… skeptical arguments. A new paper of mine, “Skeptical Appeal: The Source-Content Bias” (forthcoming in Cognitive Science), uncovers a subtle mechanism that triggers knowledge-denial and contributes to the appeal of classic skeptical arguments. The mechanism is an interaction between two factors. … Continue reading
Phenomenal conservatism and dogmatism get a bad rep for allowing some cases of wishful thinking to provide prima facie justification. In this post, I argue that reliabilism has wishful thinking problems that are even worse. Contrast direct and indirect wishful … Continue reading
Can a subject’s beliefs, desires, fears, or goals causally influence the way things seem to her? Suppose that the answer is yes. That is, suppose that a subject’s mental states can penetrate the way things seem to her. What are … Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a bit about McDowell’s epistemological argument for the disjunctive conception of experience. One reaction I’ve come across in conversation is basically that McDowell derives an implausible claim about the nature of experience from implausible claims about perceptual … Continue reading
Here is my impression: it is very popular to allow certain kinds of experiences to provide (prima facie propositional) justification for certain propositions. Which propositions might an experience justify? The most straightforward thing to say is that certain experiences provide … Continue reading
The deadline for submissions to the 3rd Formal Epistemology Festival is the end of this month, Feb. 28. This year’s festivities are in Toronto, May 11-13, and the topics are Learning from Experience and Defeasible Reasoning. The invited speakers are … Continue reading
I just finished teaching on Sosa’s safety-based defense of Mooreanism. Here’s a counterexample to safety I made up for my class. (An informal survey, on a 7-point Likert-scale, suggests the intuition enjoys strong support.) BANNED ART EXHIBIT: The Art Institute … Continue reading
In a forthcoming paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Jonathan Weisberg shows that enthusiasts for conditionalization cannot accommodate a certain strong kind of holism. Very interestingly, Weisberg shows that this result does not just hold for … Continue reading
I was talking with Matt McGrath yesterday about the following problem. If we consider ordinary epistemic principles such as “if you’re appeared to F-ly, without grounds for doubt, then it is reasonable to believe that something is F,” we can … Continue reading
The restrictive view that collapses the distinction between epistemic permission and epistemic obligation is at odds with most versions of coherentism, and there’s an interesting reason why, I think. Suppose we begin with the assumption that knowledge and justification ultimately … Continue reading