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28Why We Doubt: A Cognitive Account of Our Skeptical InclinationsOxford University Press. 2023.This book, the first of its kind, puts forward a novel, unified cognitive account of skeptical doubt. Historically, most philosophers have tried to tackle this difficult topic by directly arguing that skeptical doubt is false. But N. Ángel Pinillos does something different. He begins by trying to uncover the hidden mental rule which, for better or worse, motivates our skeptical inclinations. He then gives an account of the broader cognitive purpose of having and applying this rule. Based on thes…Read more
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19Experiments on Contextualism and Interest Relative InvariantismIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.The research project of common sense or folk behavior for the specific purposes of advancing epistemology has quickly become one of the largest in experimental philosophy. This chapter explains some of this work as it relates to two positions in epistemology: contextualism and interest relative invariantism (IRI). Naturally, questions arise about the relevance of folk behavior to debates in epistemology. First, there is the dialectical issue concerning the extent to which epistemologists have in…Read more
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305Experimental PhilosophyOxford Bibliographies Online (1): 81-92. 2006.Bibliography of works in experimental philosophy.
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298Bank Cases, Stakes and Normative FactsIn Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5, Oxford University Press. 2024.
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12Evidence Sensitivity as a Heuristic for DoubtMidwest Studies in Philosophy 45 223-239. 2021.Sensitivity-type principles are prominent in epistemology. They have the promise to explain our intuitive and considered reactions to a wide range of important cases in everyday life, science and philosophy. Despite this promise, philosophers have raised a number of very serious objections to the principles. Accordingly, I propose a different type of sensitivity account which, I believe, gets around these serious objections. An important feature of the new approach is that the principle I propos…Read more
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58Bayesian sensitivity principles for evidence based knowledgePhilosophical Studies 179 (2): 495-516. 2021.In this paper, I propose and defend a pair of necessary conditions on evidence-based knowledge which bear resemblance to the troubled sensitivity principles defended in the philosophical literature. We can think of the traditional principles as simple but inaccurate approximations of the new proposals. Insofar as the old principles are intuitive and used in scientific and philosophical contexts, but are plausibly false, there’s a real need to develop precise and correct formulations. These new r…Read more
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2262Philosophy's New challenge: Experiments and Intentional ActionMind and Language 26 (1): 115-139. 2011.Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or …Read more
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141A counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgmentCognition 190 (C): 157-164. 2019.People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b…Read more
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93Knowledge, Ignorance and Climate Change (New York Times)The New York Times 2018 (nov 26). 2018.Philosophers have been talking about skepticism for a long time. Some of those insights can shed light on our public discourse regarding climate change.
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601Skepticism and EvolutionIn Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, Routledge. 2019.I develop a cognitive account of how humans make skeptical judgments (of the form “X does not know p”). In my view, these judgments are produced by a special purpose metacognitive "skeptical" mechanism which monitors our reasoning for hasty or overly risky assumptions. I argue that this mechanism is modular and shaped by natural selection. The explanation for why the mechanism is adaptive essentially relies on an internalized principle connecting knowledge and action, a principle central to prag…Read more
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114Skepticism and the acquisition of “knowledge”Mind and Language 33 (4): 397-414. 2018.Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learn…Read more
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57Knowledge and the permissibility of actionSynthese 196 (5): 2021-2043. 2019.I argue in favor of a certain connection between knowledge and the permissibility of action. On this approach, we do not think of the relation between those notions as reflecting a universal epistemic principle. Instead, we think of it as something resembling a platitude from folk psychology. With the help of some elementary tools from the logic of normativity and counterfactuals, I attempt to establish the connection by deriving it from more elementary principles. The new formulation involves a…Read more
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42Simple Sentences, Substitution, and Intuitions, by Jennifer Saul (review)Mind 119 (474): 523-526. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation).
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271Following Kit Fine (2007), we can say that the de jure pair represent the referent as the same while the second one does not do so. There are roughly three ways of capturing this difference. One could say that de jure coreference between two expression occurrences happen because (a) the occurrences have identical meanings, (b) they have identical syntactic properties, or (c) they enter into a semantic relation not grounded in identity of meaning or syntax. In what follows, I give some reason to …Read more
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266Some Recent Work in Experimental EpistemologyPhilosophy Compass 6 (10): 675-688. 2011.In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.
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798Cause by Omission and Norm: Not Watering PlantsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (2): 270-283. 2017.People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories,…Read more
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2Experimental Evidence in Support of Anti-Intellectualism About KnowledgeIn James Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 9-44. 2014.
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50A Bayesian framework for knowledge attribution: Evidence from semantic integrationCognition 139 (C): 92-104. 2015.We propose a Bayesian framework for the attribution of knowledge, and apply this framework to generate novel predictions about knowledge attribution for different types of “Gettier cases”, in which an agent is led to a justified true belief yet has made erroneous assumptions. We tested these predictions using a paradigm based on semantic integration. We coded the frequencies with which participants falsely recalled the word “thought” as “knew” (or a near synonym), yielding an implicit measure of…Read more
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175Ambiguous ReferenceMind 125 (497): 145-175. 2016.One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories. Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sense in which both theories are correct. In particular, we defend the view that natural kind terms can sometimes take on a causal-historical reading and at other times take on a descriptivist…Read more
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134I consider here the issue of whether and to what extent moral truths are absolute. My aim is to raise some new considerations in favor of moral relativism: the thesis that some moral statements can vary in truth-value depending on the moral standards at issue.1 2 This paper has three major components. First, I describe a new puzzle concerning the possibility of moral knowledge in light of expert disagreement. I argue that the best solution to this puzzle requires moral relativism. Second, I deve…Read more
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70Attitudes, Supervaluations and Vagueness in the WorldIn Vague Objects and Vague Identity, Verlag. pp. 155-172. 2014.I consider two possible sources of vagueness. The first is indeterminacy about which intension is expressed by a word. The second is indeterminacy about which referent (extension) is determined by an intension. Focusing on a Fregean account of intensions, I argue that whichever account is right will matter to whether vagueness turns out to be a representational phenomenon (as opposed to being “in the world”). In addition, it will also matter to whether supervaluationism is a viable semantic fram…Read more
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696Counting and Indeterminate IdentityMind 112 (445). 2003.Suppose that we repair a wooden ship by replacing its planks one by one with new ones while at the same time reconstructing it using the discarded planks. Some defenders of vague or indeterminate identity claim that: (1) although the reconstructed ship is distinct from the repaired ship, it is indeterminate whether the original ship is the reconstructed ship and indeterminate whether it is the repaired ship, and (2) the indeterminacy is due to the world and not just an imprecision in the languag…Read more
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221Knowledge, Experiments, and Practical InterestsIn Jessica Brown & Mikkel Gerken (eds.), Knowledge Ascriptions, Oxford University Press. pp. 192. 2012.Recently, some philosophers have defended the idea that knowledge is an interest-relative notion. According to this thesis, whether an agent knows P may depend on the practical costs of her being wrong about P. This perspective marks a radical departure from traditional accounts that take knowledge to be a purely intellectual concept. I think there is much to say on behalf of the interest-relative notion. In this paper, I report on some new evidence which strongly suggests that ordinary people’s…Read more
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633Time Dilation, Context, and Relative TruthPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1): 65-92. 2010.I argue that truth is relative (in the sense recently defended by some prominent analytical philosophers) by focusing on some semantic issues raised by Einstein's theory of relativity together with our ordinary attributions of truth.
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980Coreference and meaningPhilosophical Studies 154 (2). 2011.Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that the names refer to the same person. Af…Read more
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Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious StudiesAssociate Professor
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Experimental Philosophy |