Book:

Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford University Press, 2014

Available here.

Articles and book chapters:

Forthcoming and in press

“Losing Knowledge by Thinking about Thinking”, forthcoming in Reasons, Justification and Defeat, Jessica Brown and Mona Simion, eds. Oxford University Press.

“The Psychological Dimension of the Lottery Paradox”, in The Lottery Paradox, Igor Douven, ed., Cambridge University Press.

2019

“The Psychology of Epistemic Judgement” (with Jessica Wright), in the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology, John Symons, Paco Calvo and Sarah Robins, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019, 746-765.

“Epistemic Territory”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 93 (2019), 67-86.

“Classical Indian Skepticism: Reforming or Rejecting Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 10:2 (2019), 113-118.

2018

“Epistemic authority, episodic memory, and the sense of self”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2018 35-36.

The distinctive feature of episodic memory is autonoesis, the feeling that one’s awareness of particular past events is grounded in firsthand experience. Autonoesis guides us in sharing our experiences of past events, not by telling us when our credibility is at stake, but by telling us what others will find informative; it also supports the sense of an enduring self.

2017

“The Psychological Context of Contextualism” (with Julia Jael Smith), in the Routledge Handbook to Contextualism, Jonathan Ichikawa, ed. New York: Routledge, 2017 94-104.

“Factive and non-factive mental state attribution” Mind & Language 32 (2017), 525-544

Factive mental states, such as knowing or being aware, can only link an agent to the truth; by contrast, non-factive states, such as believing or thinking, can link an agent to either truths or falsehoods. Researchers on mental state attribution often draw a sharp line between the capacity to attribute accurate states of mind, and the capacity to attribute inaccurate or ‘reality-incongruent’ states of mind, such as false belief. This article argues that the contrast that really matters for mental state attribution does not divide accurate from inaccurate states, but factive from non-factive ones.

2016

Knowledge and Reliability, in Alvin Goldman and his Critics, ed. Hilary Kornblith and Brian McLaughlin. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, 237-256.

Internalists have criticised reliabilism for overlooking the importance of the subject's point of view in the generation of knowledge. This paper argues that there is a troubling ambiguity in the intuitive examples that internalists have used to make their case, and on either way of resolving this ambiguity, reliabilism is untouched. However, the argument used to defend reliabilism against the internalist cases could also be used to defend a more radical form of externalism in epistemology.

“Armchair-Friendly Experimental Philosophy” (with Kaija Mortensen), in A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter, eds. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, 53-70.

Once symbolized by a burning armchair, experimental philosophy has in recent years shifted away from its original hostility to traditional methods. Starting with a brief historical review of the experimentalist challenge to traditional philosophical practice, this chapter looks at research undercutting that challenge, and at ways in which experimental work has evolved to complement and strengthen traditional approaches to philosophical questions.

2015

“The Social Value of Reasoning”, Episteme 12:2, 297-308.

When and why does it matter whether we can give an explicit justification for what we believe? This paper examines these questions in the light of recent empirical work on the social functions served by our capacity to reason, in particular, Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning.

Sensitive Knowledge: Locke on Skepticism and Sensation, in the Blackwell Companion to Locke, ed. Matthew Stuart. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2015, 313-333.

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke insists that all knowledge consists in perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. However, he also insists that knowledge extends to outer reality, claiming that perception yields ‘sensitive knowledge’ of the existence of outer objects.  Some scholars have argued that Locke did not really mean to restrict knowledge to perceptions of relations within the realm of ideas; others have argued that sensitive knowledge is not strictly speaking a form of knowledge for Locke.  This chapter argues that Locke’s conception of sensitive knowledge is in fact compatible with his official definition of knowledge, and discusses his treatment of the problem of skepticism, both in the Essay and in the correspondence with Stillingfleet.

2014

“The Meanings of Metacognition”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89:3, 710-718.

Noetic feelings, like the feeling of certainty and the tip-of-the-tongue state, have an interesting place in our cognitive economy.  Joelle Proust’s account of these feelings emphasizes the procedural guidance they supply, while arguing that this guidance does not depend on any conceptual ability to attribute mental states. I argue that she has made a strong case for their procedural value but hasn’t conclusively shown that they work in a way that is independent of our capacities for mental state attribution.

