I received my PhD in 2007 from the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge University, where I held a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and was a member of Darwin College . My dissertation was on the nature of doxastic normativity, and was supervised by Jane Heal and Simon Blackburn. After completing my PhD, I took up a position at Aarhus University, where I am now Associate Professor of Philosophy. My primary research interests are in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. In January 2009, I received Danish Ministry of Science and Innovation's 'Young Elite Researcher Prize'. In 2011, I was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I also edit The Philosophical Lexicon, previously edited by Dan Dennett.
From August 2008 to January 2012, I was working on a research project funded by The Danish Research Council for the Humanities, entitled Causation in Context: a philosophical and empirical investigation into contextual determinants of causation and causal judgment.
From January 2012 to June 2015, I will direct a collective research project on modal epistemology funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research under the Sapere Aude DFF-Starting Grant program.
Edited books
Reasons for Belief (edited with A. Reisner), Cambridge University Press (2011).
Contributors: Nishi Shah, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, Andrew Reisner, Veli Mitova, Jonas Olson, Clayton Littlejohn, Adam Leite, Hannah Ginsborg, Mark Schroeder, Ralph Wedgwood, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard.
Contributors: Lynne Rudder Baker, Helen Beebee, Thomas Hofweber, Peter van Inwagen, Peter Menzies, Hugh Mellor, Stephen Mumford, Daniel Nolan, Eric Olson, L.A. Paul, Lorenz Puntel, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gideon Rosen, Jonathan Schaffer, Peter Simons, Barry Smith, Michael Tooley, and Dean Zimmerman.
Selected online publications
For full list of publications, follow link above.
It is widely held that the possibility of value-incomparability between alternatives poses a serious threat to comparativism. Some comparativists have proposed to avoid this problem by supplementing the three traditional value relations with a fourth value relation, variously identified as "roughly equal" or "on a par", which is supposed to hold between alternatives that are incomparable by the three traditional value relations. However, in a recent article in this journal, Nien-he Hsieh has proposed that the comparisons thought to require rough equality or parity could instead be understood in terms of the concept of "clumpiness". Against this suggestion, Martin Peterson has argued that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps, and thus that there is no way of linking clumpiness to rational choice. This would remove the central appeal of the concept. In this note, I show that Peterson’s argument fails to establish that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps.
Abstract: For at least three decades, philosophers have argued that general causation and causal explanation are contrastive in nature. When we seek a causal explanation of some particular event, we are usually interested in knowing why that event happened rather than some other specified event. And general causal claims, which state that certain event types cause certain other event types, seem to make sense only if appropriate contrasts to the types of events acting as cause and effect are specified. In recent years, philosophers have extended the contrastive theory of causation to encompass singular causation as well. In this paper, I argue that this extension of the theory was a mistake. Although general causation and causal explanation may well be contrastive in nature, singular causation is not.
'Against essential mental normativity again', Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 50: 333-46 (2011). Special issue on normativity, edited by C. Tappolet and A. Voizard.
Abstract: In a recent paper (2008), I presented two arguments against the thesis that intentional states are essentially normative. In this paper, I defend those arguments from two recent responses, one from Nick Zangwill in his (2010), and one from Daniel Laurier in the present volume, and offer improvements of my arguments in light of Laurier’s criticism.
'How to be a teleologist about epistemic reasons', in A. Reisner and A. Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press (2011)
Abstract: In this paper I propose a teleological account of epistemic reasons. In recent years, the main challenge for any such account has been to explicate a sense in which epistemic reasons depend on the value of epistemic properties. I argue that while epistemic reasons do not directly depend on the value of epistemic properties, they depend on a different class of reasons which are value based in a direct sense, namely reasons to form beliefs about certain propositions or subject matters. In short, S has an epistemic reason to believe that p if and only if S is such that if S has reason to form a belief about p, then S ought to believe that p. I then propose a teleological explanation of this relationship. It is also shown how the proposal can avoid various subsidiary objections commonly thought to riddle the teleological account.
Abstract: Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss (2009) argue that any truth norm for belief, linking the correctness of believing p with the truth of p, is bound to be uninformative since applying the norm to determine the correctness of a belief as to whether p, would itself require forming such a belief. I argue that this objection conflates the condition under which the norm deems beliefs correct, with the psychological state an agent must be in to apply the norm. I also show that since the truth norm conflicts with other possible norms that clearly are informative, the truth norm must itself be informative.
'Causation' , in R. Poli and J. Seibt (eds.), Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives, 83-104, Springer (2010)
Abstract: Causation is of undeniable importance to our understanding of, and interaction with our surroundings. Despite this, the correct understanding of causation remains subject to considerable philosophical controversy. In this article, I introduce the most influential philosophical theories of causation, and provide an overview of the main difficulties that has led to the currently most influential versions of these theories.
