Robert Weston Siscoe
Biographic Data
| ID | 1218152 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Weston Siscoe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert Weston |
| FAMILY NAME | Siscoe |
| SIGNATURE | SISCOE R W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7804-9651 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Teaching and Learning Guide for: Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives
Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives: Linguistic Foundations and Philosophical Applications
In Ignorance , Peter Unger famously argues for a version of radical skepticism, that everyone knows “hardly anything to be so.” Skepticism, of course, is nothing new. What was unique about Unger's position is that it relied on a distinction between relative and absolute terms, leading to a number of discoveries about the behavior and semantics of gradable adjectives. This paper will consider the research program that his argument has spawned, fir…
Knowing Justice When You See It
Amartya Sen has argued that identifying fully just societies is not necessary for the practical project of diagnosing ways that our society could be made more just. Employing an analogy with tallness, Sen points out that we do not need to identify the tallest mountain in order to compare the heights of other mountains. Likewise, why suppose that we need to identify the perfectly just society in order to make comparative claims about justice? In t…
The Unity of the Ideal Virtues
Even though the virtues may be interconnected, it seems obviously possible to have one of the virtues without having them all. Some have defended the unity thesis against this concern by arguing that the virtues are still unified in their ideal forms. The problem with this defense is that it simply admits that the unity thesis, as traditionally conceived, is mistaken, taking the unity of the virtues to be limited to the ideal case. In this paper,…
Grounding and the Epistemic Regress Problem
Modal metaphysics consumed much of the philosophical discussion at the turn of the century, yielding a number of epistemological insights. Modal analyses were applied within epistemology, yielding sensitivity and safety theories of knowledge as well as counterfactual accounts of the basing relation. The contemporary conversation has now turned to a new metaphysical notion – grounding – opening the way to a fresh wave of insights by bringing groun…
Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance
Justification as a dimension of rationality
How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make …
Ignorance and awareness
Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic…
Awareness by degree
Do factive mental states come in degrees? If so, what is their underlying structure, and what is their theoretical significance? Many have observed that ‘knows that’ is not a gradable verb and have taken this to be strong evidence that propositional knowledge does not come in degrees. This paper demonstrates that the adjective ‘aware that’ passes all the standard tests of gradability, and thus strongly motivates the idea that it refers to a facti…
Being Rational Enough: Maximizing, Satisficing, and Degrees of Rationality
Against the maximizing conception of practical rationality, Michael Slote has argued that rationality does not always require choosing what is most rational. Instead, it can sometimes be rational to do something that is less-than-fully rational. In this paper, I will argue that maximizers have a ready response to Slote’s position. Roy Sorensen has argued that ‘rational’ is an absolute term, suggesting that it is not possible to be rational withou…
Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Epistemic Aims of Democracy
The Epistemic Aims of Democracy
Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods - goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding - can also have political value, a…
Grounding, Understanding, and Explanation
Starting with the slogan that understanding is a ‘knowledge of causes’, Stephen Grimm and John Greco have argued that understanding comes from a knowledge of dependence relations. Grounding is the trendiest dependence relation on the market, and if Grimm and Greco are correct, then instances of grounding should also give rise to understanding. In this paper, I will show that this prediction is correct – grounding does indeed generate understandin…
Real and ideal rationality
Rational supererogation and epistemic permissivism
Credal accuracy and knowledge
Traditional epistemologists assumed that the most important doxastic norms were rational requirements on belief. This orthodoxy has recently been challenged by the work of revolutionary epistemologists on the rational requirements on credences. Revolutionary epistemology takes it that such contemporary work is important precisely because traditional epistemologists are mistaken—credal norms are more fundamental than, and determinative of, belief …
Does Being Rational Require Being Ideally Rational? ‘Rational’ as a Relative and an Absolute Term
A number of formal epistemologists have argued that perfect rationality requires probabilistic coherence, a requirement that they often claim applies only to ideal agents. However, in “Rationality as an Absolute Concept,” Roy Sorensen contends that ‘rational’ is an absolute term. Just as Peter Unger argued that being flat requires that a surface be completely free of bumps and blemishes, Sorensen claims that being rational requires being perfectl…
No work for a theory of epistemic dispositions
Grounding and a priori epistemology: Challenges for conceptualism
Incoherent but Reasonable: A Defense of Truth-Abstinence in Political Liberalism
A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disag…
The Demandingness of Virtue
How demanding is the virtuous life? Can virtue exist alongside hints of vice? Is it possible to be virtuous within a vicious society? A line of thinking running through Diogenes and the Stoics is that even a hint of corruption is inimical to virtue, that participating in a vicious society makes it impossible for a person to be virtuous. One response to this difficulty is to claim that virtue is a threshold concept, that context sets a threshold f…
No prominent works on this page.
