All Papers

on books

Matthew McGrath and Jane Friedman provided great comments on Knowledge: A Human Interest Story. Here I reply to them, making some concessions, and relying on a distinction…

Précis of Knowledge: A Human Interest Story

on books

In Knowledge: A Human Interest Story, I argue for an interest-relative theory of knowledge. The argument rests on principles connecting knowledge and action, combined with…

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…

Anti-Anti-Desire-As-Belief

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…

2025

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…

2024

Published Papers

Epistemic Modals in Context

Andy Egan, John Hawthorne, Brian Weatherson

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…

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…

2004

Knowledge, Bets and Interests

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…

2012

Conditionals and Indexical Relativism

conditionals

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…

2009

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…

2008

Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment?

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…

Are Choices Binary?

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…

Games, Beliefs and Credences

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…

2016

Running Risks Morally

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…

2014

What Good are Counterexamples?

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?…

2003

Assertion, Knowledge, and Action

Ishani Maitra, Brian Weatherson

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…

2010

Memory, Belief and Time

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;…

2015

The Role of Naturalness in Lewis’s Theory of Meaning

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…

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…

Keynes, Uncertainty and Interest Rates

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…

Ishani Maitra, 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;…

Many Many Problems

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…

2003

Relativism

Brian Weatherson, Patrick Shirreff

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…

2017

Defending Interest Relative Invariantism

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…

2011

Interests, Evidence and Games

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…

Epistemic Modals and Epistemic Modality

Brian Weatherson, Andy Egan

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…

2011

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…

2016

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…

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…

2006

Humean Supervenience

David Lewis

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…

2015

Intrinsic Properties and Combinatorial Principles

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…

True, Truer, Truest

vagueness

My theory of vagueness.

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…

2014

For Bayesians, Rational Modesty Requires Imprecision

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…

2016

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…

2008

Interest-Relative Invariantism

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

2017

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…

2017

Vagueness as Indeterminacy

vagueness

Traditionally, we thought vague predicates were predicates with borderline cases. In recent years traditional wisdom has come under attack from several leading theorists.…

Accuracy and the Imps

James M. Joyce, Brian Weatherson

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…

2019

Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals

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…

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…

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.…

2006

Deference and Infinite Frames

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…

2025

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…

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

Steven Kuhn, Brian Weatherson

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…

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…

2006

Dogmatism, Probability and Logical Uncertainty

David Jehle, Brian Weatherson

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…

2012

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…

2007

Epistemic Permissivism and Symmetric Games

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…

2025

From Classical to Intuitionistic Probability

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…

Chopping up Gunk

John Hawthorne, Brian Weatherson

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.

2004

Why Ain’t Evidentialists Rich?

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.…

2024

Prankster’s Ethics