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I give an account of the meaning of epistemic modals-words like 'might' and 'must', on a broadly epistemic interpretation-and how speakers use them to coordinate on their information. I begin by exploring what epistemic ...

Semantic change is of interest in its own right in the philosophy of language. For instance, it sheds light on the relationship between the meaning of a word and its use. It also plays a role in ideology critique. Philosophy ...

Any non-skeptical epistemological theory should hold that, if we want to know what the world is like, our best bet is to believe what our evidence supports. Evidence is a guide to truth. Though it might sound like a ...

My dissertation consists of a series of papers on grounding pluralism, the broad view that there are multiple kinds of metaphysical grounding relations. Specifically, I argue that there are three species of grounding: ...

Machine ethics is a nascent subfield of computer ethics that focuses on the ethical issues involved in the design of autonomous software agents ("artificial agents"). Chapter 1 of this thesis considers how best to understand ...

This thesis seeks to develop and defend conceptions of know-how that shed light on the state's theoretical role as the cognitive basis of skilled action. In Chapter 1, 1 propose an account of knowhow based on the idea of ...

The semantic paradoxes and other statements about impossibilities have proved to be obstacles to a satisfactory theory of conditionals. In my dissertation, which consists of two parts, I propose a new approach to the ...

Chapter 1, 'Living on the Edge: Against Epistemic Permissivism,' argues that Epistemic Permissivists face a special problem about the relationship between our first- and higher-order attitudes. They claim that rationality ...

I use evolutionary science - its tenets and theory, as well as the evidence for it - to investigate the extent and nature of human knowledge by exploring the relation between human cognition, epistemic luck, and biological ...