Draft monograph on rationalism

As you may have noticed, I haven't been posting here much lately. That's for a couple of reasons. One is that, as many of you will know, my personal life has lately been very exciting. Carrie Jenkins and I are recently engaged to be married. So that's pretty awesome. It also means I'm spending a good chunk of my time working on wedding planning.

The other reason I haven't been posting much is that, for all of this summer, and much of the past year, I've been, when focused on philosophy, focused on work on a co-authored book monograph with Benjamin Jarvis. That's been on a relatively grand scale, and didn't lend itself well to blogging. However, we now have a draft of a book monograph, and we're ready to give it a limited distribution to philosophers who might have comments and suggestions for us.

Our book is tentatively titled Rational Thinking: Philosophical and Quotidian. It offers a theory of mental content, a characterization of the relation between rationality and apriority, and a treatment of philosophical methodology. It is descended in fairly direct ways from the work we've done in our two previous co-authored papers, here and here.

If you're interested in having a look, email me and I'll send you the pdf. I'm placing a detailed table of contents below the fold, to better indicate the sort of topics we're covering.

Maybe now that we've gotten the manuscript to this stage, I'll find myself blogging on philosophy more often. I have an idea for a paper about the relation between modal epistemology and linguistic treatments of modality.

UPDATE 15 JULY 2011: new TOC and downloadable new draft available here. Old TOC below.

Real-World Deviant Gettier Case

Something cool happened in our methodology seminar last week. Some people like to remark on real-world Gettier cases they find themselves in. I found myself last week in the presence of a real-life deviant Gettier case.

A deviant Gettier case (what Ben Jarvis and I have also called a 'bad Gettier case') is a situation in which the literal text used to describe a Gettier situation is satisfied, but in such a way so as to fail to provide a counterexample to JTB=K. Deviant Gettier cases play a central role in a disagreement Ben and I have with Timothy Williamson. What's cool about this deviant Gettier case is that (a) although I played a central role in producing it, I did so entirely without design, and (b) it's deviant with respect to one of the standard paradigms of Gettier cases.

Here's what happened.

Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual

Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual, (2009) Philosophical Studies, 145(3), September 2009: 435-443. Please refer to published version here. For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Timothy Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy. See also Williamson's response here.

I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The fragility of these counterfactuals makes them too easily false, and too difficult to know.

Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction

Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. (2009) Philosophical Studies 142 (2), January 2009: 221-246. Please refer to published version, available online here.

What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson’s account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson’s, avoids naturalistic skepticism.