University of Southern California
School of Philosophy
PhD, 1991
Providence, Rhode Island, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology
  •  13
    Making Sense of Non-Attachment
    Philosophy East and West. forthcoming.
    The aim of this paper is to outline a version of “non-attachment” that is conceptually clear and practically viable. We turn to the Buddhist traditions for their wealth of insights into non-attachment, but our goal is not exegetical. We are not constrained by the Buddhist traditions and turn to Anglophone moral psychology as well to point out a close connection between non-attachment and adaptive preference. We offer the reason for adopting the outlined version of non-attachment and depict what …Read more
  •  69
    The problem of rule-following in compositional semantics
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 97-108. 1995.
    One of the central issues in the recent discussion of rule-following has been the apparent gap between the finitude of any facts about the rule-follower and the infinitude of possible applications of rules. In this paper the author argues that the combination of the rule-follower's disposition and explicit directions can fill this gap with respect to the interpretation of individual words, but that the problem of finitude remains a serious threat to compositional semantics for natural language b…Read more
  •  56
    Boomerang defense of rule following
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 115-122. 1992.
    Can there be a good argument for the total denial of rule following? The question concerns the "total" denial, where the targeted rules include those meta-rules presumably required for philosophical argumentation. In this paper the author contends that such a self-undermining argument can never be a good argument even in a "reductio ad absurdum" form, but that the defender of rule following cannot dismiss a challenge on this ground when the opponent adopts "the virus strategy"
  •  10
    A Twofold Tension in Schurz’s Meta-Inductive Solution to Hume’s Problem of Induction
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (3): 379-392. 2023.
    This paper examines a twofold tension in Gerhard Schurz’s (2019) recent proposal to solve Hume’s problem of induction. Schurz concedes to the skeptic that there is no non-circular epistemic justification of the reliability of induction, but then argues for the optimality of meta-induction so that if any prediction method is reliable, then meta-induction is. There is a tension in this proposal between meta-induction and our inductive practice: Are we supposed to abandon our inductive practice in …Read more
  •  26
    Probability and proximity in surprise
    Synthese 198 (11): 10939-10957. 2020.
    This paper proposes an analysis of surprise formulated in terms of proximity to the truth, to replace the probabilistic account of surprise. It is common to link surprise to the low probability of the outcome. The idea seems sensible because an outcome with a low probability is unexpected, and an unexpected outcome often surprises us. However, the link between surprise and low probability is known to break down in some cases. There have been some attempts to modify the probabilistic account to d…Read more
  •  34
    Volume 32, Issue 3-4, September - December 2019, Page 229-231.
  •  1789
    Skepticism and Epistemic Closure: Two Bayesian Accounts
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (1): 1-25. 2017.
    This paper considers two novel Bayesian responses to a well-known skeptical paradox. The paradox consists of three intuitions: first, given appropriate sense experience, we have justification for accepting the relevant proposition about the external world; second, we have justification for expanding the body of accepted propositions through known entailment; third, we do not have justification for accepting that we are not disembodied souls in an immaterial world deceived by an evil demon. The f…Read more
  •  38
    Confirmation, transitivity, and Moore: the Screening-Off Approach
    Philosophical Studies 168 (3): 797-817. 2014.
    It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that the Screening-Of…Read more
  •  309
    In this paper we examine C. I. Lewis's view on the roleof coherence – what he calls ''congruence'' – in thejustification of beliefs based on memory ortestimony. Lewis has two main theses on the subject. His negativethesis states that coherence of independent items ofevidence has no impact on the probability of a conclusionunless each item has some credibility of its own. Thepositive thesis says, roughly speaking, that coherenceof independently obtained items of evidence – such asconverging memor…Read more
  •  20
    A unified account of the conjunction fallacy by coherence
    with Martin L. Jönsson
    Synthese 196 (1): 221-237. 2019.
    We propose a coherence account of the conjunction fallacy applicable to both of its two paradigms. We compare our account with a recent proposal by Tentori et al. : 235–255, 2013) that attempts to generalize earlier confirmation accounts. Their model works better than its predecessors in some respects, but it exhibits only a shallow form of generality and is unsatisfactory in other ways as well: it is strained, complex, and untestable as it stands. Our coherence account inherits the strength of …Read more
  •  17
    Information and Inaccuracy
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.
