• Applied philosophy has been a growing area of research for the last 40 years. Until now, however, almost all of this research has been centered around the field of ethics. A Companion to Applied Philosophy breaks new ground, demonstrating that all areasof philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind, can be applied, and are relevant to questions of everyday life. This perennial topic in philosophy provides an overview of these various applied phi…Read more
  • Reliabilism without Epistemic Consequentialism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (3): 525-555. 2018.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  • The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility (edited book)
    Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch, and Alessandra Tanesini
    Routledge. 2021.
    Humility is a vital aspect of political discussion, social media and self-help, whilst recent empirical research has linked humility to improved well-being, open-mindedness and increased accuracy in assessing persuasive messages. It is also a topic central to research and discussion in philosophy, applied ethics and religious studies. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility is the first collection to present a comprehensive overview the philosophy of humility, whilst also covering impor…Read more
  • An Epistemic Non-Consequentialism
    Kurt L. Sylvan
    The Philosophical Review 129 (1): 1-51. 2020.
    Despite the recent backlash against epistemic consequentialism, an explicit systematic alternative has yet to emerge. This paper articulates and defends a novel alternative, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for the truth. §1 tackles some preliminaries concerning the proper formulation of the epistemic consequentialism / non-consequentialism divide, explains where Epistemic Kantianism falls in the dialectical landscape, and shows how it can capture what seems attrac…Read more
  • Being More Realistic About Reasons: On Rationality and Reasons Perspectivism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3): 605-627. 2018.
    This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the requirements of rationality with the demands of normative reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends upon the agent’s perspective and the other upon features of the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative reasons are subject to the right e…Read more
  • Doxastic permissiveness and the promise of truth
    Synthese 194 (12): 4897-4912. 2017.
    The purpose of this paper is to challenge what is often called the “Uniqueness” thesis. According to this thesis, given one’s total evidence, there is a unique rational doxastic attitude that one can take to any proposition. It is sensible for defenders of Uniqueness to commit to an accompanying principle that: when some agent A has equal epistemic reason both to believe that p and to believe that not p, the unique epistemically rational doxastic attitude for A to adopt with respect to whether p…Read more
  • On the Evidential Import of Unification
    Philosophy of Science 84 (1): 92-114. 2017.
    This paper discusses two senses in which a hypothesis may be said to unify evidence. One is the ability of the hypothesis to increase the mutual information of a set of evidence statements; the other is the ability of the hypothesis to explain commonalities in observed phenomena by positing a common origin for them. On Bayesian updating, it is only mutual information unification that contributes to the incremental support of a hypothesis by the evidence unified. This poses a challenge for the vi…Read more
  • When Does Evidence Suffice for Conviction?
    Mind 127 (508): 1193-1218. 2018.
    There is something puzzling about statistical evidence. One place this manifests is in the law, where courts are reluctant to base affirmative verdicts on evidence that is purely statistical, in spite of the fact that it is perfectly capable of meeting the standards of proof enshrined in legal doctrine. After surveying some proposed explanations for this, I shall outline a new approach – one that makes use of a notion of normalcy that is distinct from the idea of statistical frequency. The pu…Read more
  • In this discussion note, I put forth an argument from the factivity of knowledge for the conclusion that knowledge is epistemic certainty. If this argument is sound, then epistemologists who think that knowledge is factive are thereby also committed to the view that knowledge is epistemic certainty.
  • There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one’s mental states, independently of whether those attitudes are justified. Call this structural rationality. According to the standard view, structural rationality is associ…Read more
  • Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, or to doubt that some particular belief of ours is rational. Perhaps we learn that a trusted friend disagrees with us about what our shared evidence supports. Or perhaps we learn that our beliefs have been afflicted by motivated reasoning or other cognitive biases. These are examples of higher-order evidence. While it may seem plausible that higher-order evidence should impact our beliefs, it is less clear how and why. Norma…Read more
  • Evidence is one of the most fundamental notions in the field of epistemology and is emerging as a major topic across academic disciplines. The practice of every academic discipline consists largely in providing evidence for key theses and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence, the first collection of its kind, is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international …Read more
  • Epistemic Reasons II: Basing
    Philosophy Compass 11 (7): 377-389. 2016.
    The paper is an opinionated tour of the literature on the reasons for which we hold beliefs and other doxastic attitudes, which I call ‘operative epistemic reasons’. After drawing some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of operative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states. I recommend a pluralist non-mentalist view that takes seriously the variety of operative epistemic reasons ascriptions and allows these reasons to b…Read more
  • Epistemic Reasons I: Normativity
    Philosophy Compass 11 (7): 364-376. 2016.
    This paper is an opinionated guide to the literature on normative epistemic reasons. After making some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of normative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states, and concluding that they are not mental states. In §3, I examine the distinction between normative epistemic reasons there are and normative epistemic reasons we possess. I offer a novel account of this distinction and argue that …Read more
  • Friedman on suspended judgment
    Synthese 197 (11): 5009-5026. 2020.
