•  1568
    People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren't beliefs because they don't guide behaviour and affect in the way that beliefs do. Or, if they are beliefs, they are somehow anomalous, atypical, or marginal beliefs. We present e…Read more
  •  1213
    Choosing and refusing: doxastic voluntarism and folk psychology
    Philosophical Studies 175 (10): 2507-2537. 2018.
    A standard view in contemporary philosophy is that belief is involuntary, either as a matter of conceptual necessity or as a contingent fact of human psychology. We present seven experiments on patterns in ordinary folk-psychological judgments about belief. The results provide strong evidence that voluntary belief is conceptually possible and, granted minimal charitable assumptions about folk-psychological competence, provide some evidence that voluntary belief is psychologically possible. We al…Read more
  •  1108
    Pedagogy is a pillar of human culture and society. Telling each other information and showing each other how to do things comes naturally to us. A strong case has been made that declarative knowledge is the norm of assertion, which is our primary way of telling others information. This article presents an analogous case for the hypothesis that procedural knowledge is the norm of instructional demonstration, which is a primary way of showing others how to do things. Knowledge is the norm of telli…Read more
  •  1036
    Knowledge before belief
    with Jonathan Phillips, Fiery Cushman, Ori Friedman, Alia Martin, John Turri, Laurie Santos, and Joshua Knobe
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.
    Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide ra…Read more
  •  885
    Descartes’s Schism, Locke’s Reunion: Completing the Pragmatic Turn in Epistemology
    with John Turri
    American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (1): 25-46. 2017.
    Centuries ago, Descartes and Locke initiated a foundational debate in epistemology over the relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and practical factors, on the other. Descartes claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally separate. Locke claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally united. After a period of dormancy, their disagreement has reignited on the contemporary scene. Latter-day Lockeans claim that knowledge itself is essentially connected to, and perhaps eve…Read more
  •  883
    Belief through Thick and Thin
    Noûs 49 (4): 748-775. 2015.
    We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philo…Read more
  •  761
    Intuition Fail: Philosophical Activity and the Limits of Expertise
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2): 378-410. 2016.
    Experimental philosophers have empirically challenged the connection between intuition and philosophical expertise. This paper reviews these challenges alongside other research findings in cognitive science on expert performance and argues for three claims. First, evidence taken to challenge philosophical expertise may also be explained by the well-researched failures and limitations of genuine expertise. Second, studying the failures and limitations of experts across many fields provides a prom…Read more
  •  724
    According to a prominent claim in recent epistemology, people are less likely to ascribe knowledge to a high stakes subject for whom the practical consequences of error are severe, than to a low stakes subject for whom the practical consequences of error are slight. We offer an opinionated "state of the art" on experimental research about the role of stakes in knowledge judgments. We draw on a first wave of empirical studies--due to Feltz & Zarpentine (2010), May et al (2010), and Buckwalter (2…Read more
  •  695
    Gettier Cases: A Taxonomy
    In Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida & Peter David Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem, Oxford University Press. pp. 242-252. 2017.
    The term “Gettier Case” is a technical term frequently applied to a wide array of thought experiments in contemporary epistemology. What do these cases have in common? It is said that they all involve a justified true belief which, intuitively, is not knowledge, due to a form of luck called “Gettiering.” While this very broad characterization suffices for some purposes, it masks radical diversity. We argue that the extent of this diversity merits abandoning the notion of a “Gettier case” in…Read more
  •  675
    We report two experiments exploring the perception of how contemporary philosophy is often conducted. We find that (1) participants associate philosophy with the practice of conducting thought experiments and collating intuitions about them, and (2) that this form of inquiry is viewed much less favourably than the typical form of inquiry in psychology: research conducted by teams using controlled experiments and observation. We also found (3) an effect whereby relying on intuition is viewed more…Read more
  •  640
    Epistemic Injustice in Social Cognition
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 294-308. 2019.
    ABSTRACTSilencing is a practice that disrupts linguistic and communicative acts, but its relationship to knowledge and justice is not fully understood. Prior models of epistemic injustice tend to c...
  •  547
    Moderate scientism in philosophy
    with John Turri
    In Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels & Rene van Woudenberg (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Moderate scientism is the view that empirical science can help answer questions in nonscientific disciplines. In this paper, we evaluate moderate scientism in philosophy. We review several ways that science has contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. We also review several ways that science has contributed to our understanding of how philosophers make judgments and decisions. Based on this research, we conclude that the case…Read more
  •  540
    The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that althoug…Read more
  •  508
    Knowledge and Luck
    with John Turri and Peter Blouw
    Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 22 (2): 378-390. 2015.
    Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible with kn…Read more
  •  496
    Knowledge, adequacy, and approximate truth
    with John Turri
    Consciousness and Cognition 83 (C): 102950. 2020.
    Approximation involves representing things in ways that might be close to the truth but are nevertheless false. Given the widespread reliance on approximations in science and everyday life, here we ask whether it is conceptually possible for false approximations to qualify as knowledge. According to the factivity account, it is impossible to know false approximations, because knowledge requires truth. According to the representational adequacy account, it is possible to know false approximations…Read more
  •  478
    Ability, Responsibility, and Global Justice
    Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 577-590. 2017.