“Intuition, Reflection, and the Command of Knowledge”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 88 (2014), 217-39.

Action is not always guided by conscious deliberation; in many circumstances, we act intuitively rather than reflectively. Tamar Gendler contends that because intuitively guided action can lead us away from our reflective commitments, it limits the power of knowledge to guide action.  While I agree that intuition can diverge from reflection, I argue that this is not always a bad thing, and that it does not constitute a restriction on the power of knowledge.  After explaining my view of the contrast between intuitive and reflective thinking, this paper argues against the conclusions Gendler draws from empirical work on implicit bias.

The Reliability of Epistemic Intuitions (with Kenneth Boyd), in Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Edouard Machery and Elizabeth O’Neill (Routledge, 2014).

This chapter argues that intuitions about particular instances of knowledge are generally a reliable guide to the nature of knowledge itself. We argue that there is antecedent reason to expect epistemic intuitions to be reliable due to their nature and function, and that prominent challenges presented by experimental philosophers (e.g. that intuitions are susceptible to demographic and contextual variation) misrepresent available data and stem from debatable assumptions about the way people reason. Furthermore, we argue that disagreement about intuitions (both between “experts” and “laypeople” and amongst experts themselves) does not provide reason to think that epistemic intuitions are unreliable.

2013

Authentic Gettier Cases: A reply to Starmans and Friedman (with Valerie San Juan and Raymond A. Mar), Cognition 129 (2013), 666-669.

Do laypeople and philosophers differ in their attributions of knowledge? Starmans and Friedman maintain that laypeople differ from philosophers in taking ‘authentic evidence’ Gettier cases to be cases of knowledge.  Their reply helpfully clarifies the distinction between ‘authentic evidence’ and ‘apparent evidence’.  Using their sharpened presentation of this distinction, we contend that the argument of our original paper still stands.

Lay Denial of Knowledge for Justified True Beliefs (with Valerie San Juan and Raymond A. Mar), Cognition 129 (2013), 652-661.

Intuitively, there is a difference between knowledge and mere belief. Contemporary philosophical work on the nature of this difference has focused on scenarios known as “Gettier cases.” Designed as counterexamples to the classical theory that knowledge is justified true belief, these cases feature agents who arrive at true beliefs in ways which seem reasonable or justified, while nevertheless seeming to lack knowledge. Prior empirical investigation of these cases has raised questions about whether lay people generally share philosophers’ intuitions about these cases, or whether lay intuitions vary depending on individual factors (e.g. ethnicity) or factors related to specific types of Gettier cases (e.g. cases that include apparent evidence). We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge. Although participants rated true beliefs in Gettier and Skeptical Pressure cases as being justified, they were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge for these cases than for matched true belief cases. This pattern of response was consistent across different variations of Gettier cases and did not vary by ethnicity or gender, although attributions of justification were found to be positively related to measures of empathy. These findings therefore suggest that across demographic groups, laypeople share similar epistemic concepts with philosophers, recognizing a difference between knowledge and justified true belief.

Defending the Evidential Value of Epistemic Intuitions: A Reply to Stich, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86:1 (July 2013), 179-199.

Do epistemic intuitions tell us anything about knowledge? Stich has argued that we respond to cases according to our contingent cultural programming, and not in a manner that tends to reveal anything significant about knowledge itself.  I’ve argued that a cross-culturally universal capacity for mindreading produces the intuitive sense that the subject of a case has or lacks knowledge.  This paper responds to Stich’s charge that mindreading is cross-culturally varied in a way that will strip epistemic intuitions of their evidential value.  I argue that existing work on cross-cultural variation in mindreading favors my position over Stich’s.

