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29Lying and DeceitIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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16On the Nature of Faith and Its Relation to Trust and BeliefThe Monist 106 (1): 61-71. 2023.One can have faith in someone, believe in someone and trust someone, and these notions seem closely related. Any account of faith should then address its relation to trust and belief. Like trust, faith can similarly have propositional and relational forms. One can have faith that God is good and faith in God; one can trust that another will do something and trust them to do it. Starting from a comparison between these forms of faith and trust, this paper proposes a philosophical analysis of fait…Read more
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32Losing the rose tinted glasses: neural substrates of unbiased belief updating in depressionFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. 2014.
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28What Are We Doing When We Are Training?Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 13 (3-4): 348-362. 2019.ABSTRACTAmateur and professional sportspersons, Bernard Suits proposed, are differentiated by their attitude towards their sport. For the amateur, competition is a game done for its own sake, while...
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29The presumption of assuranceSynthese 199 (3-4): 6391-6406. 2021.According to the Assurance Theory of testimony, in telling an audience something, a speaker offers their assurance that what is told is true, which is something like their guarantee, or promise, of truth. However, speakers also tell lies and say things they do not have the authority to back up. So why does understanding tellings to be a form of assurance explain how tellings can provide a reason for belief? This paper argues that reasons come once it is recognised that tellings are trusted. And …Read more
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485Really Trying or Merely TryingJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 41 (3): 363-380. 2014.We enjoy first-person authority with respect to a certain class of actions: for these actions, we know what we are doing just because we are doing it. This paper first formulates an epistemological principle that captures this authority in terms of trying to act in a way that one has the capacity to act. It then considers a case of effortful action – running a middle distance race – that threatens this principle. And proposes the solution of changing the metaphysics of action: one can keep hold …Read more
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32Collective and extended knowledgePhilosophical Issues 32 (1): 200-213. 2022.Philosophical Issues, EarlyView.
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54Communicating your point of viewEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 661-675. 2021.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 661-675, June 2022.
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44The nature and rationality of conversionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 27 (4): 821-836. 2019.European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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42Indirect Communication, Authority, and Proclamation as a Normative PowerGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 40 (1): 147-179. 2019.
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18The Philosophy of Trust (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to philosophical debates on the conditions of its possibility. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these issues. On the practical side, discussions of cooperation address what makes society possible—of how it is that life is not a Hobbesian war …Read more
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52Can we agree to disagree?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (2): 282-285. 2008.
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105Giving the Benefit of the DoubtInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2): 139-155. 2018.Faced with evidence that what a person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say – choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar as belief is possible, it is also possible t…Read more
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134Cooperation and trust in conversational exchangesTheoria 23 (1): 23-34. 2008.A conversation is more than a series of disconnected remarks because it is conducted against a background presumption of cooperation. But what makes it reasonable to presume that one is engaged in a conversation? What makes it reasonable to presume cooperation? This paper considers Grice’s two ways of answering this question and argues for the one he discarded. It does so by means of considering a certain problem and analysis of trust.
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166On Dreaming and Being Lied ToEpisteme 2 (3): 149-159. 2006.As sources of knowledge, perception and testimony are both vulnerable to sceptical arguments. To both arguments a Moorean response is possible: both can be refuted by reference to particular things known by perception and testimony. However, lies and dreams are different possibilities and they are different in a way that undercuts the plausibility of a Moorean response to a scepticism of testimony. The condition placed on testimonial knowledge cannot be trivially satisfied in the way the Moorean…Read more
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90Collective Testimony and Collective KnowledgeErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5. 2018.Testimony is a source of knowledge. On many occasions, the explanation of one’s knowing that p is that a speaker, S, told one that p. Our testimonial sources—the referents of ‘S’—can be other individuals, and they can be collectives; that is, in addition to learning from individuals, we learn things from committees, commissions, councils, clubs, teams, research groups, departments, administrations, churches, states and other social groups. North Korea might make a declaration about its missile p…Read more
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61Knowledge on TrustOxford University Press. 2011.Paul Faulkner presents a new theory of testimony - the basis of much of what we know. He addresses the questions of what makes it reasonable to accept a piece of testimony, and what warrants belief formed on that basis. He rejects rival theories and argues that testimonial knowledge and testimonially warranted belief are based on trust.
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147The practical rationality of trustSynthese 191 (9). 2014.Most action can be explained in Humean or teleological terms; that is, in most cases, one can explain why someone acted by reference to that person’s beliefs and desires. However, trusting and being trustworthy are actions that do not permit such explanation. The action of trusting someone to do something is a matter of expecting someone to act for certain reasons, and acting trustworthily is one of acting for these reasons. It is better to say that people act out of trust, rather than for some …Read more
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36Conspiracies And Lyes: Scepticism And The Epistemology of TestimonyDissertation, University College London. 1998.In Conspiracies and Lyes I aim to provide an epistemological account of testimony as one of our faculties of knowledge. I compare testimony to perception and memory. Its similarity to both these faculties is recognised. A fundamental difference is stressed: it can be rational to not accept testimony even if testimony is fulfilling its proper epistemic function because it can be rational for a speaker to not express a belief; or, as I say, it can be rational for a speaker to lye. This difference …Read more
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204The attitude of trust is basicAnalysis 75 (3): 424-429. 2015.Most philosophical discussion of trust focuses on the three-place trust predicate: X trusting Y to φ. This article argues that it is the one-place and two-place predicates – X is trusting, and X trusting Y – that are fundamental.
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398Norms of TrustIn Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar & Adrian Haddock (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2008.Should we tell other people the truth? Should we believe what other people tell us? This paper argues that something like these norms of truth-telling and belief govern our production and receipt of testimony in conversational contexts. It then attempts to articulate these norms and determine their justification. More fully specified these norms prescribe that speakers tell the truth informatively, or be trustworthy, and that audiences presume that speakers do this, or trust. These norms of trus…Read more
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386Two-Stage Reliabilism, Virtue Reliabilism, Dualism and the Problem of SufficiencySocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 121-138. 2013.Social epistemology should be truth-centred, argues Goldman. Social epistemology should capture the ‘logic of everyday practices’ and describe socially ‘situated’ reasoning, says Fuller. Starting from Goldman’s vision of epistemology, this paper aims to argue for Fuller’s contention. Social epistemology cannot focus solely on the truth because the truth can be got in lucky ways. The same too could be said for reliability. Adding a second layer of epistemic evaluation helps only insofar as the re…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |