I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to comment on Declan Smithies’ thought-provoking, creative, and ambitious book: The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (‘ERC’).1 Unfortunately I can only discuss a small selection of the issues that it covers here. I'll focus on the conception of belief that Smithies defends in Ch. 4–5 (and further in Ch. 7–10): beliefs as dispositions to cause judgments—specifically

A Curry paradox about truth is generated by the following sentence, written on the board in room 101: If the sentence on the board in room 101 is true then 1 ≠ 1. A Curry paradox about validity is generated by the following argument, written on the board in room 102: The argument on the board in room 102 is valid. Therefore, 1 ≠ 1. Though the sentence and the argument generate Curry paradoxes, they

Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? Fanaticism says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I evaluate the prospects for Fanaticism

Elinor Mason's Ways to be Blameworthy offers an interesting and potentially-fruitful distinction between varieties of blame and, correspondingly, between varieties of blameworthiness. The notion of "Grasping" Morality is central to her picture, distinguishing those who act subjectively wrongly and can be blamed in the ordinary way from those who only act objectively wrongly and can only be blamed in

This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded

This paper addresses the question of how the ‘weight’ or ‘strength’ of normative reasons is best understood. We argue that, given our preferred analysis of reasons as sources of normative support, this question has a straightforward answer: the weight of a normative reason is simply a matter of how much support it provides. We also critically discuss several competing views of reasons and their weight

It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is sometimes insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is always insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical

A recent, seemingly appealing version of the powerful qualities view defines properties’ qualitativity via an essentialist claim and their powerfulness via a grounding claim. Roughly, this approach holds that properties are qualities because they have qualitative essences, while they are powerful because their instances or essences ground causal-modal facts. I argue that this theory should be replaced

This paper offers a defense of a much-maligned Leibnizian argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the principle according to which whatever is has a sufficient reason or explanation. While Leibniz’s argument is widely thought to rely on a question-begging premise, the paper offers a wholly original and non-question-begging defense of that premise, a defense that Leibniz did not anticipate

This paper asks: Is the quantifier variantist committed to metaphysical vagueness? My investigation of this question goes via a study of vague existence. I’ll argue that the quantifier variantist is committed to vague existence and that the vague existence posited by the variantist requires a puzzling sort of metaphysical vagueness. Specifically, I distinguish between (what I call) positive and negative

Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing

Recently some epistemologists have approached the question whether epistemic justification comes in degrees from a linguistic perspective. Drawing insights from linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives, they investigate whether epistemic occurrences of ‘justified’ are gradable and if yes what type of gradability they involve. These authors conclude that the adjective passes standard tests for gradability

Hume describes skeptical philosophy as having a variety of desirable effects. It can counteract dogmatism, produce just reasoning, and promote social cohesion. When discussing how skepticism may achieve these effects, Hume typically appeals to its effects on pride. I explain how, for Hume, skeptical philosophy acts on pride and how acting on pride produces the desirable effects. Understanding these

Penance is often said to be a part of the process of making amends for wrongdoing. Here I clarify the nature of penance as a remedial action, highlighting the differences between it and more familiar corrective actions such as reparation and apology, and I offer an account of how penance contributes to the expiation of wrongdoing. In doing so, I reject a popular view according to which one does penance

Recent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence

Roche and Sober (2013; 2014; 2017; 2019) have offered an important new argument that explanatoriness lacks confirmatory significance. My aim in this paper is not only to contend that their argument fails to show that in confirmation ‘there is nothing special about explanatoriness’ (Roche & Sober, 2017: 589), but also to reveal what is special confirmationwise about explanatoriness. I will argue that

Is relativism a coherent thesis? The paper argues for a new view of relativism that opposes both classic and contemporary views. On this view, the thesis of relativism is coherent even if the key notions in the standard apparatus of relativism—of alternative conceptual schemes, relative truth, perspectival content—are all incoherent. The view defended here highlights issues about attitude attribution

Sometimes, the fact that an attitude is fitting seems like a demand to have that attitude. But in other cases, the fact that an attitude is fitting seems more like a permission to have the attitude. I defend a proposal that can accommodate both of these appearances. I argue that there is a kind of emotionlessness, which I call apathy, that can be fitting or unfitting in just the same way that emotion

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

We regularly make graded normative judgements in the epistemic domain. Recent work in the literature examines degrees of justification, degrees of rationality, and degrees of assertability. This paper addresses a different dimension of the gradeability of epistemic normativity, one that has been given little attention. How should we understand degrees of epistemic criticizability? In virtue of what

According to Michael Thompson's defence of neo-Aristotelian naturalism in meta-ethics, (i) ‘[t]he concept life-form is a pure or a priori, perhaps a logical, concept’, and (ii) ‘[t]he concept human, as we human beings have it, is an a priori concept’ (p. 57). Here I show Thompson's argument for (ii) to be unsound, hoping thereby to shed light on the neglected subject of the a prioricity of concepts

Our universe features a harmonious match between laws and states: applying its laws to its states generates other states. This is a striking fact. Matters might have been otherwise. The universe might have been stillborn in a state unengaged by its laws. The problem of nomological harmony is that of explaining the noted striking fact. After introducing and developing this problem, we canvass candidate

We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid.

Elinor Mason has provided an account of blame and blameworthiness that is pluralistic. There are, broadly speaking, three ways in which we aptly blame -- and ordinary sense, directed at those with poor quality of the will, and then a detached sense and an extended sense, in which blame is aptly directed towards those without poor quality of the will as it is normally understood. In this essay I explore

Moral expressivists think that moral thoughts and sentences don’t represent or describe the world, at least not in any interesting sense. Global expressivists think that no thoughts or sentences represent the world; local expressivists think that some do and others don’t. Huw Price has influentially argued that local expressivism collapses into global expressivism, due both to the effects of minimalist

Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that, if moral realism is true, all of our moral beliefs are unjustified. In this paper, I respond to two of the most enduring objections that have been raised against these arguments. The first objection claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are self-undermining, because they cannot be formulated without invoking epistemic principles, and epistemic

Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal-historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different-idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 74, Issue 1, March 2023.

