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

Books, Schools, and Restaurants

This is a contribution to a symposium on David Liebesman and Ofra Magidor’s book Property Versatility and Copredication. It was originally presented, in compressed…

Humberstone on Possibility Frames

In his 1981 paper “From Worlds to Possibilities”, Lloyd Humberstone developed an approach to modal logic using possibilities rather than possible worlds. Possibilities…

Brian Weatherson

Anti-Anti-Desire-As-Belief

games and decisions

David Lewis put forward a decision theoretic argument against there being a tight connection between desires and beliefs about the good. I reply on behalf of the targets of…

Brian Weatherson

Intrinsic Knowledge

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

Published Papers

Epistemic Modals in Context

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

Morality, Fiction and Possibility

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

Knowledge, Bets and Interests

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

Conditionals and Indexical 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

Deontology and Descartes’s Demon

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

Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment?

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

Are Choices Binary?

games and decisions

There is a natural view of the relationship between preference and choice: an option is choiceworthy if and only if no alternative is strictly preferred to it. I argue…

Brian Weatherson

Games, Beliefs and Credences

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

Running Risks Morally

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

What Good are Counterexamples?

games and decisions

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

Assertion, Knowledge, and Action

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

Memory, Belief and Time

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

The Role of Naturalness in Lewis’s Theory of Meaning

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

Should We Respond to Evil With Indifference?

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

Keynes, Uncertainty and Interest Rates

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

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

Many Many Problems

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

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

Defending Interest Relative Invariantism

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

Interests, Evidence and Games

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

Epistemic Modals and Epistemic Modality

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

Analytic-Synthetic and A Priori-A Posteriori

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

Disagreements, Philosophical and Otherwise

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

Scepticism, Rationalism, and Externalism

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

Humean Supervenience

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

Intrinsic Properties and Combinatorial Principles

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

True, Truer, Truest

My theory of vagueness.

Brian Weatherson

Probability and 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

For Bayesians, Rational Modesty Requires Imprecision

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

Attitudes and 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

Interest-Relative Invariantism

interest-relativity

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

Brian Weatherson

Intellectual Skill and the Rylean Regress

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

Vagueness as Indeterminacy

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

Accuracy and the Imps

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

Indicative and Subjunctive 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

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

Questioning Contextualism

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

Deference and Infinite Frames

games and decisions

Three recent results about probabilistic deference, due to Zhang, Geanakoplos, and Dorst et al,. each hold for all finite probability frames but fail when frames are allowed…

Brian Weatherson

Margins and Errors

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

Notes on Some Ideas in Lloyd Humberstone’s Philosophical Applications of Modal 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

The Asymmetric Magnets Problem

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

Dogmatism, Probability and Logical Uncertainty

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

The Bayesian and the Dogmatist

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

Epistemic Permissivism and Symmetric Games

games and decisions

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

From Classical to Intuitionistic Probability

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

Chopping up Gunk

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

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

Prankster’s 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

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
Stalnaker on Sleeping Beauty	2011	5,973 words
The Sporting Attitude	2022	5,710 words
Explanation, Idealisation and the Goldilocks Problem	2012	5,396 words
In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma	2012	5,383 words
Ross on Sleeping Beauty	2013	5,000 words
Luminous Margins	2004	4,526 words
Doing Philosophy With Words	2006	4,396 words
No Royal Road to Relativism	2011	4,322 words
Begging the Question and Bayesians	2001	4,112 words
Review of “Words Without Meaning”	2003	4,037 words
A Break in the Citation Patterns	2024	3,722 words
Akrasia and Traitors	2026	3,711 words
Are You a Sim?	2003	3,452 words
Nine Objections to Steiner and Wolff on Land Disputes	2003	3,364 words
Insulting Orders: Reply to Mandelkern	2022	3,192 words
Humeans Aren’t Out of Their Minds	2006	2,934 words
Review of “Sameness and Substance Renewed”	2002	2,744 words
The Temporal Generality Problem	2012	2,308 words
Review of “Lewisian Themes”	2005	1,881 words
Review of “Theories of Vagueness”	2003	1,807 words
Epistemicism, Parasites, and Vague Names	2003	1,739 words
Review of “The Realm of Reason”	2004	1,735 words
Review of “Rethinking Intuition”	2002	1,702 words
Review of “Vagueness and Contradiction”	2003	1,650 words
Review of “Moral Uncertainty and Its Consequences”	2002	1,612 words
Review of “What do Philosophers Do”	2019	1,412 words
Review of “Real Conditionals”	2003	1,320 words
Induction and Supposition	2012	1,316 words
Reply to Blackson	2016	1,208 words
Review of “David Lewis”	2007	1,189 words
Misleading Indexicals	2002	1,156 words
Games and the Reason-Knowledge Principle	2012	1,024 words
Reply to Eaton and Pickavance	2016	786 words