Knowledge as a Mental State, Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4 (May 2013), 273-308. (or here)

In the philosophical literature on mental states, the paradigmatic examples of mental states are beliefs, desires, intentions, and phenomenal states such as being in pain.  The corresponding list in the psychological literature on mental state attribution includes one further member: the state of knowledge.  This article examines the reasons why developmental, comparative and social psychologists have classified knowledge as a mental state, while most recent philosophers--with the notable exception of Timothy Williamson-- have not. The disagreement is traced back to a difference in how each side understands the relationship between the concepts of knowledge and belief, concepts which are understood in both disciplines to be closely linked. Psychologists and philosophers other than Williamson have generally have disagreed about which of the pair is prior and which is derivative. The rival claims of priority are examined both in the light of philosophical arguments by Williamson and others, and in the light of empirical work on mental state attribution.

Motivating Williamson’s Model Gettier Cases, Inquiry 56:1 (April 2013), 54-62, (or here).

Internalists have criticised reliabilism for overlooking the importance of the subject's point of view in the generation of knowledge. This paper argues that there is a troubling ambiguity in the intuitive examples that internalists have used to make their case, and on either way of resolving this ambiguity, reliabilism is untouched. However, the argument used to defend reliabilism against the internalist cases could also be used to defend a more radical form of externalism in epistemology.

2012

Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85:3 (November 2012).

Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender.  This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared.  It argues that epistemic intuitions are produced by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction.  Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception.  Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions.

Mindreading in Gettier Cases and Sceptical Pressure Cases, in Knowledge Ascriptions, Jessica Brown and Mikkel Gerken, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2012), 171-191.

To what extent should we trust our natural instincts about knowledge?  The question has special urgency for epistemologists who want to draw evidential support for their theories from certain intuitive epistemic assessments while discounting others as misleading.  This paper focuses on the viability of endorsing the legitimacy of Gettier intuitions while resisting the intuitive pull of skepticism – a combination of moves that most mainstream epistemologists find appealing.  Awkwardly enough, the “good” Gettier intuitions and the “bad” skeptical intuitions seem to be equally strong.  This chapter argues that it is not a coincidence that these two types of intuition register with equal force: they are generated by a common mechanism. However, the input to this mechanism is interestingly different in the two types of case, and different in a way that can support the mainstream view that Gettier cases tell us something about knowledge where skeptical intuitions involve systematic error.

2011 and before

The Psychological Basis of the Harman-Vogel Paradox, Philosophers’ Imprint 11:5 (March 2011), 1-28.

Harman’s lottery paradox, generalized by Vogel to a number of other cases, involves a curious pattern of intuitive knowledge ascriptions: certain propositions seem easier to know than various higher-probability propositions that are recognized to follow from them.  For example, it seems easier to judge that someone knows his car is now on Avenue A, where he parked it an hour ago, than to judge that he knows that it is not the case that his car has been stolen and driven away in the last hour.  Contextualists have taken this pattern of intuitions as evidence that “knows” does not always denote the same relationship; subject-sensitive invariantists have taken this pattern of intuitions as evidence that non-traditional factors such as practical interests figure in knowledge; still others have argued that the Harman-Vogel pattern gives us a reason to abandon the principle that knowledge is closed under known entailment.  This paper argues that there is a psychological explanation of the strange pattern of intuitions, grounded in the manner in which we shift between an automatic or heuristic mode of judgment and a controlled or systematic mode.  Understanding the psychology behind the pattern of intuitions enables us to see that the pattern gives us no reason to abandon traditional intellectualist invariantism.  The psychological account of the paradox also yields new resources for clarifying and defending the single premise closure principle for knowledge ascriptions.

Epistemic Anxiety and Adaptive Invariantism, Philosophical Perspectives 24 (December 2010), 407-435. Penultimate draft here,

Do we apply higher epistemic standards to subjects with high stakes?  This paper argues that we expect different outward behavior from high-stakes subjects—for example, we expect them to collect more evidence than their low-stakes counterparts—but not because of any change in epistemic standards.  Rather, we naturally expect subjects in any condition to think in a roughly adaptive manner, balancing the expected costs of additional evidence collection against the expected value of gains in accuracy.   The paper reviews a body of empirical work on the automatic regulation of cognitive effort in response to stakes, and argues that we naturally see high- and low-stakes subjects as experiencing different levels of ‘epistemic anxiety’, and anticipate different levels of cognitive effort from them for this reason.  If unresolved epistemic anxiety always bars an ascription of knowledge, then we can explain our responses to cases involving shifting stakes without positing any variation in the standards of intuitive knowledge ascription.

