The papers housed on this website constitute a relatively small subset of my total publications. There are several reasons for this, one of which is that much of my work from perhaps 2000 on until early 2007 was bound up in my book with Tim McGrew, Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason, Routledge, 2007. Another reason is that most publishers do not permit one to make one's papers available on-line on a personal site after they have been published in a journal or book.

 

Some papers not listed here are available to be read for free on-line at their own sites because the publisher is open-source (the journal Ergo, for example), so there is no need for me to house a copy on this site. Please see my CV for links to those.

 

In many other cases, I am permitted to send copies of e-offprints to other scholars upon request or to make a reading link available to a certain number of people, so feel free to e-mail me and ask about that based upon my CV.

 

As of July, 2018 “Undesigned Coincidence and Coherence for an Hypothesis.” Author’s accepted manuscript version archived per author agreement with Erkenntnis. A DOI number will be provided when the on-line edition is published, and at that time those whose institutions have access to the journal will be able to see the journal’s own version.

 

As of January, 2018 “The World, the Deceiver, and The Face in the Frost”--A Bayesian model of an answer to the external-world skeptic. Draft version very similar to final published version archived by permission from Questiones Disputatae.

 

As of May, 2013, “Jeffrey Conditioning and the Defeasible Red Jelly Bean.” The final publication (at On-Line First in Philosophical Studies, Arizona) DOI # 10.1007/s11098-013-0145-3, is available here. Personal web page version posted by permission from Springer for the publishers.

 

As of January 9, 2009, here is Tim’s and my article on the resurrection, “The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.” Preprint version published here with the permission of Blackwell publishers. The print form appears in Blackwell’s Companion to Natural Theology,  2009, edited by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, pp. 593-662.

 

As of September 13, 2006, Here is the official PDF from Philosophia Christi of Tim’s and my rejoinder to Alvin Plantinga on probability and the historical argument for Christianity. A reprise of this same argument occurs in the resurrection article in the Blackwell volume, linked above.

 

Here is a paper on Jeffrey Conditioning, rigidity, and foundationalism, published in the Journal of Philosophical Research, 2010. An earlier version was the first part of our joint session at FEW 2006.

 

Here is an unpublished version of a paper co-written with Tim McGrew on foundationalism and mutual support. Published in Erkenntnis 68 (2008):55-77.

 

The history of this material is (to my mind, at least) interesting. Tim's original paper, "How Foundationalists Do Crossword Puzzles" (Phil Studies 96 (1999)) was at the time entirely convincing to me. It uses diachronicity to model mutual support, requiring the subject to decide which propositions he wishes to "prioritize" in his cognitive schema at any given time. Over the years, I would from time to time bring up the idea to Tim, trying to fit it in with other work we were doing or saying, "But doesn't that depend on how he prioritizes his beliefs?" About three years ago I was astonished to learn that Tim was dissatisfied with the solution, because if pushed as a model of mutual support it violated the requirement that two perfectly rational subjects with identical foundational data should have the same probabilities at any given time for all propositions. At first, I was frustrated by Tim’s desire to find something better. Any attempt to model mutual support synchronically might, I feared, abandon the notion of epistemic routing and make for mere vagueness (at the best) regarding specific basings. Last summer, I pressed Tim to teach me about Jeffrey Conditioning, which I had previously only heard of. Once I understood JC, I had the core of an idea for solving the problem of synchronic mutual support and foundationalism. (This is particularly ironic since Jeffrey himself was strongly against C.I. Lewis-style strong foundations, and Jeffrey Conditioning itself is considered paradigmatically diachronic.)

 

An earlier draft was presented by Tim as the first part of our joint session at FEW 2006. In this version we deal in detail with an attempted counterexample raised by Peter Vranas, our FEW commentator. The paper now also contains an appendix rigorously proving the triviality of a probabilistic and epistemic “tangle” that appears at first blush to require loops for its modeling. Triviality in this case means that the tangle should not be modeled with a loop, because the two entangled nodes of the evidence tree collapse into a single node influenced by the third node.

 

“What Grandma Can’t Know”  has never been published. It was presented at the Pacific Division meeting of the Society for Christian Philosophers in February of 2003, at Biola University. It’s a rip-roaring attack on externalist Reformed Epistemology. If someone reads this and is dying to put it into an anthology, please get in touch with me!

 

“Testability, Likelihoods, and Design” has appeared in Philo is posted here with permission. You won’t be able to get correct Philo page numbers from this version, as it was translated to PDF directly from Word Perfect. Its topic is Intelligent Design theory and the possibility of getting likelihoods for a Bayesian analysis of biological ID arguments.

 

“Likelihoods, Multiple Universes, and Epistemic Context”, published in Philosophia Christi. The PDF version here actually came from Philosophia Christi for purposes of page proof correction. Only a few corrections were necessary, so the page numbers should be correct. It is my understanding that Philosophia Christi allows authors to post papers published there on a personal web page. The article was about the fine-tuning argument. I don’t think the FTA works anyway, but here I argue that the attempt to introduce multiple universes as a reply to the FTA is blatantly ad hoc. Its plausibility springs from a) arguments that compare multiple to single universes when design is not on the table as an alternate explanation of some phenomenon and b) the idea that comparable likelihoods are the only really important epistemic consideration in comparing hypotheses.