Joshua Edward Pearson
Conditionally Accepted at Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Suppose you believe on independent grounds that Verdi is Italian, Bizet is French, and Satie is French. To your surprise, you then learn that all three composers are compatriots. What should you believe? Some argue you should be cautious and become ambivalent as to whether all three composers are French or all three are Italian. Surprisingly, if that's right, Composers wreaks epistemological anarchy: a wide variety of epistemological principles turn out to be false. Those resistant to this anarchy instead argue you should be bold and conclude that all three composers are French. I endorse the anarchy. But I do so here in a unique way. Existing approaches to Composers side exclusively with either the cautious or bold reaction, ruling the other out as irrational. This is undesirable: both judgements look reasonable. I outline a new approach to Composers that successively captures this permissive element of the case.
Belief Revision Revised
A Puzzle about Weak Belief
Against the Causal Independence Principle
Handout July 2026. Working on a draft!
It is extremely plausible that when two facts are causally independent from one-another in the right kind of way, had one of them been false, the other would still have been true. I argue that endorsing a general principle to explain this—the Causal Independence Principle (CIP)—produces a dilemma. In particular, the CIP-lover must give up one of:
WOULD-BY-CASES: If both (1) If A&B had been the case, C would have been the case, and (2) If A¬-B had been the case, C would have been the case, then (3) If A had been the case, C would have been the case.
MIGHT-BY-CASES: If both (1) If A&B had been the case, C might have been the case, and (2) If A¬-B had been the case, C might have been the case, then (3) If A had been the case, C might have been the case.
After exploring some CIP-loving views on which these principles fail, I argue CIP should be given up, offering a contextualist account of its plausibility.
Counterfactual Skepticism Reloaded
Email me if you're interested and would like to chat. As a taster, here's a work-in-progress handout from early on in this project.
Two Joint Projects in progress
Composing Composers: LIVE!
Eastern APA, 2025. Thanks to Abe Matthew!
I outline a novel counterexample to the principle of belief revision, Anticipation: if both learning e and learning not-e would render belief in p unjustified, you cannot now be justified in believing p. If I’m right, not only is the leading theory of belief revision false, so are various recently proposed weakenings. I defend a new theory that correctly predicts the failures of Anticipation I argue for, predicated on the simple idea that one is justified in ruling out possibility just in case that possibility is sufficiently improbable.
I present an intractable puzzle for currently popular view that belief is weak — the view that expressions like 'S believes p' ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence in p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology when accommodating beliefs in conditionals, or they must deny that beliefs in conditionals can be used in reasoning.
Slide from early FARM 2025 presentation.
Thanks to Helena Fang!
Hájek famously defends the view that most counterfactuals are false, and so not known. His arguments now deploy premises which are widely contested. However, I argue that new arguments for counterfactual skepticism can be constructed without using these assumptions. Indeed, I'll develop two such arguments, one for each side on a central debate in the literature: whether the controversial "Conditional Excluded Middle"(CEM) is true. However, I'm not a counterfactual skeptic. I develop responses on behalf of both CEM-lovers and CEM-haters.
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A project on orthogonal knowledge, with Richard Roth and Ginger Schultheis.
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A project on objective reasons for belief and the Dogmatism Paradox, with Eliot Watkins.