•  12
    Correction to Credence and belief
    Philosophical Studies 180 (10): 3215-3215. 2023.
  • How is thinking possible?
    In James Conant & Jesse M. Mulder (eds.), Reading Rödl: on Self-consciousness and objectivity, Routledge. 2023.
  •  12
    Correction To: Credence and belief
    Philosophical Studies 180 (9): 2895-2895. 2023.
  •  43
    From Inputs to Beliefs
    Analysis 82 (4): 707-716. 2022.
    What you believe is typically responsive to what you perceive, what you recall, what inferences you’ve made and various other factors. Let’s use the term ‘input.
  • The motivating power of the a priori obvious
    In Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The Many Moral Rationalisms, Oxford Univerisity Press. 2018.
  •  131
    Credence and belief
    Philosophical Studies 180 (2): 429-438. 2022.
  •  21
    Book symposium on Ernest sosa’s epistemic explanations
    Philosophical Topics 49 (2): 385-404. 2021.
    Ernest Sosa’s new monograph, Epistemic Explanations, develops an important new account of epistemic evaluation, epistemic normativity, and the explanatory role of these. The first two sections of the present paper develop an interpretation of Sosa’s metaphysics of the mental states of rational agents as a version of hylomorphism. The second half of the paper uses this hylomorphic view to argue that Sosa can account for differences among the various kinds of knowledge by appeal to nothing more th…Read more
  •  70
    Capacitism and the transparency of evidence
    Mind and Language 37 (2): 219-226. 2022.
    Susanna Schellenberg develops a unified account—“capacitism”—of perceptual content, phenomenology, and epistemic force. In this paper, I raise questions about her arguments for a capacitist account of evidential force, and then challenge her claim that such an account, even if correct, demands that our evidence be less than fully transparent to us.
  •  53
    Naturalism in Question
    Philosophical Review 116 (4): 657-663. 2007.
  •  2
    The Transparency of Inference
    In Timothy Chan & Anders Nes (eds.), Inference and Consciousness, Routledge. 2019.
  •  60
    Rationality, Success, and Luck
    Acta Analytica 37 (1): 57-71. 2021.
    Rationality, whatever exactly it demands of us, promotes success, whatever exactly that is. Some philosophers interpret that slogan as something that can provide them with a way of reductively explaining the demands of rationality by appeal to some independently intelligible notion of success: being rational, they might say, is just having whatever property it is that promotes success. Other philosophers may interpret the same slogan as something that can provide them with a way of reductively e…Read more
  •  248
    What evidence do you have?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (1): 89-119. 2008.
    Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally. On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that …Read more
  •  4
    Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question (review)
    Philosophical Review 116 (4): 657-663. 2007.
  •  673
    The Basing Relation
    Philosophical Review 128 (2): 179-217. 2019.
  •  94
    An evidentialist account of hinges
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 15): 3577-3591. 2019.
    Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is sometimes read as providing a response to the skeptical puzzle from closure, according to which our commitment to the trustworthiness of our evidence is not itself evidentially grounded. In this paper, I argue both that this standard reading of Wittgenstein is incorrect, and that a more accurate reading of Wittgenstein provides us with a more plausible solution to the Closure Puzzle.
  •  157
  •  24
    Current Controversies In Epistemology (edited book)
    Routledge. 2014.
    Epistemology is one of the oldest, yet still one of the most active, areas of philosophical research today. There currently exists many annotated tomes of primary sources, and a handful of single-authored introductions to the field, but there is no book that captures epistemology’s dynamic growth and lively debates for a student audience. In this volume, eight leading philosophers debate four topics central to recent research in epistemology: The A Priori: C. S. I. Jenkins and Michael Devitt The…Read more
  •  229
    Luminosity and the safety of knowledge
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (4). 2004.
    In his recent Knowledge and its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that no non-trivial mental state is such that being in that state suffices for one to be in a position to know that one is in it. In short, there are no “luminous” mental states. His argument depends on a “safety” requirement on knowledge, that one’s confident belief could not easily have been wrong if it is to count as knowledge. We argue that the safety requirement is ambiguous; on one interpretation it is obviously true but usele…Read more
  •  46
    Access Internalism and the Guidance Deontological Conception of Justification
    American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 155-168. 2016.
    Historically, prominent proponents of the guidance deontological conception of epistemic justification have thought that the guidance deontological conception entails access internalism. Alvin Goldman has argued that this is not so, and that there is no good argument from the guidance deontological conception of justification to access internalism. This paper refutes Goldman's argument. If the guidance deontological conception of epistemic justification is correct, then so is access internalism.
  •  148
  •  35
    What Evidence Do You Have?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (1): 89-119. 2008.
    Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally. On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that …Read more
  •  203
    What is an inference
    Philosophical Issues 23 (1): 388-407. 2013.
  •  28
    Expression and the Inner
    Philosophical Review 117 (2): 310-313. 2008.
  •  134
    Undermining the case for contrastivism
    Social Epistemology 22 (3). 2008.
    A number of philosophers have recently defended “contrastivist” theories of knowledge, according to which knowledge is a relation between at least the following three relata: a knower, a proposition, and a contrast set. I examine six arguments that Jonathan Schaffer has given for this thesis, and show that those arguments do not favour contrastivism over a rival view that I call “evidentiary relativism”. I then argue that evidentiary relativism accounts for more data than does contrastivism
  •  293
    Two Legacies of Goldman’s Epistemology
    Philosophical Topics 45 (1): 121-136. 2017.
    Goldman’s epistemology has been influential in two ways. First, it has influenced some philosophers to think that, contrary to erstwhile orthodoxy, relations of evidential support, or confirmation, are not discoverable a priori. Second, it has offered some philosophers a powerful argument in favor of methodological reliance on intuitions about thought experiments in doing philosophy. This paper argues that these two legacies of Goldman’s epistemology conflict with each other.
  •  16
    The nature and reach of privileged access
    In Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.), Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 2008.
    Many philosophers accept a “privileged access” thesis concerning our own present mental states and mental events. According to these philosophers, if I am in mental state (or undergoing mental event) M, then – at least in many cases – I have privileged access to the fact that I am in (or undergoing) M. For instance, if I now believe that my cat is sitting on my lap, then (in normal circumstances) I have privileged access to the fact that I now believe that my cat is sitting on my lap. Similarly,…Read more