Supervenience: New Essays (editor, together with Dr. Elias Savellos of SUNY at Geneseo). A collection of original essays on supervenience, which includes essays both from experts on supervenience, and prominent philosophers who are writing on the subject for the first time.

In Knowledge and Evidence (1989), Moser presents an argument against Humean justification skepticism (i.e., “the view that no physical object propositions are epistemically justifiable for us on the basis of our evidence”) based on the premise that the common-sense, or “Realist”, hypothesis introduces less gratuitous elements than its skeptical competitors.  Moser attempts to establish the gratuitousness of the entities posited by skeptical hypotheses by claiming that these entities, or their features, are not represented in the contents of our experiences (while the posits of the realist hypothesis are thus represented).  In “Skepticism and Perceptual Content”, I argue against this claim by showing that Moser’s account of representation  fails to establish it.

In “The Nature of Basic Beliefs and the Regress of Justification”,  I argue that if basic beliefs, in foundationalist theories of justification, are to play the role of stopping the regress of justification, then they cannot just be basic in the sense of being non-inferential.  The justification of these beliefs should not require the existence of any other justified belief in a sense that is stronger than that indicated by characterizing them merely as non-inferentially justified.

In “Skeptical Arguments from Underdetermination” , I investigate the extent to which skeptical arguments can be construed as arising from putative underdetermination claims.  I argue that insofar as skeptical arguments can be thus construed, they are immune to a number of traditional objections raised against them.

In "On Why Philosophers and Social Scientists Should Talk to Each Other" , I defend “realist” social science against Michael Burawoy’s criticisms, while arguing that Burawoy himself does not succeed in outlining a “non-realist” conception of science that avoids some well-known objections to various such proposals.

 In my “Relational Relativism”, I propose a formulation of alethic relativism that is clearer than most, and argue that this formulation is immune to a number of traditional attempts to refute relativism.  Nevertheless, an unrestricted form of this kind of relativism is undermined by what I call the “semantic” argument.  A weaker, restricted relativism survives, but is of debatable interest.

In Universals and Scientific Realism, Armstrong had argued against a variety of nominalisms by claiming that they fall prey to a kind of vicious regress he called “the relation regress”.  In his recent Universals, An Opinionated Introduction, he explicitly withdraws this charge.  In my “Armstrong on  the Relation Regress”, I take a closer look both at Armstrong’s original arguments, and the reasons he gives for his recent change of heart.  I argue that although the nominalisms Armstrong discusses are indeed immune to the relation regress, this is not due to the reasons Armstrong adduces in his later work.

In Universals, An Opinionated Introduction, Armstrong argues that Realism concerning universals suffers from a certain type of regress, the relation regress, Resemblance and Class nominalisms are immune to.  Armstrong’s argument trades on the notion of the natures of entities determining the relations they enter into.  In my “Armstrong on Instantiation”, I investigate this concept of “nature”, and argue that given the best interpretation of what natures are, Armstrong’s argument is not valid.

Recently, a number of authors (“incompatibilists”) have advanced arguments that purport to show that externalism with respect to propositional attitude contents undermines some of our basic intuitions about the nature and possibility of what is generically referred to as “self-knowledge”.  In “Which Content Externalism, Which Transparency, Which Knowledge”, I argue that such tensions between content externalism and self-knowledge do not arise unless very specific and theory-laden tacit assumptions are made about content externalism, the nature and scope of self-knowledge and a particular internalist conception of justification and knowledge.  I first distinguish various externalist theses and show that they do not all threaten self-knowledge to the same degree, if at all.  Then I argue that the scope of self-knowledge has to be significantly narrower than it is assumed to be by the incompatibilists.  Finally, I explicitly adopt an externalist, broadly process-reliabilist notion of justification and knowledge and argue that the various thought-experiments introduced by incompatibilists to constitute at best novel examples of how introspection under non-standard conditions can go wrong.  But these novel examples of introspective error are not generalizable to create a global threat to introspective self-knowledge.

Putnam’s Twin-Earth thought experiment has convinced many that not only reference, but also mental content is not determined by what is internal to the individual (which, by the way, indicates that currently popular solutions to the problem that draw a distinction between public and private languages are not quite adequate). Yet, upon further reflection, this is a quite puzzling phenomenon for the following reason. The Cartesian thought experiment, where we are invited to imagine two minds having the same “experiences”, also incorporates the further element that the environments of these two minds are different, and that these different environments are causally responsible for the “same” experiences. In other words, the Cartesian and Twin-Earth thought-experiments are apparently isomorphic, but tend to have different effects as “intuition pumps”. This raises an important set of questions: are these thought experiments really isomorphic? If so, does the Putnam-inspired externalist argument do no more than beg the question against Cartesianism? If not, what is the crucial difference between the two, and is this difference sufficient to turn the tables against the Cartesian internalist? I am working on these questions in my “A Tale of Four Minds”.

visits since September 1997