•  114
    Understanding the Humanities Crisis: An Argument for Humanities’ National Value
    South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (1): 54-69. 2016.
    What justifies the negative perception of the Humanities? What justifies budget cuts and curricula changes in schools and universities that prejudice the Humanities? In this article I argue that what is meant to justify the crisis narrative as well as curricula and budget cuts is the following argument: education has national value if and only if it positively contributes to the economy. The Humanities do not and cannot positively contribute to the economy. Therefore, the Humanities fail to cont…Read more
  •  67
    Defending Evidence-Resistant Beliefs
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (3): 517-537. 2016.
    There is a view in the literature around beliefs that evidence responsiveness is a necessary feature of beliefs. The reasoning is that because beliefs are governed by truth they must be evidence responsive. A mental state that fails to be evidence responsive, therefore, could not be a belief as it could not be governed by truth. The implication is that even those evidence-resistant mental states that appear to be beliefs are in fact something else. I argue that evidence resistance is a feature o…Read more
  •  25
    Transparency belongs to action, not to belief
    South African Journal of Philosophy 37 (2): 217-228. forthcoming.
    In setting out their normative account of the truth-belief relationship, Nishi Shah and David Velleman make two claims about a feature of doxastic deliberation they call transparency. Firstly, transparency is a feature only of doxastic deliberation. Secondly, teleological theories of the truth-belief relationship cannot account for both transparency and the non-evidential factors present in instances of motivated belief. Therefore, they argue, we should abandon teleological accounts in favour of…Read more