All Papers

A full list of my online papers is below, or these links will take you to dedicated pages for various types of articles:

Work in Progress

Four Problems in Decision Theory
games and decisions
unpublished
in progress
In dynamic games where there is only one possible choice to make, the same choices are rational whether someone is playing the dynamic or strategic form of the game. Or, at…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Most Cited Articles at the Time
history of analytic
unpublished
in progress
Imagine people at different times over the past half-century asking the following question: What philosophy journal article, published less than ten years ago, has the most…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Trends in Philosophical Studies, 1980-2019
history of analytic
in progress
unpublished
Philosophical Studies is the most cited journal in English-language philosophy. This essay looks at how it became so central, and how the changes in its subject matter…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Intrinsic Knowledge
epistemology
metaphysics
in progress
unpublished
This is a commentary on Jonathan Stoltz’s paper “Inferential Knowledge and What that Determines” for a volume called Learning from Buddhist Logic edited by Koji…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Anti-Anti-Desire-As-Belief
games and decisions
ethics
in progress
unpublished
David Lewis put forward a decision theoretic argument against there being a tight connection between desires and beliefs about the good. I argue that his argument fails…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Some Data about Citation Trends
history of analytic
in progress
unpublished
In the future I plan to write something substantive about trends in citations in philosophy journals. This is a presentation of some of the underlying data, with some small…
Brian Weatherson
2024

The End of Decision Theory
games and decisions
unpublished
in progress
What question are decision theorists trying to answer, and why is it worth trying to answer it? A lot of philosophers talk as if the aim of decision theory is to describe…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Epistemic Permissiveness and Symmetric Games
games and decisions
epistemology
unpublished
in progress
Permissivism in epistemology is a family of theses, each of which says that rationality is compatible with a number of distinct attitudes. This paper argues that thinking…
Brian Weatherson
2021
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Published Papers

Epistemic Modals in Context
language
relativism
A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community…
Andy Egan, John Hawthorne, Brian Weatherson
2005

Morality, Fiction and Possibility
ethics
metaphysics
Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe…
Brian Weatherson
2004

Knowledge, Bets and Interests
epistemology
interest-relativity
games and decisions
This paper argues that the interest-relativity of knowledge cannot be explained by the interest-relativity of belief. The discussion starts with an argument that knowledge…
Brian Weatherson
2012

Conditionals and Indexical Relativism
language
conditionals
relativism
I set out and defend a view on indicative conditionals that I call “indexical relativism”. The core of the view is that which proposition is (semantically) expressed by an…
Brian Weatherson
2009

Deontology and Descartes’s Demon
epistemology
In this paper, I defend a broadly Cartesian position about doxastic freedom. At least some of our beliefs are freely formed, so we are responsible for them. Moreover, this…
Brian Weatherson
2008

Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment?
epistemology
interest-relativity
I argue that interests primarily affect the relationship between credence and belief. A view is set out and defended where evidence and rational credence are not…
Brian Weatherson
2005

Games, Beliefs and Credences
epistemology
interest-relativity
games and decisions
In previous work I’ve defended an interest-relative theory of belief. This paper continues the defence. I have four aims. First, to offer a new kind of reason for being…
Brian Weatherson
2016

Running Risks Morally
ethics
games and decisions
I defend normative externalism from the objection that it cannot account for the wrongfulness of moral recklessness. The defence is fairly simple—there is no wrong of moral…
Brian Weatherson
2014

What Good are Counterexamples?
games and decisions
epistemology
methodology
Intuitively, Gettier cases are instances of justified true beliefs that are not cases of knowledge. Should we therefore conclude that knowledge is not justified true belief?…
Brian Weatherson
2003

Assertion, Knowledge and Action
epistemology
language
interest-relativity
We argue against the knowledge rule of assertion, and in favour of integrating the account of assertion more tightly with our best theories of evidence and action. We think…
Ishani Maitra, Brian Weatherson
2010

Memory, Belief and Time
epistemology
games and decisions
I argue that what evidence an agent has does not supervene on how she currently is. Agents do not always have to infer what the past was like from how things currently seem;…
Brian Weatherson
2015

The Role of Naturalness in Lewis’s Theory of Meaning
David Lewis
language
metaphysics
history of analytic
Many writers have held that in his later work, David Lewis adopted a theory of predicate meaning such that the meaning of a predicate is the most natural property that is…
Brian Weatherson
2013

Should We Respond to Evil With Indifference?
epistemology
scepticism
In a recent article, Adam Elga outlines a strategy for “Defeating Dr Evil with Self-Locating Belief”. The strategy relies on an indifference principle that is not up to the…
Brian Weatherson
2005

