Current Projects

(1) "Knowledge and Action" (co-authored with John Hawthorne)

In Knowledge and Practical Interests, I defended the principle that one should act only on what one knows. In this paper, Hawthorne and I provide a series of further considerations in favor of this principle (in fact, we argue for a somewhat stronger principle, which entails it).

(2) "Knowledge and Certainty"

Most philosophers think that our folk concept of knowledge has an infalliblist character. The fact that knowledge seems to be incompatible between epistemic possibility of falsity, or any degree of uncertainty, is supposed to be evidence in favor of this thesis. In my 2005 paper, "Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions", I argued that the fact that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic possibility of falsity is consistent with fallibilism. In this paper, I turn to the relation between our folk concept of knowledge and epistemic certainty. I argue that there is no entailment between knowledge and certainty, and the evidence that there is such an entailment is best explained by norms of conversation.

(3) "On 'Average'"

In the appendix to "Hermeneutic Fictionalism", I gave a formal semantics for "average" as it appears in constructions such as "The average American has 2.3 children". I provide an alternative semantics for these constructions in this paper, with reference specifically to work done by Greg Carlson and Jeff Pelletier.

(4) "Knowing How in Romance"

This is essentially a syntax paper, on the expression of knowledge how in Spanish, Catalan, French, Portuguese, and Italian. I counter Ian Rumfitt's arguments in "Savoir Faire" that romance languages provide evidence for Ryle's view that "know how" expresses a relation between a person and an action-type.

(5) Shared Content (with Herman Cappelen)

This is a book project, with each of us writing half of the book, on the model of the "for and against" series, like Smart and Williams's book on Utilitarianism. My portion will involve at least one chapter on the topic of Sly Pete and Indicative Conditionals, an early draft of which I have been giving as a talk ("Indicative Conditionals and the Problem of Shared Content"). Our aim is to have it published by Fall 2008.