Various philosophers authors have argued—on the basis of powerful examples—that we can have compelling moral or practical reasons to believe, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. This paper explores an alternative story, which still aims to respect widely shared intuitions about the motivating examples. Specifically, the paper proposes that what is at stake in these cases is not belief, but rather

On a highly influential way to think of modality, that I call ‘relationalism’, the modality of a state is explained by its being composed of properties, and these properties being related by a higher-order and primitively modal relation. Examples of relationalism are the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong account of natural necessity, many dispositional essentialist views, and Wang’s incompatibility primitivism

David Lewis’s account of conventions has received substantial criticism over the years, but one aspect of it has been less controversial and thus has been retained in various forms by other authors: his requirement that members of a group in which a convention obtains must know that they and others conform. I argue that knowledge of conformity requirements wrongly exclude certain paradigmatic conventions

It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with

A joke is amusing if and only if it’s fitting to be amused by it; an act is regrettable if and only if it’s fitting to regret it. Many philosophers accept these biconditionals and hold that analogous ones obtain between a wide range of additional evaluative properties and the fittingness of corresponding responses. Call these the fit–value biconditionals. The biconditionals give us a systematic way

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

Perception is riddled with cases of reliable misperception. These are cases in which a perceptual state is tokened inaccurately any time it is tokened under normal conditions. On the face of it, this fact causes trouble for theories that provide an analysis of perceptual content in non-semantic, non-intentional, and non-phenomenal terms, such as those found in Millikan (1984), Fodor (1990), Neander

Philosophers are now wary of conflating the “fittingness” or accuracy of an emotion with any form of moral assessment of that emotion. Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, who originally cautioned against this “conflation”, also warned philosophers not to infer that an emotion is inaccurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally inappropriate, or that it is accurate from the fact that feeling

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content-sensitive first-personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over-intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and

To reconcile the standard possible worlds model of knowledge with the intuition that ordinary agents fall far short of logical omniscience, a Stalnakerian strategy appeals to two components. The first is the idea that mathematical and logical knowledge is at bottom metalinguistic knowledge. The second is the idea that non-ideal minds are often fragmented. In this paper, we investigate this Stalnakerian

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

Two related claims have lately garnered currency: dispositional essentialism—the view that some or all properties, or some or all fundamental properties, are essentially dispositional; and the claim that laws of nature (or again, many or the fundamental ones) are metaphysically necessary. I have argued elsewhere (On the metaphysical contingency of laws of nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002)

ABSTRACT Losing an arm to rescue a child from a burning building is supererogatory. But is losing an arm to save two children more supererogatory than losing two arms to save a single child? What factors make one act more supererogatory than another? I provide an innovative account of how to compare which of two acts is more supererogatory, and show the superiority of this account to its chief rival

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Ahead of Print, 2023)

1 AN HISTORIC IDEA Talk of “rights” is notoriously ambiguous. Rights and Demands—henceforth R&D—focuses on a particular idea of a right.1 I call the corresponding rights “demand-rights”. Crucially, to have a demand-right to a particular action is to have the standing or authority to demand that action of the right's addressee. Demand-rights are of clear practical utility. Your understanding that I

Rights and Demands is a rich and illuminating inquiry into fundamental questions about the meaning and sources of rights. It continues Gilbert's groundbreaking investigations into the social phenomenon she calls “joint commitment.” The focus of the book is the distinctive rights to which, in her view, joint commitments give rise. Although Gilbert's main claims are often modestly hedged, many of them

It is an honor and a privilege to have received the engaged comments of these distinguished philosophers on Rights and Demands.1 I thank them for the time and thought they have put into them. Each commentator makes points I have not been able to address in the space available, and many of the points I do discuss deserve a longer treatment. I hope that, even so, these responsive notes will help further

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

Dasgupta poses a serious challenge to realism about natural properties. He argues that there is no acceptable explanation of why natural properties deserve the value realists assign to them and are consequently absent of value. In response, this paper defines and defends an alternative non-explanatory account of normativity compatible with realism. Unlike Lewis and Sider, who believe it is sufficient

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.

In 2021, Germany passed the first law worldwide that regulates dilemma situations with autonomous cars. Against this background, this article investigates the permissibility of trade-offs between human lives in the context of self-driving cars. It does so by drawing on the debate about the traditional trolley problem. In contrast to most authors in the relevant literature, it argues that the debate

Desire theories of well-being claim that how well our life goes for us is solely determined by the fulfilment and frustration of our desires. Several writers have argued that these theories are incorrect because they fail to capture the harms of self-sacrifice and severe depression. In this paper, I argue that desire theories of well-being can account for the harm of both phenomena by rejecting proportionalism

I introduce a novel and quite intuitive interpretation of the ternary relation that figures in the relational semantics of many relevance logics. Conceptually, my interpretation makes use only of incompatibility and parthood relations, defined over a set of states. In this way, the proposed interpretation—of the ternary relation and the conditional—extends Dunn’s and Restall’s works on negation and

We begin by showing that every theory of the value of uncertain prospects must have one of three unpalatable properties. Reckless theories recommend giving up a sure thing, no matter how good, for an arbitrarily tiny chance of enormous gain; timid theories permit passing up an arbitrarily large potential gain to prevent a tiny increase in risk; non-transitive theories deny the principle that, if A

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.