Scientists are Epistemic Consequentialists about Imagination

Epistemic Indefinites: Are We Ignorant About Ignorance?

Epistemic indefinites make an existential claim and convey that the speaker does not know which individual makes this claim true. The account put forward by Aloni and Port [3, 2] —which we will dub ‘the Lack of Relevant Identification Approach’— defends that ‘not knowing who’ means that the speaker cannot identify the individual that satisfies the existential claim in a contextually relevant wa...

Vitalizing physician-scientists: it's time to overcome our imagination fatigue.

Nonfactualism about Epistemic Modality

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something factual, something whose truth turns on how things are with some aspect of the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on a different feature of the world, namely, the weatherman’s state of mind. Likewise when I tell you that I th...

Should Kantians Be Consequentialists?

Parfit argues that a form of rule consequentialism can be derived from the most plausible formulation of the fundamental principle of Kantian ethics. And so he concludes that Kantians should be consequentialists. I argue that we have good reason to reject two of the auxiliary premises that figure in Parfit’s derivation of rule consequentialism from Kantianism. In chapter 16 of On What Matters,...

Two claims about epistemic propriety

This paper has two main parts. In the first part, I argue that prominent moves in two related current debates in epistemology—viz., the debates over classical invariantism and the knowledge first movement—depend on one or the other of two claims about epistemic propriety: (1) Impropriety due to lack of a particular epistemic feature suffices for epistemic impropriety; and (2) Having justificati...