Incoherent but Reasonable: A Defense of Truth-Abstinence in Political Liberalism
A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disag…
The Demandingness of Virtue
How demanding is the virtuous life? Can virtue exist alongside hints of vice? Is it possible to be virtuous within a vicious society? A line of thinking running through Diogenes and the Stoics is that even a hint of corruption is inimical to virtue, that participating in a vicious society makes it impossible for a person to be virtuous. One response to this difficulty is to claim that virtue is a threshold concept, that context sets a threshold f…
Does Being Rational Require Being Ideally Rational? ‘Rational’ as a Relative and an Absolute Term
A number of formal epistemologists have argued that perfect rationality requires probabilistic coherence, a requirement that they often claim applies only to ideal agents. However, in “Rationality as an Absolute Concept,” Roy Sorensen contends that ‘rational’ is an absolute term. Just as Peter Unger argued that being flat requires that a surface be completely free of bumps and blemishes, Sorensen claims that being rational requires being perfectl…
No work for a theory of epistemic dispositions
Grounding and a priori epistemology: Challenges for conceptualism
Grounding, Understanding, and Explanation
Starting with the slogan that understanding is a ‘knowledge of causes’, Stephen Grimm and John Greco have argued that understanding comes from a knowledge of dependence relations. Grounding is the trendiest dependence relation on the market, and if Grimm and Greco are correct, then instances of grounding should also give rise to understanding. In this paper, I will show that this prediction is correct – grounding does indeed generate understandin…
Real and ideal rationality
Rational supererogation and epistemic permissivism
Credal accuracy and knowledge
Traditional epistemologists assumed that the most important doxastic norms were rational requirements on belief. This orthodoxy has recently been challenged by the work of revolutionary epistemologists on the rational requirements on credences. Revolutionary epistemology takes it that such contemporary work is important precisely because traditional epistemologists are mistaken—credal norms are more fundamental than, and determinative of, belief …
Being Rational Enough: Maximizing, Satisficing, and Degrees of Rationality
Against the maximizing conception of practical rationality, Michael Slote has argued that rationality does not always require choosing what is most rational. Instead, it can sometimes be rational to do something that is less-than-fully rational. In this paper, I will argue that maximizers have a ready response to Slote’s position. Roy Sorensen has argued that ‘rational’ is an absolute term, suggesting that it is not possible to be rational withou…
Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Epistemic Aims of Democracy
The Epistemic Aims of Democracy
Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods - goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding - can also have political value, a…
Grounding and the Epistemic Regress Problem
Modal metaphysics consumed much of the philosophical discussion at the turn of the century, yielding a number of epistemological insights. Modal analyses were applied within epistemology, yielding sensitivity and safety theories of knowledge as well as counterfactual accounts of the basing relation. The contemporary conversation has now turned to a new metaphysical notion – grounding – opening the way to a fresh wave of insights by bringing groun…
Knowledge, true belief, and the gradability of ignorance
Justification as a dimension of rationality
How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make …
Ignorance and awareness
Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic…
Awareness by degree
Do factive mental states come in degrees? If so, what is their underlying structure, and what is their theoretical significance? Many have observed that ‘knows that’ is not a gradable verb and have taken this to be strong evidence that propositional knowledge does not come in degrees. This paper demonstrates that the adjective ‘aware that’ passes all the standard tests of gradability, and thus strongly motivates the idea that it refers to a facti…
The Unity of the Ideal Virtues
Even though the virtues may be interconnected, it seems obviously possible to have one of the virtues without having them all. Some have defended the unity thesis against this concern by arguing that the virtues are still unified in their ideal forms. The problem with this defense is that it simply admits that the unity thesis, as traditionally conceived, is mistaken, taking the unity of the virtues to be limited to the ideal case. In this paper,…
Teaching and Learning Guide for: Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives
Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives: Linguistic Foundations and Philosophical Applications
In Ignorance , Peter Unger famously argues for a version of radical skepticism, that everyone knows “hardly anything to be so.” Skepticism, of course, is nothing new. What was unique about Unger's position is that it relied on a distinction between relative and absolute terms, leading to a number of discoveries about the behavior and semantics of gradable adjectives. This paper will consider the research program that his argument has spawned, fir…
Knowing Justice When You See It
Amartya Sen has argued that identifying fully just societies is not necessary for the practical project of diagnosing ways that our society could be made more just. Employing an analogy with tallness, Sen points out that we do not need to identify the tallest mountain in order to compare the heights of other mountains. Likewise, why suppose that we need to identify the perfectly just society in order to make comparative claims about justice? In t…
Philosophy (18 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (16 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (9 works) · Metaphysics (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Philosophy of language (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Free Will and Agency (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works)