Much of my work in epistemology concerned the structure of knowledge and the principles used to theorise about it. I was interested in questions such as whether knowledge is closed under known entailment, whether knowledge is the most general factive mental state, and whether factive epistemic support can at the same time be reflectively accessible. A recurring methodological question was how such principles should be assessed: by analysing their logical role, by considering their relation to scepticism, and, in later work, by testing how they are reflected in ordinary knowledge ascriptions.
“Warum Wissen nicht der allgemeinste faktive mentale Zustand ist” (2011). This paper discusses Timothy Williamson’s claim that knowledge is the most general factive mental state. I argue, first, that knowledge is not more general than states such as seeing, and, second, that more general factive mental states are conceivable. The characterisation of knowledge as the most general factive mental state therefore does not by itself single out knowledge.
“Transmission Arguments against Knowledge Closure Are Still Fallacious” (2014). The paper examines a particular strategy for rejecting epistemic closure: arguing that because a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed, knowledge itself cannot be closed either. I defend Warfield’s objection that this transmission argument is fallacious and argue that attempts to repair it either preserve the fallacy or cease to be transmission arguments in the relevant sense. The paper is therefore a defence of closure against one important family of objections rather than an independent proof of closure.
“Epistemological Disjunctivism’s Genuine Access Problem” (2015). Epistemological disjunctivism aims to combine factive epistemic support with reflective accessibility. I argue that Pritchard’s response solves a general access problem for internalism but not the distinctive problem generated by disjunctivism itself. The view needs the distinction between the source and the content of epistemic support, but its commitments concerning propositional perception make that distinction difficult to sustain in the required way.
“A New Argument for Distinguishing Rejection and Denial” (2017). This paper starts from a methodological puzzle about epistemic principles such as closure, infallibilism, KK and internalism. If scepticism is true, such principles can be vacuously true, so simply denying them has stronger anti-sceptical commitments than philosophical practice usually assumes. I propose distinguishing denial from rejection: one can reject an epistemic principle without simply asserting its negation.
with Alex Wiegmann, “Folk Epistemology and Epistemic Closure” (2018). Here we revisit closure using methods from experimental philosophy. Against earlier experimental work suggesting that ordinary knowledge ascriptions violate closure, we argue that closure is in fact a principle of folk epistemology. The paper is also methodological: it uses closure as a case study for the difficulty of translating abstract epistemological principles into experimentally testable hypotheses.
My papers
- “Warum Wissen nicht der allgemeinste faktive mentale Zustand ist.” Grazer Philosophische Studien 83 (2011), pp. 33–65. DOI · PhilPapers
- “Transmission Arguments against Knowledge Closure Are Still Fallacious.” Synthese 191 (2014), pp. 2617–2632. DOI · PhilPapers
- “Epistemological Disjunctivism’s Genuine Access Problem.” Theoria 81(4) (2015), pp. 311–332. DOI · PhilPapers
- “A New Argument for Distinguishing Rejection and Denial.” Logique & Analyse 239 (2017), pp. 285–299. DOI · PhilPapers · PDF
- with Alex Wiegmann: “Folk Epistemology and Epistemic Closure.” Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 2 (2018), pp. 71–103. DOI · PhilPapers · PDF