    In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order attitude, with a question as its content. In this paper, I offer a critique of Friedman’s project. I begin by responding to her arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of suspended judgment, and thus undercut the negative case for her own view. Further, I raise worries about the details of her positive account, and in particular about her claim that one suspends judgmen…Read more
  • Knowledge From a Human Point of View (edited book)
    Springer Verlag. 2019.
    This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions in philosophy of science so far have suggested. Perspectivism is a much broader view that emphasizes how our knowledge is situated; it is always from a hu…Read more
  • Normative reasons for action are facts or considerations that contribute to the justification of an action. Sometimes, normative reasons for action conflict: one reason may favor doing something, while another may favor not doing it. These conflicts can be so radical that it seems difficult, if not impossible, to judge which reason should ultimately guide one’s actions. According to a theory of practical rationality known as reasons pluralism, there are some radical cases of conflict among norma…Read more
  • Epistemic Akrasia
    The Monist 85 (3): 381-397. 2002.
    One way of discerning what sort of control we have over our mental lives is to look at cases where that control is not exercised. This is one reason why philosophers have taken an interest in the phenomenon of akrasia, in an agent's ability to do, freely and deliberately, something that they judge they ought not to do. Akrasia constitutes a failure of control but not an absence of control. The akratic agent is not a compulsive; an akratic agent has the ability to control their action, to make it…Read more
  • Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 257-272. 2018.
    In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three way…Read more
  • Belief, Credence, and Evidence
    Synthese 197 (11): 5073-5092. 2020.
    I explore how rational belief and rational credence relate to evidence. I begin by looking at three cases where rational belief and credence seem to respond differently to evidence: cases of naked statistical evidence, lotteries, and hedged assertions. I consider an explanation for these cases, namely, that one ought not form beliefs on the basis of statistical evidence alone, and raise worries for this view. Then, I suggest another view that explains how belief and credence relate to evidence. …Read more
  • A Defense of the (Almost) Equal Weight View
    In David Phiroze Christensen & Jennifer Lackey (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 98-117. 2013.
  • Disagreement, evidence, and agnosticism
    Synthese 187 (2): 753-783. 2012.
    In this paper, I respond to recent attempts by philosophers to deny the existence of something that is both real and significant: reasonable disagreements between epistemic peers. In their arguments against the possibility of such disagreements, skeptical philosophers typically invoke one or more of the following: indifference reasoning , equal weight principles , and uniqueness theses . I take up each of these in turn, finding ample reason to resist them. The arguments for indifference reasonin…Read more
  • Strong and weak justification
    Alvin Goldman
    Philosophical Perspectives 2 51-69. 1988.
    It is common in recent epistemology to distinguish different senses, or conceptions, of epistemic justification. The proposed oppositions include the objective/subjective, internalist/externalist, regulative/nonregulative, resource-relative/resource-independent, personal/verific, and deontological/evaluative conceptions of justification. In some of these cases, writers regard both members of the contrasting pair as legitimate; in other cases only one member. In this paper I want to propose anoth…Read more
  • One of the most important research programmes in contemporary cognitive science is that of extended cognition, whereby features of a subject's cognitive environment can in certain conditions become constituent parts of the cognitive process itself. The aim of this volume is to explore the epistemological ramifications of this idea.... The first part of the volume explores foundational issues with regard to an extended epistemology, including from a critical perspective. The second part of the vo…Read more
  • The Uniqueness Thesis
    Philosophy Compass 11 (4): 189-200. 2016.
    The Uniqueness Thesis holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence. We first sketch some varieties of Uniqueness that appear in the literature. We then discuss some popular views that conflict with Uniqueness and others that require Uniqueness to be true. We then examine some arguments that have been presented in its favor and discuss why permissivists find them unconvincing. Last, we present some purported counterexamples that have been ra…Read more
  • The trouble with having standards
    Philosophical Studies 176 (5): 1225-1245. 2019.
    The uniqueness thesis states that for any body of evidence and any proposition, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude that an epistemic agent can take toward that proposition. Permissivism is the denial of uniqueness. Perhaps the most popular form of permissivism is what I call the Epistemic Standard View, since it relies on the concept of epistemic standards. Roughly speaking, epistemic standards encode particular ways of responding to any possible body of evidence. Since different ep…Read more
  • Is epistemic inconsistency a mere symptom of having violated other requirements of rationality—notably, reasons-responsiveness requirements? Or is inconsistency irrational on its own? This question has important implications for the debate on the normativity of epistemic rationality. In this paper, I defend a new account of the explanatory role of the requirement of epistemic consistency. Roughly, I will argue that, in cases where an epistemically rational agent is permitted to believe P and als…Read more
  • Permissivism and the Value of Rationality: A Challenge to the Uniqueness Thesis
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (2): 286-297. 2018.
    In recent years, permissivism—the claim that a body of evidence can rationalize more than one response—has enjoyed somewhat of a revival. But it is once again being threatened, this time by a host of new and interesting arguments that, at their core, are challenging the permissivist to explain why rationality matters. A version of the challenge that I am especially interested in is this: if permissivism is true, why should we expect the rational credences to be more accurate than the irrational …Read more