Abstract: Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also explored whether this new account threatens the anti-luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti-luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility.
Abstract: Semantic theories that violate semantic innocence, i.e. require reference-shifts when terms are embedded in ‘that’ clauses and the like, are often challenged by producing sentences where an anaphoric expression, while not itself embedded in a context in which reference shifts, is anaphoric on an antecedent expression that is embedded in such a context. This, in conjunction with a widely accepted principle concerning unproblematic anaphora, is used to show that such reference shifting has absurd consequences. We show that it is the widely accepted principle concerning anaphora that is to be blamed for these consequences, and not the supposed sin of reference shifting.
Abstract: The theory of belief, according to which believing that p essentially involves having as an aim or purpose to believe that p truly, has recently been criticised on the grounds that the putative aim of belief does not interact with the wider aims of believers in the ways we should expect of genuine aims. I argue that this objection to the aim theory fails. When we consider a wider range of deliberative contexts concerning beliefs, it becomes obvious that the aim of belief can interact with and be weighed against the wider aims of agents in the ways required for it to be a genuine aim.
Abstract: Nishi Shah has recently argued that transparency in doxastic deliberation supports a strict version of evidentialism about epistemic reasons. I argue that Shah's argument relies on a principle that is incompatible with the strict version of evidentialism Shah wishes to advocate.
Abstract: A number of authors have recently developed and defended various versions of ‘normative essentialism’ about the mental, i.e. the claim that propositional attitudes are constitutively or essentially governed by normative principles. I present two arguments to the effect that this claim cannot be right. First, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional attitude ascriptions would require non-normative justification, but since this is not a requirement of folk-psychology, propositional attitudes cannot be essentially normative. Second, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional attitude ascriptions could not support normative rationality judgments, which would remove the central appeal of normative essentialism.
Abstract: Does transparency in doxastic deliberation entail a constitutive norm of correctness governing belief, as Shah and Velleman argue? No, because this presupposes an implausibly strong relation between normative judgements and motivation from such judgements, ignores our interest in truth, and cannot explain why we pay different attention to how much justification we have for our beliefs in different contexts. An alternative account of transparency is available: transparency can be explained by the aim one necessarily adopts in deliberating about whether to believe that p. To show this, I reconsider the role of the concept of belief in doxastic deliberation, and I defuse 'the teleologian's dilemma'.
Abstract: It is widely assumed that doxastic deliberation is transparent to the factual question of the truth of the proposition being considered for belief, and that this sets doxastic deliberation apart from practical deliberation. This feature is frequently invoked in arguments against doxastic voluntarism. I argue that transparency to factual questions occurs in practical deliberation in ways parallel to transparency in doxastic deliberation. I argue that this should make us reconsider the appeal to transparency in arguments against doxastic voluntarism, and the wider issue of distinguishing theoretical from practical rationality.
Abstract: In his Knowledge and its Limits (2000) Timothy Williamson argues that knowledge can be causally efficacious and as such figure in psychological explanation. His argument for this claim figures as a response to a key objection to his overall thesis that knowing is a mental state. In this paper I argue that although Williamson succeeds in establishing that knowledge in some cases is essential to the power of certain causal explanations of actions, he fails to do this in a way that establishes knowledge itself as a causal factor. The argument thus fails to support his overall claim that knowledge should be conceived as a state of mind.
Abstract: In this paper, I introduce and discuss a series of problems associated with answering the question of semantic unity, and argue that the truth theoretical approach to semantics put forward by Donald Davidson suggests a possible solution. Although not put forward explicitly as such by Davidson, it is argued that we in Davidson's interpretation of Tarski's definition of truth find the resources to illuminate and resolve the problem of unity.
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Courses taught at Aarhus University
For details concerning my current teaching, see the Department's page at Aula
Spring 10: Philosophy, cognition, and neuroscience
Spring 09: Introduction to Philosophy of Mind (undergraduate)
Spring 09: Introduction to Epistemology (undergraduate)
Spring 09: Introduction to Philosophy of Science (undergraduate)
Fall 08: Epistemic Normativity (graduate)
Fall 08: Introduction to Formal Logic (undergraduate)
Spring 08: Weighing and Comparing Values (graduate)
Spring 08: Introduction to Epistemology (undergraduate)
Spring 08: Introduction to Philosophy of Science (undergraduate)
Fall 07: Introduction to Critical Reasoning (undergraduate)
Fall 07: Advanced Topics in Metaphysics (graduate)
Spring 07: Introduction to Epistemology (undergraduate)
Spring 07: Advanced Topics in Epistemology (graduate)
