of how to correctly capture the scope of singular thinking. The first part of the paper identifies a scope problem for the dominant view of singular thought maintaining that, in order for a thinker to have a singular thought about an object o, the thinker has to bear a special epistemic relation to o. The scope problem has it is that this view cannot make sense of the singularity of our thoughts about objects to which we do not or cannot bear any special epis…Read more
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686Moral Deference and Deference to an Epistemic PeerPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (261): 605-625. 2015.Deference to experts is normal in many areas of inquiry, but suspicious in morality. This is puzzling if one thinks that morality is relevantly like those other areas of inquiry. We argue that this suspiciousness can be explained in terms of the suspiciousness of deferring to an epistemic peer. We then argue that this explanation is preferable to others in the literature, and explore some metaethical implications of this result.
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2A Critique of Contextualist Approaches to Peer DisagreementDiscipline Filosofiche 22 (2): 27-48. 2012.Contemporary epistemology devotes much attention to disagreements among epistemic peers, that is, disagreements in which subjects take themselves to be equals with respect to the evidence that bears on the matter at issue as well as general intellectual virtues. The crucial question is: what should you do when you disagree with an epistemic peer? The paper pursues three goals. First, it clarifies some as of yet unexplained details of the problem of peer disagreement. Second, it distinguishes bet…Read more
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577The Semantic Significance of Faultless DisagreementPacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (3): 349-371. 2014.The article investigates the significance of the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement for debates about the semantics of taste discourse. Two kinds of description of the phenomenon are proposed. The first ensures that faultless disagreement raises a distinctive philosophical challenge; yet, it is argued that Contextualist, Realist and Relativist semantic theories do not account for this description. The second, by contrast, makes the phenomenon irrelevant for the problem of wh…Read more
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384How to Condorcet a GoldmanEpisteme 12 (3): 413-425. 2015.In his 2010 paper “Philosophical Naturalism and Intuitional Methodology”, Alvin I. Goldman invokes the Condorcet Jury Theorem in order to defend the reliability of intuitions. The present note argues that the original conditions of the theorem are all unrealistic when analysed in connection to the case of intuitions. Alternative conditions are discussed.
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335A Puzzle About the Agnostic Response to Peer DisagreementPhilosophia 41 (4): 1253-1261. 2013.The paper argues that the view to the effect that one should suspend judgment in the face of a disagreement with a recognised epistemic peer results in a puzzle when applied to disagreements in which one party is agnostic. The puzzle is this: either the agnostic party retains her suspension of judgment, or she suspends it. The former option is discarded by proponents of the agnostic response; the latter leads the agnostic response to undermine itself
University of Modena
PhD, 2013
Madrid, Spain
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |