•  48
    Constitutivism and cognitivism
    Philosophical Studies 179 (12): 3705-3727. 2022.
    Constitutivism holds that an account of what a thing is yields those normative standards to which that thing is by nature subject. We articulate a minimal form of constitutivism that we call _formal, non-epistemological constitutivism_ which diverges from orthodox versions of constitutivism in two main respects. First: whereas orthodox versions of constitutivism hold that those ethical norms to which people are by nature subject are sui generis because of their special capacity to motivate actio…Read more
  •  28
    In this paper, I examine Crispin Wright’s most recent attempt to introduce a diagnostic tool for predicting failures of warrant transmission, the so-called ‘Revised Template’. I show that the Revised Template does not, in fact, generate the predictions about warrant transmission failure that Wright thinks it does. I argue that the failure lies, in large part, with the definition of the technical notion ‘presupposition’ which the Revised Template deploys. Through a consideration of Wright’s own ‘…Read more
  •  14
    The Status of Value-ranges in the Argument of Basic Laws of Arithmetic I §10
    History and Philosophy of Logic 38 (4): 345-363. 2017.
    Frege's concern in GGI §10 is neither with the epistemological issue of how we come to know about value-ranges, nor with the semantic-metaphysical issue of whether we have said enough about such objects in order to ensure that any kind of reference to them is possible. The problem which occupies Frege in GGI §10 is the general problem according to which we ‘cannot yet decide’, for any arbitrary function, what value ‘’ has if ‘ℵ’ is a canonical value-range name. This is a problem with the ‘refere…Read more
  •  43
    Epistemological Disjunctivism and the Random Demon Hypothesis
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (1): 1-30. 2018.
    _ Source: _Page Count 30 According to epistemological disjunctivism I can claim to know facts about the world around me on the basis of my perceptual experience. My possession of such knowledge is incompatible with a number of familiar skeptical scenarios. So a paradigmatic epistemological disjunctivist perceptual experience should allow me to rule out such incompatible skeptical scenarios. In this paper, I consider skeptical scenarios which both cast doubt on my conviction that I can trust my p…Read more
  •  46
    Moral Luck and the Possibility of Agential Disjunctivism
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1): 308-332. 2018.
    Most presentations of the problem of moral luck invoke the notion of control, but little has been said about what control amounts to. We propose a necessary condition on an agent's having been in control of performing an action: that the agent's effort to perform the action ensured that the agent performed the action. The difficulty of satisfying this condition leads many on both sides of the moral luck debate to conclude that much of what we do is not within our control, and, at the limit, unde…Read more
  •  475
    Motivating Disjunctivism
    In Günter Abel & James Conant (eds.), Rethinking Epistemology, Volume 2, De Gruyter. pp. 309-347. 2012.
  •  55
    Epistemological disjunctivists make appeal to Moorean-style anti-skeptical arguments. It is often held that one problem with using Moorean-style arguments in the context of a response to skepticism is that such arguments are subject to a kind of epistemic circularity. The specific kind of epistemic failure involved has come to be known as a failure of warrant transmission. It would likely pose a problem for the anti-skeptical ambitions of the epistemological disjunctivist if his version of the M…Read more
  •  104
    According to the Explanatory Problem with Frege's Platonism about Thoughts, the sharp separation between the psychological and the logical on which Frege famously insists is too sharp, leaving Frege no resources to show how it could be legitimate to invoke logical laws in an explanation of our activities of thinking. I argue that there is room in Frege's philosophy for such justificatory explanations. To see how, we need first to understand correctly the lesson of Frege's attack on psychologism …Read more