In Defense of the ACA’s Medicaid Expansion
political philosophy
The only part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ‘the ACA’) struck down was a provision expanding Medicaid. We will argue that this was a mistake;…
Ishani Maitra, Brian Weatherson
2013

Keynes, Uncertainty and Interest Rates
epistemology
games and decisions
history of analytic
Uncertainty plays an important role in The General Theory, particularly in the theory of interest rates. Keynes did not provide a theory of uncertainty, but he did make…
Brian Weatherson
2001

Many Many Problems
language
logic
vagueness
Recently four different papers have suggested that the supervaluational solution to the Problem of the Many is flawed. Stephen Schiffer has argued that the theory cannot…
Brian Weatherson
2003

Defending Interest Relative Invariantism
epistemology
interest-relativity
Since interest-relative invariantism (hereafter, IRI) was introduced into contemporary epistemology in the early 2000s, it has been criticised on a number of fronts. This…
Brian Weatherson
2011

Relativism
language
relativism
Relativism is the view that the truth of a sentence is relative both to a context of utterance and to a context of assessment. That the truth of a sentence is relative to a…
Brian Weatherson, Patrick Shirreff
2017

Interests, Evidence and Games
epistemology
interest-relativity
games and decisions
Pragmatic encroachment theories have a problem with evidence. On the one hand, the arguments that knowledge is interest-relative look like they will generalise to show that…
Brian Weatherson
2018

Epistemic Modals and Epistemic Modality
language
relativism
This chapter introduces the main themes of the volume, summarizes the chapters in it, and looks at the various arguments that have been raised for semantic relativism over…
Brian Weatherson, Andy Egan
2011

Analytic-Synthetic and A Priori-A Posteriori
epistemology
language
history of analytic
This article focuses on the distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths (i.e. every truth that isn’t analytic), and between a priori truths and a posteriori…
Brian Weatherson
2016

Disagreements, Philosophical and Otherwise
epistemology
The Equal Weight View of disagreement says that if an agent sees that an epistemic peer disagrees with her about p, the agent should change her credence in p to half way…
Brian Weatherson
2013

Scepticism, Rationalism, and Externalism
epistemology
scepticism
I argue that we have to accept one of the three isms in the title. Either inductive scepticism is true, or we have substantial contingent a priori knowledge, or a strongly…
Brian Weatherson
2006

Humean Supervenience
David Lewis
metaphysics
Humean supervenience is the conjunction of three theses: Truth supervenes on being, Anti‐haecceitism, and Spatiotemporalism. The first clause is a core part of Lewis’s…
Brian Weatherson
2015

Intrinsic Properties and Combinatorial Principles
metaphysics
David Lewis
Three objections have recently been levelled at the analysis of intrinsicness offered by Rae Langton and David Lewis. While these objections do seem telling against the…
Brian Weatherson
2001

True, Truer, Truest
language
logic
vagueness

My theory of vagueness.

Brian Weatherson
2005

Probability and Scepticism
epistemology
scepticism
One way to motivate scepticism is by looking at the ways we might possibly know we aren’t brains in vats. Could we know we aren’t brains in vats a priori? Many will say no…
Brian Weatherson
2014

Interest-Relative Invariantism
epistemology
interest-relativity

An opinionated survey of the state of the literature on interest-relative invariantism.

Brian Weatherson
2017

For Bayesians, Rational Modesty Requires Imprecision
epistemology
games and decisions
Gordon Belot has recently developed a novel argument against Bayesianism. He shows that there is an interesting class of problems that, intuitively, no rational belief…
Brian Weatherson
2016

Attitudes and Relativism
language
relativism
Data about attitude reports provide some of the most interesting arguments for, and against, various theses of semantic relativism. This paper is a short survey of three…
Brian Weatherson
2008

Accuracy and the Imps
epistemology
games and decisions
Recently several authors have argued that accuracy-first epistemology ends up licensing problematic epistemic bribes. They charge that it is better, given the accuracy-first…
James M. Joyce, Brian Weatherson
2019

Intellectual Skill and the Rylean Regress
epistemology
Intelligent activity requires the use of various intellectual skills. While these skills are connected to knowledge, they should not be identified with knowledge. There are…
Brian Weatherson
2017

Vagueness as Indeterminacy
logic
language
vagueness
Traditionally, we thought vague predicates were predicates with borderline cases. In recent years traditional wisdom has come under attack from several leading theorists.…
Brian Weatherson
2018

Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals
logic
language
conditionals
In any plausible semantics for conditionals, the semantics for indicatives and subjunctives will resemble each other closely. This means that if we are to keep the…
Brian Weatherson
2001

