Philosophy has long been concerned with various doxastic and epistemic states, such as belief and knowledge, and numerous philosophers have examined what it is for a subject to believe that the sun is shining or to know that the sun is shining. Surprisingly, however, almost no work has been devoted to analyzing doubt. Yet doubting is clearly no less interesting than believing or knowing. This paper offers a novel perspective, arguing that doubt is best understood in its close relation to certainty.

Suppose someone makes a racist remark but prefaces it with “I’m not a racist, but. . . ” or later dismisses it as “locker room talk.” These rhetorical maneuvers are now commonly known as figleaves: devious rhetorical devices that obscure otherwise apparent norm violations. Figleaves can be dangerous: they can normalize harmful speech and shield speakers from criticism. It is therefore important to find effective strategies to counter them. In this paper, we propose a new account of figleaves that lays the groundwork for such strategies. We argue that figleaves are a particular kind of defeater: they defeat evidence for norm violations by exploiting flawed background beliefs of the audience. This account not only accommodates a range of otherwise recalcitrant types and characteristics of figleaves, but also draws on well-understood epistemological categories.

Surprisingly, only some deontic necessity modals give rise to Moorean infelicities. For instance, `You must go to confession, but you won't' sounds strange, whereas `You should go to confession, but you won't' does not (see, e.g., Ninan 2005, Portner 2009, Mandelkern 2021, Silk 2022). In this paper, I propose a novel account. Rather than appealing to differences in speech act type, as recent accounts do, I argue that the relevant contrast is best explained by differences in verbal mood marking.

KK, or Epistemic Luminosity, is the thesis that knowledge is transparent. While unpopular for quite some time, KK has lately had a comeback. Most of the discussion aims to defuse anti KK arguments concerning inexact knowledge and the norm of assertion. Dorst (2019), however, presents an entirely novel argument for KK. He argues that conditionals of the form `If ~Kp, then p’, such as `If I don’t know that Padua is in Italy, it’s in Italy’, are strange and that KK can explain why. In this paper, we argue that this explanation fails. If we accept it, we cannot explain why seemingly similar conditionals of the form `If ~FBp, then ~p’, such as `If I don’t falsely believe that Padua is in France, it’s not in France’, are strange as well. Along the way, we offer further support for a relevance based account of the strangeness of both types of conditionals.

It is commonly assumed that there are at least two kinds of indicative conditionals: hypothetical and biscuit conditionals. It is also assumed that there is no analogous distinction within subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive conditionals, it is generally agreed, are uniformly read hypothetically. In a recent paper, Swanson argues that this is not true: embedded in the contexts of wants and wishes, at least certain subjunctive conditionals are read in a biscuit-like fashion. In this paper, I shall go beyond Swanson's claim. I shall argue that there are indicative biscuit conditionals of four different kinds and that subjunctive versions of all of them can be read as biscuit conditionals, even outside the contexts of wants and wishes.