Selected Papers

• "A Puzzle About Rational Desire"
  The following four assumptions plausibly describe the ideal rational agent. (1) She desires to believe only truths. (2) She knows what her beliefs are. (3) She does not both desire that P and desire that ~P, for any P. (4) Whenever she desires that P→Q and knows that P, she desires that Q. Although the assumptions are plausible, they have an implausible consequence. They imply that the ideal rational agent never believes and desires contradictory propositions. She never desires the world to be any different than she thinks it is. Preserving our intuitions about desire, without embracing the implausible conclusion, is what I call “the Wishful Thinking Puzzle.” In this paper, I examine how this puzzle arises and I argue that it is surprisingly difficult to solve. Even the decision theoretic conception of desire is not immune to the puzzle. As I argue, the contrastive conception of desire avoids the puzzle, but that view is not worked out in enough detail to win our full confidence.
• "Rationality for Ostriches, Wishful Thinkers and Other Deviants"
  An earlier version of "A Puzzle About Rational Desire"
• "Hypothetical and Categorical Epistemic Normativity"
  In this paper, I consider an argument of Harvey Siegel's according to which there can be no hypothetical normativity anywhere unless there is categorical normativity in epistemology. The argument fails because it falsely assumes people must be bound by epistemic norms in order to have justified beliefs. (Revised version in: The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Summer 2004)
• "Truth and Other Self-effacing Properties"
  Colin McGinn (2000) introduces the idea of a self-effacing property, a property that can be defined without referring to it in any way. He also claims that truth is the one and only such property. This paper shows that, if truth is a self-effacing property, then there are too many others to constitute a set. (Revised version in: The Philosophical Quarterly, October 2004)
• "Pragmatism, Truth, and Inquiry"
  Such Pragmatists as Richard Rorty argue that truth is not a goal of inquiry. There is no practical difference, they say, between "pursuing truth" and trying to be as persuasive as one can be, and so there is no good reason to posit truth as a distinct goal, over and above persuasiveness. I argue that there is a practical difference between pursuing truth and trying to be persuasive, and so even pragmatists can maintain that truth is a legitimate goal of inquiry, over and above mere justification or persuasiveness. (Revised version in: Contemporary Pragmatism, June 2005.)
• "Why There are no Epistemic Duties"
  An epistemic duty would be a duty to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgment from a proposition, and it would be grounded in purely evidential or epistemic considerations. If I promise to believe it is raining, my duty to believe is not epistemic. If my evidence is so good that, in light of it alone, I ought to believe it is raining, then my duty to believe supposedly is epistemic. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people do sometimes have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgment from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations.
• Comments on Casey Woodling, "A Puzzle about 'About'" These comments were delivered at the 2006 meeting of the SSPP.
• Truth and the Normativity of Naturalistic Epistemology front matter, including table of contents
• Truth and the Normativity of Naturalistic Epistemology Chapters 1 through 5, Appendix, and Bibliography.
  This is my doctoral dissertation. It concerns the so-called "normativity objection" to epistemological naturalism, according to which scientific investigation is irrelevant to the normative questions of epistemology. I argue that (i) those questions are best construed as questions about how to pursue such goals as believing the truth, and (ii) that naturalists can consistently maintain that truth is a worthwhile cognitive goal.
• "Epistemology as Engineering?"
  Based on part of Chapter 1 of TNNE, this paper develops a detailed account of how scientific epistemology modelled on engineering can address normative epistemological questions. (Revised version to appear in Theoria.)
• "Is it Rational to Pursue the Truth?"
  Larry Laudan and Richard Rorty say it is not. They are wrong.