Knowledge Ascriptions and the Psychological Consequences of Thinking about Error, Philosophical Quarterly 60: 239 (April 2010): 286-306 (or here).

Epistemologists generally agree that the stringency of intuitive ascriptions of knowledge is increased when unrealized possibilities of error are mentioned.  For example, being prompted to think about the possibility of tricky lighting can leave us inclined to describe a subject as merely believing, rather than knowing, that an object is a certain color, even if it is stipulated that the lighting was in fact normal for the subject in question.  Non-skeptical invariantists like Timothy Williamson and John Hawthorne argue that it is a mistake to give in to the temptation to be more stringent in such cases, but they do not deny that we feel it.  They offer a psychological explanation of the temptation towards higher stringency, an explanation that appeals to the availability heuristic.  This paper argues against the availability explanation and sketches a rival account of what happens to us psychologically when possibilities of error are raised.

Knowledge Ascriptions and the Psychological Consequences of Changing Stakes, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (June 2008): 279-294. (or here)

Why do our intuitive knowledge ascriptions shift when a subject’s practical interests are mentioned?  Many efforts to answer this question have focused on empirical linguistic evidence for context sensitivity in knowledge claims, but the empirical psychology of belief formation and attribution also merits attention. The present paper examines a major psychological factor (called “need-for-closure”) relevant to ascriptions involving practical interests. Need-for-closure plays an important role in determining whether one has a settled belief; it also influences the accuracy of one’s cognition. Given these effects, it is a mistake to assume that high- and low-stakes subjects provided with the same initial evidence are perceived to enjoy belief formation that is the same as far as truth-conducive factors are concerned.  This mistaken assumption has underpinned  contextualist and interest-relative invariantist treatments of cases in which contrasting knowledge ascriptions are elicited by descriptions of subjects with the same initial information and different stakes.  The paper argues that intellectualist invariantism in fact yields the best treatment of such cases.

Epistemic Intuitions Philosophy Compass 2/6 (2007): 792–819.  Or here.

We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion.  Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone’s condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology.

Contemporary Scepticism and the Cartesian God, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (September 2005), 465-497.

Descartes claims that God is incomprehensible and yet clearly and distinctly understood; indeed, we gain knowledge of God exactly by recognizing our inability to comprehend him  Looking at these claims against a historical background of skeptical arguments about the difficulty of knowing God, this paper examines the role that Descartes wants awareness of our cognitive limitations to play in anchoring our knowledge of other things. I argue that the Cartesian contrast between comprehension and understanding sets limits on the ambition of his response to skepticism, and that these limits have value for contemporary discussions of skepticism as well.

The Empiricist Conception of Experience, Philosophy 75 (July 2000), 345-376.

One might think that a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience would require us to give up any claim to nontrivial a priori knowledge. One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge--if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as, say, a memory or daydream. This paper argues that, surprisingly enough, we can find elements of this essentially Kantian line about experience even in the work of empiricists, such as John Locke and Bas van Fraassen.

 

Reviews, encyclopedia entries and conference proceedings:

Gendler on Alief.  Contribution to book symposium on Tamar Gendler’s Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology, Analysis Reviews 72:4, 774-788.

The Attitude of Knowledge. Contribution to book symposium on Keith DeRose’s The Case for Contextualism, Vol. 1, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84:3 (2012), 678-685.

Broadly Kantian Epistemology and the Problem of Mind-Independence Proceedings of the X International Kant Congress (Berlin, DeGruyter 2008), 699-709.

Review of Albert Casullo, A Priori Knowledge The Philosophical Review (April 2006) 115:2, 251-255.

Empiricism encyclopedia entry for The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Sarkar and Pfeifer, eds. (Routledge, 2006), 235-243.

Review of Joel Pust, Intuitions as Evidence Philosophy in Review (August 2001), 282-285.

Review of Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutability Reality, ed. Sarah Hutton.  Philosophy in Review (February 1998), 19-21.