Epistemology 6
Why We Care about Understanding: Competence through Predictive Compression
With Pierre Beckmann.
Offers a unifying account of understanding by reverse-engineering the function of both the state and the concept. Arges that we care about understanding because it grounds robust competence. Our concept of understanding evolved as an efficient proxy to track this elusive property, allowing us to identify who to trust and learn from. This highlights the sociality of understanding and how it shapes the character of human understanding. Understanding is the result of convergent pressures to predict the world using cognitive models that are not only accurate, but also compressed enough to be stored, demonstrated, and transmitted.
epistemology, AI, understanding, conceptual change, compression, competence
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Précis of The Practical Origins of Ideas
Analysis 84 (2): 341–344. 2024. Symposium on my The Practical Origins of Ideas. By invitation. doi:10.1093/analys/anad011
Summarizes my book for a symposium in Analysis.
analysis, conceptual engineering, genealogy, history of ideas, state of nature, book symposium
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Debunking Concepts
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 (1): 195–225. By invitation. 2023. doi:10.5840/msp2023111347
Argues that the debunking of concepts should extend beyond assessing their epistemological merits to include their evaluation on moral, social, and political grounds, based on their societal functions and effects.
concepts, conceptual ethics, genealogical debunking, genealogy, ideology critique, methodology
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How Genealogies Can Affect the Space of Reasons
Synthese 197 (5): 2005–2027. 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1777-9
Attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something are often said to commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices. But this invites a second objection, which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure—the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems.
genealogy, Bernard Williams, Craig, epistemology, normativity, space of reasons
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Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?
The Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 100–120. 2019. doi:10.1093/pq/pqy041
Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first epistemology holds that the concept of knowledge is primitive and explanatorily fundamental. This seems to leave little room for attempts to give a genealogical explanation of the concept of knowledge, much less ones that explain the formation of the concept of knowledge in terms of the concept of belief, as E.J. Craig does. Yet I argue that Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge not only is compatible with knowledge-first epistemology, but actually lends succour to it.
Craig, epistemology, genealogy, methodology, Williams, knowledge-first epistemology
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Wittgenstein on the Chain of Reasons
Wittgenstein-Studien 7 (1): 105–30. 2016. doi:10.1515/witt-2016-0108
This article examines Wittgenstein’s conception of rationality through the central image of the “chain,” arguing that reasons are defined by their relational role in making actions intelligible rather than by intrinsic properties. The author contends that unlike chains of causes, chains of reasons are necessarily finite and anchored in communal reason-giving practices, meaning that justification inevitably ends at the boundaries of a specific language game. Ultimately, the paper suggests that this finite structure liberates agents from the misleading expectation of infinite justification while simultaneously limiting the reach of reasons to the specific practices that sustain them.
action theory, Wittgenstein, reasons and causes, philosophy of mind, explanation, justification
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