What is an assurance? What do we do when we claim to know? Krista Lawlor offers an original account based on the work of J. L. Austin. She addresses challenges to contextualist semantic theories; resolves closure-based skeptical paradoxes; and helps us tread the line between acknowledging our fallibility and skepticism.

This book defends a novel theory of singular concepts, emphasizing the pragmatic requirements of singular concept possession and arguing that these requirements must be understood to institute traditions and policies of thought.

(2014). Exploring the Stability of Belief: Resiliency and Temptation. Inquiry: Vol. 57, The Nature of Belief, pp. 1-27. doi: 10.1080/0020174X.2014.858414.

People often become confused, mistaking one thing for another, or taking two things to be the same. How should we assign semantic values to confused statements? Recently, philosophers have taken a pessimistic view of confusion, arguing that understanding confused belief demands significant departure from our normal interpretive practice. I argue for optimism. Our semantic treatment of confusion can be a lot like our semantic treatment of empty names. Surprisingly, perhaps, the resulting semantics lets us keep in place more of our (...) everyday interpretive practices in the face of confused belief. (shrink)

Recent social psychology is skeptical about self-knowledge. Philosophers, on the other hand, have produced a new account of the source of the authority of self-ascriptions. On this account, it is not descriptive accuracy but authorship which funds the authority of one's self-ascriptions. The resulting view seems to ensure that self-ascriptions are authoritative, despite evidence of one's fallibility. However, a new wave of psychological studies presents a powerful challenge to the authorship account. This research suggests that one can author one's attitudes, (...) but one's self- ascriptions may lack authority. I present this new challenge from social psychology and use it to argue that first-person authority is agential authority: one's self-ascriptions are authoritative, in part anyway, because they are reliable expressions of those attitudes that govern further choices and behavior. (shrink)

G. E. Moore famously noted that saying 'I went to the movies, but I don't believe it' is absurd, while saying 'I went to the movies, but he doesn't believe it' is not in the least absurd. The problem is to explain this fact without supposing that the semantic contribution of 'believes' changes across first-person and third-person uses, and without making the absurdity out to be merely pragmatic. We offer a new solution to the paradox. Our solution is that the (...) truth conditions of any moorean utterance contradict its accuracy conditions. Thus we diagnose a contradiction in how the moorean utterance represents things as being; so we can do justice to the intuition that a Moore-paradoxical utterance is in some way senseless, even if we know what proposition it expresses. (shrink)

Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1962) generates wildly different reactions among philosophers. Interpreting Austin on perception starts with a reading of this text, and this in turn requires reading into the lectures key ideas from Austin’s work on natural language and the theory of knowledge. The lectures paint a methodological agenda, and a sketch of some first-order philosophy, done the way Austin thinks it should be done. Crucially, Austin calls for philosophers to bring a deeper understanding of natural language meaning to (...) bear as they do their tasks. In consequence Austin’s lectures provide a fascinating start—but only a start—on a number of key questions in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Epistemic closure, the idea that knowledge is closed under known implication, plays a central role in current discussions of skepticism and the semantics of knowledge reports. Contextualists in particular rely heavily on the truth of epistemic closure in staking out their distinctive response to the so-called "skeptical paradox." I argue that contextualists should re-think their commitment to closure. Closure principles strong enough to force the skeptical paradox on us are too strong, and closure principles weak enough to express unobjectionable epistemic (...) principles are too weak to generate the skeptical paradox. I briefly consider how the contextualist might live without (strong) closure. (shrink)

Ruth Millikan has long argued that the phenomenon of confused thought requires us to abandon certain traditional programmes for mental semantics. On the one hand she argues that confused thought involves confused concepts, and on the other that Fregean senses, or modes of presentation, cannot be useful in theorizing about minds capable of confused thinking. I argue that while we might accept that concepts can be confused, we have no reason to abandon modes of presentation. Making sense of confused thought (...) requires recognizing modes of presentation. (shrink)

Knowing what one believes sometimes takes effort—it sometimes involves seeking to know one’s beliefs as causes. And when one gains self-knowledge of one’s belief this way—that is, through causal self-interpretation—one engages in a characteristically human kind of psychological liberation. By investigating the nature of causal self-interpretation, I discover some surprising features of this liberty. And in doing so, I counter a trend in recent philosophical theories, of discounting the value of self-knowledge in projects of human liberation.

Tyler Burge defends the idea that memory preserves beliefswith their justifications, so that memory's role in inferenceadds no new justificatory demands. Against Burge's view,Christensen and Kornblith argue that memory is reconstructiveand so introduces an element of a posteriori justificationinto every inference. I argue that Burge is right,memory does preserve content, but to defend this viewwe need to specify a preservative mechanism. Toward thatend, I develop the idea that there is something worthcalling anaphoric thinking, which preserves content inBurge's sense of ``content (...) preservation.'' I providea model on which anaphoric thought is a fundamentalfeature of cognitive architecture, consequentlyrejecting the idea that there are mental pronounsin a Language of Thought. Since preservativememory is a matter of anaphoric thinking, thereare limits on the analogy of memory and testimony. (shrink)

Knowing one’s past thoughts and attitudes is a vital sort of self-knowledge. In the absence of memorial impressions to serve as evidence, we face a pressing question of how such self-knowledge is possible. Recently, philosophers of mind have argued that self-knowledge of past attitudes supervenes on rationality. I examine two kinds of argument for this supervenience claim, one from cognitive dynamics, and one from practical rationality, and reject both. I present an alternative account, on which knowledge of past attitudes is (...) inferential knowledge, and depends upon contingent facts of one’s rationality and consistency. Failures of self-knowledge are better explained by the inferential account. (shrink)

The point of knowledge is to answer our need for information that will let us successfully navigate our world. So says Edward Craig in Knowledge and the State of Nature. This claim may sound anodyne, but according to Craig, it is crucial we keep this fact uppermost in our minds as we theorize about knowledge. Craig argues that our concept of knowledge begins its life by answering our need to mark out those who have the information we seek. A priori (...) analysis may not reveal the application conditions of our concept of knowledge, but reflection on its function can. (shrink)

What role does ‘ordinary language philosophy’ play in the defense of common sense beliefs? J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein each give central place to ordinary language in their responses to skeptical challenges to common sense beliefs. But Austin and Wittgenstein do not always respond to such challenges in the same way, and their working methods are different. In this paper, I compare Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical positions, and show that they share many metaphilosophical commitments. I then examine Austin and Wittgenstein’s (...) respective takes on the problem of other minds and the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Interestingly, we find Wittgenstein employing methods more frequently associated Austin and vice versa. Moreover, we find that a variety of defenses of common sense beliefs are compatible with ‘ordinary language philosophy.’. (shrink)

My reply to Ferrero is divided into three parts: a recap of my argument and claim, a response to Ferrero's central criticism, and, finally, a question about his attempted defense of the authorship account.

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The notion of relevance plays a role in many accounts of knowledge and knowledge ascription. Although use of the notion is well-motivated, theorists struggle to codify relevance. A reasonable person standard of relevance addresses this codification problem, and provides an objective and flexible standard of relevance; however, treating relevance as reasonableness seems to allow practical factors to determine whether one has knowledge or not—so-called “pragmatic encroachment.” I argue that a fuller understanding of reasonableness and of the role of practical factors (...) in the acquisition of knowledge lets us avoid pragmatic encroachment. (shrink)