Sosa’s theory of knowledge

Synthese - This paper is a critical discussion of Ernest Sosa’s recent analysis of reflective knowledge.     

Benacerraf,Field, and the agreement of mathematicians

Synthese - Hartry Field’s epistemological challenge to the mathematical platonist is often cast as an improvement on Paul Benacerraf’s original epistemological challenge. I disagree....     

Hale’s argument from transitive counting

Synthese - A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications...     

Making AI meaningful again

Synthese - Artificial intelligence (AI) research enjoyed an initial period of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s, but this enthusiasm was tempered by a long interlude of frustration when genuinely...     

Meaning relativism and subjective idealism

Synthese - The paper discusses an objection, put forward by—among others—John McDowell, to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s non-factualist and relativist view of semantic discourse....     

Can performance epistemology explain higher epistemic value?

Synthese - Judgment and Agency contains Sosa’s latest effort to explain how higher epistemic value of the sort missing from an unwitting clairvoyant’s beliefs might be a special case of...     

Some fallibilist knowledge: Questioning knowledge-attributions and open knowledge

Synthese - We may usefully distinguish between one’s having fallible knowledge and having a fallibilist stance on some of one’s knowledge. A fallibilist stance could include a...     

Hoops and Barns: a new dilemma for Sosa

Synthese - This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central...     

Is Hume’s Principle analytic?

Synthese - The question of the analyticity of Hume’s Principle (HP) is central to the neo-logicist project. We take on this question with respect to Frege’s definition of analyticity,...     

Hans Reichenbach,radio philosopher: a preliminary report

Synthese - This essay looks at some of the key aspects of Hans Reichenbach’s career as a radio engineer, broadcaster, and producer. It argues that some of the themes of Reichenbach’s...     

Science and common sense: perspectives from philosophy and science education

Synthese - This paper explores the relation between scientific knowledge and common sense intuitions as a complement to Hoyningen-Huene’s account of systematicity. On one hand,...     

Calculus as method or calculus as rules? Boole and Frege on the aims of a logical calculus

Synthese - By way of a close reading of Boole and Frege’s solutions to the same logical problem, we highlight an underappreciated aspect of Boole’s work—and of its difference with...     

(Co-)Constructing a theory of mind: From language or through language?

Synthese - There is a large body of empirical work that has investigated the relationship between parents’ child-directed speech and their children’s Theory of Mind development. That...     

Physical models and embodied cognition

Synthese - Philosophers have recently paid more attention to the physical aspects of scientific models. The attention is motivated by the prospect that a model’s physical features strongly...     

The ignorance behind inconsistency toleration

Synthese - Inconsistency toleration is the phenomenon of working with inconsistent information without threatening one’s rationality. Here I address the role that ignorance plays for the...     

Gödel,Carnap and the Fregean Heritage

Synthese - Thorough a detailed analysis of version III of Gödel's Is mathematics syntax of language?, we propose a new interpretation of Gödel's criticism against the...     

Concepts and categorization: do philosophers and psychologists theorize about different things?

Synthese - I discuss Edouard Machery’s claim that philosophers and psychologists when using the term ‘concept’ are really theorizing about different things. This view is not new,...     

Systematicity,knowledge, and bias. How systematicity made clinical medicine a science

Synthese - This paper shows that the history of clinical medicine in the eighteenth century supports Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s thesis that there is a correlation between science and...     

Revisiting Reichenbach’s logic

Synthese - In this paper we show that, when analyzed with contemporary tools in logic—such as Dunn-style semantics, Reichenbach’s three-valued logic exhibits many interesting features,...     

Reasoning without regress

Synthese - In this paper I explore alternative ways of answering the infinite regress problem of inference, as it was depicted in Lewis Carroll’s ‘What the Tortoise said to...