• Lecturer (Philosophy)

email: Martin.Smith@glasgow.ac.uk

Office Hours: Tuesday 3-4, Wednesday 3-4.

I am currently working on two (related) research projects.  The first project concerns the relationship between justified belief and evidential probability.  Epistemologists (and others) often take it for granted that what it means for one to have justification for believing a claim is for it to be sufficiently probable, given one's evidence.  Despite the obvious appeal of this, I think that justified belief has little to do with evidential probability and is determined by very different features of one's evidence.  The second project concerns the problem of radical scepticism and the notion of entitlement - of automatic or default justification - that some epistemologists have invoked in order to deal with it.  I argue for a novel conception of entitlement based upon the idea that the evidential support relation can be modelled as a kind of variably strict conditional operator. I have also written on conditional logic, the epistemology of deduction and the epistemology of religious belief.  My current CV can be found here. 

Papers on Justification and Evidential Probability

• 'Knowledge, Justification and Normative Coincidence' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming
• 'The Arbitrariness of Belief' in Dodd, D. and Zardini, E. eds. Contemporary Perspectives on Scepticism and Perceptual Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthcoming
• 'A Generalised Lottery Paradox for Infinite Probability Spaces'British Journal for the Philosophy of Sciencev61(4), 2010 (The published version can be found here.)
• 'What Else Justification Could Be' Noûs v44(1), 2010, reprinted in Neta, R. ed. Epistemology v1 (Routledge, 2012) (The published version can be found here.)

Papers on Scepticism and Entitlement

• 'Full Blooded Entitlement' in Pedersen, N. and Graham, P. eds. Epistemic Entitlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthcoming
• 'Entitlement and Evidence' Australasian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming (The published version can be found here.)
• 'Transmission Failure Explained'‌ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research v79(1), 2009 (The published version can be found here.)

Other Papers

• 'Two Notions of Epistemic Risk' Erkenntnis, forthcoming
• 'Outright Belief and Degrees of Belief' Dialectica v66(3), 2012 (with Philip Ebert) 
• 'Some Thoughts on the JK-Rule' Noûs v46(4), 2012
• 'God and the External World'‌‌‎ Ratio v24(1), 2011 (The published version can be found here.)
• 'Ceteris Paribus Conditionals and Comparative Normalcy' ‌Journal of Philosophical Logic v36(1), 2007 (The published version can be found here)

Book reviews

• Review of Quitting Certainties by Michael G Titelbaum Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2013

A full list of publications and some work in progress can be found on my Philpapers Profile.

• Received (jointly with Philip Ebert and Peter Milne) grants from the Scots Philosophical Association, and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science for a workshop on beliefs and degrees of belief held at the University of Stirling in 2010.
• Received (jointly with Philip Ebert and Peter Milne) grants from the Scots Philosophical Association, the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, to support a workshop on the lottery paradox, held at the University of Glasgow in 2009. 

Current PhD students:

• Stephanie Rennick
• Neil McDonnell
• Geert Drieghe

Current teaching:

• JH3: Epistemology
• SH26: Justification and Probability
• Russell/Ayer component of 2K: Knowledge, Meaning and Inference