Many of these are works in progress, and some have progressed further than others. I welcome comments and criticism. Please do not cite without permission, etc. All links are to pdf files.
Who Needs Intuitions?, June 13, 2008.
Abstract."Intuitions
play critical evidential roles in philosophy." This statement has air
of truism about it; it is widely assumed, and occasionally explicitly
argued, to be correct. It forms the basis of an influential series of
challenges to traditional philosophical methodology; among these are a
reliability challenge—'how can we explain how our intuitions are
reliable guides to philosophical truth?'—and the experimentalist
critique—'it is illegitimate to assume from the armchair that
people really have the intuitions traditional methodology says they do;
in fact, survey data indicates that they often don't'.
I argue that this widespread assumption about the evidential role of
intuitions is importantly ambiguous, and, in the sense that is relied
upon for many such critiques, it is false. Philosophical evidence is
not primarily psychological; traditional methodology does not require
introspected premises of the form 'I have the intuition that p'. In
this matter, I agree with recent work by Timothy Williamson.
I examine three attempts to recast the experimentalist critique in
terms that do not rely upon this false assumption about traditional
methodology: the concepts we happen to have are arbitrary in a way
undermining traditional methodology; empirical research undermines our
confidence in our abilities to discern philosophical truths; general
worries about the epistemology of disagreement, combined with
experimental results, undermine traditional methodology. I suggest that
all of these reformulated challenges can be met.
Dreaming and Imagination. Forthcoming in Mind and Language. Penultimate draft; please refer to published version.
Scepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming. The Philosophical Quarterly, 58 (232), 519–527 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x Penultimate draft; please refer to published version (available here) -- especially important in this case, as the official version has been Britishized; even the title's second letter is not the same.
Abstract. Ernest Sosa has argued that the solution to dream skepticism lies in an understanding of dreams as imaginative experiences – when we dream, on this suggestion, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them. Sosa rebuts skepticism thus: dreams don’t cause false beliefs, so my beliefs cannot be false, having been caused by dreams.
I argue that, even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dreaming, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model, I suggest, is to recharacterize the way we think about dream skepticism: the skeptical threat is not, after all, that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams don’t involve false beliefs, they still pose a skeptical threat, which I elaborate.
Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. Penultimate draft; please refer to published version.
Conceivable Impossibilities Are Conceivably Impossible, (Ben Jarvis and I are working together on a new version fo this material; it should be up soon)Abstract. What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson’s account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson’s, avoids naturalistic skepticism.
Inference and Conditionals, (I'm planning substantial revisions; the paper will be back eventually)
A New Objection to Lewis on Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. September 7, 2006
Because I Said So: Authorial Authority and Truth in Fiction, February 14, 2006. (This paper has been on the back-burner for a long time; I may or may not take it up again some day. I cannot vouch for the quality of the draft available here!)
Abstract. I question alleged limitations on the author's ability to make propositions true in the fiction. I defend a strong principle of authorial authority according to which authors can make whatever they want true in the fiction. I defend this claim from Richard Hanley's recent argument that it is very difficult to make certain propositions true in fictions, and from the standard view in philosophy of fiction according to which the “puzzle of imaginative resistance” poses a threat to authorial authority. I close with an attempt to explain why we seem to have contrary intuitions.
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