    Many have argued we have a moral obligation to assist others in need, but given the scope of global suffering, how far does this obligation extend? According to one traditional philosophical view, the obligation to help others is limited by our ability to help them, or by the principle that “ought implies can”. This view is primarily defended on the grounds that it is a core principle of commonsense moral psychology. This paper reviews findings from experimental philosophy in cognitive science d…Read more
  •  471
    Mind-Brain Dichotomy, Mental Disorder, and Theory of Mind
    Erkenntnis 85 (2): 511-526. 2020.
    The tendency to draw mind-brain dichotomies and evaluate mental disorders dualistically arises in both laypeople and mental health professionals, leads to biased judgments, and contributes to mental health stigmatization. This paper offers a theory identifying an underlying source of these evaluations in social practice. According to this theory, dualistic evaluations are rooted in two mechanisms by which we represent and evaluate the beliefs of others in folk psychology and theory of mind: the …Read more
  •  448
    Implicit attitudes and the ability argument
    Philosophical Studies 176 (11): 2961-2990. 2019.
    According to one picture of the mind, decisions and actions are largely the result of automatic cognitive processing beyond our ability to control. This picture is in tension with a foundational principle in ethics that moral responsibility for behavior requires the ability to control it. The discovery of implicit attitudes contributes to this tension. According to the ability argument against moral responsibility, if we cannot control implicit attitudes, and implicit attitudes cause behavior, t…Read more
  •  445
    Knowledge and truth: A skeptical challenge
    with John Turri
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1): 93-101. 2019.
    It is widely accepted in epistemology that knowledge is factive, meaning that only truths can be known. We argue that this theory creates a skeptical challenge: because many of our beliefs are only approximately true, and therefore false, they do not count as knowledge. We consider several responses to this challenge and propose a new one. We propose easing the truth requirement on knowledge to allow approximately true, practically adequate representations to count as knowledge. In addition to a…Read more
  •  438
    Impossible intentions
    American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (4): 319-332. 2021.
    Philosophers are divided on whether it is possible to intend believed-impossible outcomes. Several thought experiments in the action theory literature suggest that this is conceptually possible, though they have not been tested in ordinary social cognition. We conducted three experiments to determine whether, on the ordinary view, it is conceptually possible to intend believed-impossible outcomes. Our findings indicate that participants firmly countenance the possibility of intending believed-im…Read more
  •  437
    In the Thick of Moral Motivation
    with John Turri
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2): 433-453. 2017.
    We accomplish three things in this paper. First, we provide evidence that the motivational internalism/externalism debate in moral psychology could be a false dichotomy born of ambiguity. Second, we provide further evidence for a crucial distinction between two different categories of belief in folk psychology: thick belief and thin belief. Third, we demonstrate how careful attention to deep features of folk psychology can help diagnose and defuse seemingly intractable philosophical disagreement…Read more
  •  431
    Experimental Philosophy
    Annual Review of Psychology 63 (1): 81-99. 2012.
    Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally rela…Read more
  •  418
    Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (5): 629-638. 2013.
    Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people's moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers' moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philoso…Read more
  •  369
    Actionability Judgments Cause Knowledge Judgments
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (3): 212-222. 2016.
    Researchers recently demonstrated a strong direct relationship between judgments about what a person knows and judgments about how a person should act. But it remains unknown whether actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments, or knowledge judgments cause actionability judgments. This paper uses causal modeling to help answer this question. Across two experiments, we found evidence that actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments.
  •  341
    It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a…Read more
  •  320
    In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-bar…Read more
  •  312
    Knowledge Isn’t Closed on Saturday: A Study in Ordinary Language
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3): 395-406. 2010.
    Recent theories of epistemic contextualism have challenged traditional invariantist positions in epistemology by claiming that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions fluctuate between conversational contexts. Contextualists often garner support for this view by appealing to folk intuitions regarding ordinary knowledge practices. Proposed is an experiment designed to test the descriptive conditions upon which these types of contextualist defenses rely. In the cases tested, the folk patt…Read more
  •  309
    Non-Traditional Factors in Judgments about Knowledge
    Philosophy Compass 7 (4): 278-289. 2012.
    One recent trend in contemporary epistemology is to study the way in which the concept of knowledge is actually applied in everyday settings. This approach has inspired an exciting new spirit of collaboration between experimental philosophers and traditional epistemologists, who have begun using the techniques of the social sciences to investigate the factors that influence ordinary judgments about knowledge attribution. This paper provides an overview of some of the results these researchers …Read more
  •  307
    A Guide to Thought Experiments in Epistemology
    In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition, Wiley-blackwell. 2024.
    The purpose of this chapter is to provide a guide for conducting thought experiments in epistemology effectively. The guide raises several considerations for best practices when using this research method. Several weaknesses in the way thought experiments are conducted are also identified and several suggestions are reviewed for how to improve them. Training in these research techniques promotes more productive scholarship in epistemology, saves time and resources wasted on less efficient approa…Read more