There is Some Truth in That

I haven’t been updating my blog since moving to UBC last fall, partly because I’ve been busy preparing new courses and grant applications and settling into a new city. (My two biggest professional bits of news over the last while, for anyone interested who hasn’t already heard elsewhere, are that The Rules of Thought, my book [...]

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I have completed a draft of a new short discussion piece on Michael Blome-Tillmann’s (2009) Mind paper, “Knowledge and Presuppositions”. It is essentially a development of this blog post from a year and a half ago. (I’d forgotten about it, to be honest — I rediscovered it as I finished drafting.) My new paper: Ignorance [...]

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I’m starting work on a new project on epistemic justification. I’m trying to begin by laying out various perceived or actual desiderata for theories of epistemic justification. Here’s one, laid out in Alvin Goldman’s classic paper, “What is Justified Belief?”: a theory of justification should give necessary and sufficient conditions in non-epistemic terms. We could [...]

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Benjamin Jarvis and I have been working for some time now on a book manuscript on mental content, rationality, and the epistemology of philosophy. I posted a TOC of our first draft last summer. Since then, we’ve received some helpful comments from reviewers, and have revised extensively; we now have a full new draft, which [...]

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Suppose that Katie is sitting out in the sun. Here are two propositions: (1) It is sunny. (2) Jonathan is wearing glasses or Jonathan is not wearing glasses. It’s pretty plausible to develop the case in such a way that each of (1) and (2) would be rational for Katie to believe, and irrational for [...]

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According to David Lewis’s classic paper, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” conversations, like sporting matches, have scores, which characterize the current situation, and rules, which interact with scores to determine what is permissible. The score of a baseball game includes the number of runs scored, an indication of which team is batting, the number of [...]

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I spent the last week at the APA Pacific in San Diego. I have several topics inspired there that I’m hoping to write up quick blog posts about, including some philosophical and nonphilosophical ones. In general, I think I’m going to start using this blog for a bit more extraphilosophy content. I’ll start that not-right-now, [...]

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Suppose somebody has a false intuition about an a priori matter. Is she justified in believing its content? Many plausible answers, of course, will begin with “it depends…”. On what does it depend? Ernie Sosa thinks that among the things upon which it depends is whether the false intuition derives from “some avoidably defective way”; such [...]

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I’m thinking about a point that Ernie Sosa has made in response to survey-based experimental philosophy challenges. As we all know, some critics have argued that certain experimental results challenge traditional armchair philosophy. In particular, for example, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich found that there seemed to be a systematic divergence of epistemic intuitions depending upon [...]

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A conversation last night with Yuri and Andy helped me to get clearer on the argument I was trying to press in my last post. Here’s the much more succinct way to make the point. It’s an argument against forms of contextualism that put relevant alternatives into the proposition expressed by knowledge attributions. Suppose I’m [...]

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Suppose you agree with Jonathan Schaffer that ‘knows’ takes an extra argument place, and that variation in what fills this slot explains the context-sensitivity of ‘S-knows-that-p’ attributions. Knowledge relates, say, a subject, a proposition, and, let’s call it, the ‘epistemic standard’. Nothing yet is assumed about what sort of thing that is. Schaffer thinks the epistemic [...]

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One of the questions I’ve been thinking about lately (unrelated to most of my recent blog posts) concerns the best linguistic implementation of contextualism about ‘knows’. I’ve committed myself to contextualism in a couple of papers, but so far I have tried to avoid a commitment to any particular semantic treatment of ‘knows’. I take [...]

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For reasons exactly like the ones outlined in the previous post, these two claims are importantly distinct: (1) If S knows p, then S can appropriately rely on p in practical reasoning. (2) If S knows p, then p is warranted enough to justify S in phi-ing, for any phi. I argued a couple of [...]

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Here’s a crazy thesis that nobody holds: (1) If S knows that p, then S is permitted to assert that p. There are boring counterexamples to (1). For instance, there are cases in which I am morally forbidden from asserting things that I know. This, of course, shows nothing interesting about the relationship between knowledge [...]

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I’m thinking a bit more today about the point I made in a post yesterday about the use of intuitions about cases to evaluate knowledge norms. That point was basically that facts about whether S knows p and whether S is well-enough situated epistemically in order appropriately to X don’t by themselves say anything about [...]

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