Research
My primary areas of research are in epistemology, and in
the philosophy of language, particularly, issues concerning linguistic meaning
and cognition. The list of drafts and works in progress below gives you an idea
into the kinds of issues that interest me. (Updated Aug. 3rd, 2013).
Justified
Believing is Tracking Your Evidential Commitments
Logos
and Episteme III.4 (545-564), 2012
|
According to my Commitment-tracking theory of the
rationality of inference, an inference is rational only if it is properly
evidence-tracking. What counts as evidence for a subject is a matter of a
subject's commitments. This commitment- tracking theory of evidence states
that, for a subject S, what counts as evidence for what depends both on the
structure and content of S's knowledge, beliefs, and credences, and on a set
of objective, subject-independent normative principles that generate from
that noetic structure a new structure, the class of beliefs and credences to
which S is committed. This latter class of commitments is what S's inferences
must track in order to be rational. The Commitment-Tracking theory makes sense
of the way in which evidence seems to be both subjective and objective, and
it blocks a certain kind of skepticism regarding the rationality of
inferences. |
Calibrated Probabilities and the
Epistemology of Disagreement
forthcoming
in Synthese.
Link is to penultimate draft.
Please reference and cite final draft only.
|
This paper uses two different measures of reliability
for probabilistic belief-revision rules, Calibration and Brier Scoring, to assess
the comparative reliability of two belief-revision rules relevant to the
epistemology of disagreement, the Equal Weight and Stay the Course rules. On
the Calibration measure of reliability, epistemic peerhood is easy to come
by, and employing the Equal Weight rule in the case of peer disagreement
generally renders you less reliable than Staying the Course. On the
Brier-Score measure of reliability, epistemic peerhood is much more difficult
to come by, but employing the Equal Weight rule in the case of peer
disagreement always renders you more reliable than Staying the Course. I
conclude with some lessons we can draw from these formal results for the
normative issues rational belief-change in the face of peer disagreement,
foreshadowing part II of my work on this topic, ``On the Rationality of
Belief-Invariance in Light of Peer Disagreement." |
The Rationality
of Belief-Invariance in Light of Peer Disagreement
Philosophical
Review 120:2 Apr. 2011.
Link is
to penultimate draft. Please reference and cite final draft only.
|
This is part II of the work on the epistemological
significance of disagreement and a continuation of the paper posted above,
"Calibrated Probabilities and the Epistemology of Disagreement".
This paper draws two anti-skeptical lessons from the formal results of the
first paper, namely, that it is not the case that you are always rationally
obliged to change your mind in the face of disagreement, and that when you
are so-obliged, the result is that you increase your knowledge. In the
process, I respond to the Elga objection to Stay the Course views in the
epistemology of disagreement by showing how, on any measure of reliability
and epistemic peerhood, the inference from disagreement to epistemic
inferiority or superiority is invalid. |
Are Cantonese
Speakers Really Descriptivists? Revisiting Cross-cultural Semantics
Cognition 115 (2010) 320-329
|
This is a response to Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and
Stich's 2004 "Semantics, Cross-cultural Style" in which I provide
data that native Cantonese-speakers are not descriptivists about the
referents of proper names. |
Reasoning about
Knowledge: the Role of Evidence and Stakes
(manuscript.
Please request permission to cite)
|
This is an empirical study of the role that visual
evidence and monetary stakes play in third-party knowledge ascriptions.
Subjects are given an "online" task in which they use information
about the evidence available to two third parties who are investigating
whether P, and information about what is at stake for the third-parties in
getting things right or wrong about P, to draw a conclusion about which third
party is likeliest to know that P. The conclusion is that whether stakes play
a role in knowledge-ascriptions might in fact be task-dependent. |
forthcoming in Acta Analytica
|
What is the proper attitude toward what is expressed by a vague
sentence in the face of borderline evidence? Many call this attitude ÒambivalenceÓ
and distinguish it from uncertainty. It has been argued that Classical
Epistemicism and classical probability theory fail to characterize this
attitude, and that we must therefore abandon classical logic or classical
probabilities in the presence of vagueness. In this paper, I give a
characterization of ambivalence assuming a supervaluationist semantics for
vague terms that does not revise either. The theory, which I call the theory
of Superprobabilities, identifies the proper attitude toward a vague
sentence, in the presence of exact borderline evidence, as the set of
classical probabilities of the evidence on each member of the set of all
precisifications of a vague sentence. I defend the use of sets of
probabilities against objections by generalization the theory of
Superprobabilities to a theory of rational betting called Superrationality. I
then compare the merits of the theory of Superprobabilities to Classical
Epistemicism and nonclassical probabilities theories with respect to the
problem of ambivalence. |
The Dynamic
Foundations of Epistemic Rationality
PhD
Thesis, Princeton University. January 2007
|
Abstract: Classical theories of epistemic rationality
take an agentÕs individual beliefs to be the only things that are rational or
irrational. For them, rationality is wholly static. Recent work in
epistemology take sets of individual beliefs and also changes of belief over
time to be rational or irrational. For these theories, rationality is both
static and dynamic. However, for both groups, static rationality is
fundamental. In my dissertation, I argue to the contrary that, in fact, all
rationality is dynamic rationality. Epistemic reasons, rationality, and
justification as applying only to changes of belief. This wholly dynamic view
of rationality, which I call "Dynamicism" has wide-ranging
epistemological consequences. A small set of simple, elegant, and
independently motivated principles of dynamic rationality can illuminate and
solve otherwise interminable epistemological disputes. |