Journal ArticlesWhat the Future 'Might' Brings. Mind, forthcoming. [penultimate draft] How Strong is a Counterfactual? (with Ginger Schultheis). Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming. [penultimate draft] Agentive Modals (with Matthew Mandelkern and Ginger Schultheis). The Philosophical Review, 126: 3, 2017. [penultimate draft] Conference Proceedings
Abilities and Success. Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. [published version] Attitudes, Conditionals and Margins for Error (with Ginger Schultheis). Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. [published version] Miners and Modals. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 2018. [published version] Strengthening Principles and Counterfactual Semantics (with Ginger Schultheis). Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, 2017. [published version] I Believe I Can Phi (with Matthew Mandelkern and Ginger Schultheis). Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2015. [published version] |
Work in Progress – Practical Language
Success and Ability This paper considers the status of the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue Success is highly puzzling: it looks required to validate certain other plausible inference patterns; and yet it has counterexamples. I resolve the puzzle by showing we can invalidate Success while validating those related inferences by connecting the meaning of ‘can’ to the facts about what is settled or open. [R&R at Nous] [draft] Agglomeration and 'Ought' I argue that deontic but not epistemic 'ought's agglomerate. I give a theory that predicts this by appealing to the idea that a proposition can be epistemically, but not deontically, better than all the particular ways for it to be true. [R&R at Mind] [draft] Know-How is Knowing How You're Able I consider new linguistic data about know-how, involving coordinated questions, entailments to ability, and indeterminacy and negation. I argue only an intellectualist view, specifically one where knowing how is knowing how you're able, correctly predicts these data. [in progress] Work in Progress – Epistemic Language and Epistemology
Attitudes, Conditionals and the Qualitative Thesis (with Ginger Schultheis) We show that, in standard frameworks, a plausible margin for error principle stands in tension with what we call the Qualitative Thesis, the thesis that, if you leave open p, you should be sure that if p, q iff you should be sure of the corresponding material conditional. We give a new framework for attitudes and conditionals to reconcile the two. [R&R at Journal of Philosophy] [draft] Indicative Conditionals and Negative Introspection I show that, in standard frameworks, two natural principles governing indicative conditionals entail that our information obeys the principle of negative introspection. This leaves us with a dilemma. One principle in my argument, Stability, is a consequence of popular principles linking beliefs in conditionals to conditional beliefs or probabilities; the other is a widely accepted principle about the presuppositions of conditionals. But negative introspection is widely denied by externalist approaches to epistemology, which claim that our access to our own information can be highly constrained. I show how to resolve the dilemma with the Local, Shifty theory of conditionals, advocated in Boylan and Schultheis 2020. [draft] |