    This paper proposes a new interpretation of mutual information (MI). We examine three extant interpretations of MI by reduction in doubt, by reduction in uncertainty, and by divergence. We argue that the first two are inconsistent with the epistemic value of information (EVI) assumed in many applications of MI: the greater is the amount of information we acquire, the better is our epistemic position, other things being equal. The third interpretation is consistent with EVI, but it is faced with …Read more
  •  408
    Information and Inaccuracy
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 577-604. 2018.
    This article proposes a new interpretation of mutual information. We examine three extant interpretations of MI by reduction in doubt, by reduction in uncertainty, and by divergence. We argue that the first two are inconsistent with the epistemic value of information assumed in many applications of MI: the greater is the amount of information we acquire, the better is our epistemic position, other things being equal. The third interpretation is consistent with EVI, but it is faced with the probl…Read more
  •  18
    Mediated Confirmation
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.
  •  17
    We propose a coherence account of the conjunction fallacy applicable to both of its two paradigms. We compare our account with a recent proposal by Tentori et al. : 235–255, 2013) that attempts to generalize earlier confirmation accounts. Their model works better than its predecessors in some respects, but it exhibits only a shallow form of generality and is unsatisfactory in other ways as well: it is strained, complex, and untestable as it stands. Our coherence account inherits the strength of …Read more
  •  14
    This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji show…Read more
  •  98
    The problem of the criterion in rule-following
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 501-525. 2000.
    This paper addresses the issue of rule-following in the context of the problem of the criterion. It presents a line of reasoning which concludes we do not know what rule we follow, but which develops independently of the problem of extrapolation that plays a major role in many recent discussions of rule-following. The basis of the argument is the normativity of rules, but the problem is also distinct from the issue of the gap between facts and values in axiology. The paper further points out tha…Read more
  •  82
    Internalism and Externalism in Meliorative Epistemology
    Erkenntnis 76 (1): 59-72. 2012.
    This paper addresses the meta-epistemological dispute over the basis of epistemic evaluation from the standpoint of meliorative epistemology. Meliorative epistemology aims at guiding our epistemic practice to better results, and it comprises two levels of epistemic evaluation. At the social level (meliorative social epistemology) appropriate experts conduct evaluation for the community, so that epistemic evaluation is externalist since each epistemic subject in the community need not have access…Read more
  •  16
    Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 292-296. 2008.
  •  82
    This paper examines the role of coherence of evidence in what I call the non-dynamic model of confirmation. It appears that other things being equal, a higher degree of coherence among pieces of evidence raises to a higher degree the probability of the proposition they support. I argue against this view on the basis of three related observations. First, we should be able to assess the impact of coherence on any hypothesis of interest the evidence supports. Second, the impact of coherence among t…Read more
  •  277
  •  52
    Mediated Confirmation
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3): 847-874. 2017.
    ABSTRACT This article aims to achieve two things: to identify the conditions for transitivity in probabilistic support in various settings, and to uncover the components and structure of the mediated probabilistic relation. It is shown that when the probabilistic relation between the two propositions, x and z, is mediated by multiple layers of partitions of propositions, the impact x has on z consists of the purely indirect impact, the purely bypass impact, and the mixed impact. It is also shown…Read more
  •  19
    The Problem of Rule‐Following in Compositional Semantics
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 97-107. 2010.
  •  188
    Is coherence truth conducive?
    Analysis 59 (4). 1999.
  •  101
    Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, Justification (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 292-296. 2008.
    Erik Olsson’s Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification is an important contribution to the growing literature on Bayesian coherentism. The book applies the formal theory of probability to issues of coherence in two contexts. One is the philosophical debate over radical skepticism, and the other is common sense and scientific reasoning. As the title of the book suggests, Olsson’s view about coherence is negative on both accounts. With regard to radical skepticism, Olsson states th…Read more
  •  113
    Why does coherence appear truth-conducive?
    Synthese 157 (3). 2007.
    This paper aims to reconcile (i) the intuitively plausible view that a higher degree of coherence among independent pieces of evidence makes the hypothesis they support more probable, and (ii) the negative results in Bayesian epistemology to the effect that there is no probabilistic measure of coherence such that a higher degree of coherence among independent pieces of evidence makes the hypothesis they support more probable. I consider a simple model in which the negative result appears in a st…Read more
  •  280
    This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmati…Read more
  •  85
    Modest scepticism about rule-following
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4): 486-500. 1993.
    This Article does not have an abstract