Freedom of Research Area
political philosophy
Some writers have said that academic freedom should extend to giving academics complete freedom over what they choose to research. I argue against this: it is consistent…
Brian Weatherson
2018

Questioning Contextualism
language
epistemology
This chapter argues against the pragmatism that shows that there is a striking disanalogy between the behavior of “knows” in questions and the behavior of “knows” in terms.…
Brian Weatherson
2006

Notes on Some Ideas in Lloyd Humberstone’s Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic
logic
Lloyd Humberstone’s recently published Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic presents a number of new ideas in modal logic as well explication and critique of recent…
Steven Kuhn, Brian Weatherson
2018

Margins and Errors
epistemology
Timothy Williamson has argued that cases involving fallible measurement show that knowledge comes apart from justified true belief in ways quite distinct from the familiar…
Brian Weatherson
2013

The Asymmetric Magnets Problem
metaphysics
There are many controversial theses about intrinsicness and duplication. The first aim of this paper is to introduce a puzzle that shows that two of the uncontroversial…
Brian Weatherson
2006

Dogmatism, Probability and Logical Uncertainty
epistemology
Many epistemologists hold that an agent can come to justifiably believe that p is true by seeing that it appears that p is true, without having any antecedent reason to…
David Jehle, Brian Weatherson
2012

The Bayesian and the Dogmatist
epistemology
scepticism
It has been argued recently that dogmatism in epistemology is incompatible with Bayesianism. That is, it has been argued that dogmatism cannot be modelled using traditional…
Brian Weatherson
2007

From Classical to Intuitionistic Probability
logic
games and decisions
We generalize the Kolmogorov axioms for probability calculus to obtain conditions defining, for any given logic, a class of probability functions relative to that logic…
Brian Weatherson
2001

Chopping up Gunk
metaphysics

We raise an objection to the idea that the world is gunky. Certain plausible sounding supertasks have implausible consequences if the world is made of gunk.

John Hawthorne, Brian Weatherson
2004

Why Ain’t Evidentialists Rich?
games and decisions
A common argument for favouring Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) over Causal Decision Theory (CDT) is that EDT has predictably higher expected returns in Newcomb Problems.…
Brian Weatherson
2024

Prankster’s Ethics
ethics
We raise an objection to a very weak form of consequentialism. A world with only moral saints would be improved by adding a few mostly harmless pranksters. This result is…
Andy Egan, Brian Weatherson
2004
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Short Papers, Book Reviews, and Unpublished Papers

Title Date Word Count
Do Judgments Screen Evidence? 2009 12,384 words
Keynes and Wittgenstein 2001 9,172 words
Decision Making with Imprecise Probabilities 1998 8,635 words
Centrality and Marginalisation 2014 7,913 words
Mixing Expert Opinion 2021 6,809 words
Stalnaker on Sleeping Beauty 2011 5,827 words
The Sporting Attitude 2022 5,626 words
Explanation, Idealisation and the Goldilocks Problem 2012 5,309 words
In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma 2012 5,230 words
Ross on Sleeping Beauty 2013 4,941 words
Luminous Margins 2004 4,526 words
Doing Philosophy With Words 2006 4,336 words
No Royal Road to Relativism 2011 4,322 words
Begging the Question and Bayesians 2001 3,978 words
Review of “Words Without Meaning” 2003 3,821 words
A Break in the Citation Patterns 2024 3,693 words
Are You a Sim? 2003 3,330 words
Nine Objections to Steiner and Wolff on Land Disputes 2003 3,259 words
Insulting Orders: Reply to Mandelkern 2022 3,176 words
Review of “Sameness and Substance Renewed” 2002 2,744 words
Humeans Aren’t Out of Their Minds 2006 2,730 words
The Temporal Generality Problem 2012 2,308 words
Review of “Lewisian Themes” 2005 1,777 words
Epistemicism, Parasites, and Vague Names 2003 1,739 words
Review of “Theories of Vagueness” 2003 1,707 words
Review of “The Realm of Reason” 2004 1,616 words
Review of “Rethinking Intuition” 2002 1,615 words
Review of “Vagueness and Contradiction” 2003 1,559 words
Review of “Moral Uncertainty and Its Consequences” 2002 1,485 words
Review of “What do Philosophers Do” 2019 1,264 words
Review of “Real Conditionals” 2003 1,238 words
Induction and Supposition 2012 1,188 words
Reply to Blackson 2016 1,165 words
Review of “David Lewis” 2007 1,068 words
Games and the Reason-Knowledge Principle 2012 1,008 words
Misleading Indexicals 2002 1,001 words
Reply to Eaton and Pickavance 2016 729 words
No matching items