John Hawthorne

About

John Hawthorne is a Provost Professor of Philosophy and holds the Linda MacDonald Hilf Chair in Philosophy at USC Dornsife. His academic role involves engaging in philosophical scholarship, and he is associated with the university's broader intellectual community. As a faculty member, he contributes to the university's mission of advancing knowledge and education in the field of philosophy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Physics
• Mathematical economics
• Quantum mechanics
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Multiple Universes and Self-Locating Evidence

  The Philosophical Review · 2022 · 39 citations

  Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse (at least in a suitably idealized setting). This convergence is no accident: w…

  DOI

• The Bounds of Possibility

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 32 citations

  Abstract This book didn’t have to consist of exactly the sentences that it in fact contains: any one of its sentences could have been very different. But it could not have consisted of an entirely different collection of sentences, such as to make it a gothic novel or a treatise on wine-tasting. Other familiar objects are similarly capable of being moderately different, but not radically different, in various respects. But there are puzzling arguments which threaten these apparently obvious judg…

  DOI

• Dogmatism and Inquiry

  Mind · 2024-04-15 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Inquiry aims at knowledge. Your inquiry into a question succeeds just in case you come to know the answer. However, combined with a common picture on which misleading evidence can lead knowledge to be lost, this view threatens to recommend a novel form of dogmatism. At least in some cases, individuals who know the answer to a question appear required to avoid evidence bearing on it. In this paper, we’ll aim to do two things. First, we’ll present an argument for this novel form of dogmat…

  PublisherDOI

• Safety, Closure, and Extended Methods

  The Journal of Philosophy · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epist…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• KK is Wrong Because We Say So

  Mind · 2024-10-15 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper offers a new argument against the KK thesis, which says that if you know p, then you know that you know p. We argue that KK is inconsistent with the fact that anyone denies the KK thesis: imagine that Dudley says he knows p but that he does not have 100 iterations of knowledge about p. If KK were true, Dudley would know that he has 100 iterations of knowledge about p, and so he wouldn’t deny that he did. We consider several epicycles, and also explore whether the argument typ…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Juhani Yli‐Vakkuri

  48 shared

• Cian Dorr

  27 shared

• Herman Cappelen

  15 shared

• Maria Lasonen‐Aarnio

  University of Helsinki

  13 shared

• Yoaav Isaacs

  Baylor University

  13 shared

• Clayton Littlejohn

  11 shared

• Jeffrey Sanford Russell

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  11 shared

• David Manley

  University of Bristol

  11 shared

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

• Lu Chenh-72
• Mark Schroederh-59
• Scott Soamesh-47