About

Krista Lawlor is the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Memorial Professor at Stanford University, affiliated with the Philosophy department and the Symbolic Systems Program. She holds a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of New Hampshire, an M.A. in Philosophy from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. Her academic appointments include roles such as Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Philosophy at Stanford, and Director of Graduate Studies for the university. Her professional service includes memberships on various committees, editorial responsibilities, and leadership positions within the American Philosophical Association and Stanford University. Her research interests encompass cognitive science and the philosophical foundations of these fields. Throughout her career, she has been recognized with awards such as the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and the Pedagogy Award from the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Her contributions to philosophy and education are reflected in her extensive involvement in academic committees, editorial work, and her leadership roles within the university and professional organizations.

Research topics

• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Computer science
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Speaking, vaguely

  Stanford Digital Repository · 2026-05-19

  dissertationOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• How to Really Take Scepticism Seriously

  Analysis · 2025-08-09 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Being Reasonable

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2025-12-09

  book1st authorCorresponding

  A leading philosopher explores what it means to be reasonable—and why it matters for the well-being of our society. Reasonableness plays many roles in our lives. In Anglo-American law, it is the yardstick for a wide range of behavior—the “reasonable-person standard” governs everything from contract enforcement to killing in self-defense. In politics, a state can maintain a liberal democracy only if its citizens are reasonable. In ordinary life, we hold each other accountable to reason: We criticize the unreasonable of bosses who demand too much of our time or of partners who make decisions without regard for our preferences. But what does it mean to be reasonable? Being reasonable is not the same as being rational. It is also different from being thoughtful. In Being Reasonable, Krista Lawlor argues that a reasonable person seeks to understand what is valuable. A reasonable person must be rational enough to figure out what is valuable and thoughtful enough to care about what other people find valuable, but rationality and thoughtfulness alone do not suffice to make one reasonable. Even an ideally rational and thoughtful person might fail to understand, or lack the concern to understand, what is valuable. Being Reasonable is the first comprehensive study of reasonableness. Lawlor provides an account of the nature of reasonableness and, further, explains how we manage to be reasonable. Humans discover what is valuable by listening to their emotions and by listening to each other. By taking command over our emotions, and by interacting attentively with others, we can live up to the standard set by society and law.

  PublisherDOI

• A Genealogy of Reasonableness

  Mind · 2022-08-22 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We all know that being reasonable is important in daily life. Beyond daily life, major political and ethical theorists give central place to reasonableness in their accounts of just and moral behaviour. In the law, at least in the Anglo-American setting, reasonableness is the standard for a wide range of behaviour, from administrative decisions to torts. But what is it to be reasonable? In answer, I provide a genealogical account of reasonableness. The functional perspective afforded by a genealogical account has numerous payoffs, explaining important features of reasonableness, and enabling us to respond to worries about vagueness or subjectivity in the meaning of ‘reasonable’.

  PublisherDOI

• Modest Foundations for Perceptual Knowledge

  2022-09-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Modest foundationalism is the view that our perceptual beliefs may be justified without the need for further justified beliefs. The view accords with common sense, in counting many of our ordinary perceptual beliefs as justified. But modest foundationalism struggles with an excess of justification, as it seems also to warrant empirically ambitious or even outlandish beliefs that might be inferred from ordinary starting points. I develop a commonsense view of warrant transmission that helps the modest foundationalist block the excess. 1

  PublisherDOI

• Impersonal Epistemic Standards 1

  2021-05-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Recent epistemology pits Invariantists against Contextualists in a debate about how to best account for various features of knowledge claims. One feature is the cross-contextual usefulness of knowledge claims: if a person says she knows p, her knowledge claim can be useful to others, regardless of whether or how these others differ from the speaker in their interests in p’s truth. I argue that a widely shared assumption of both Contextualists and Invariantists hampers the explanation of cross-contextual usefulness, namely the assumption that the standards that govern knowledge claims are personal standards. This widely shared assumption makes it difficult to account for the cross-contextual use of knowledge claims. I suggest we should reject the widely shared “personalist” assumption and explore the nature of impersonal epistemic standards.

  PublisherDOI

• Telling as Joint Action: comments on Richard Moran’s <i>The Exchange of Words</i>

  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2021-05-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Comments on <i>What Is the Point of Knowledge?</i>

  Analysis · 2020-09-04 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Comments on What Is the Point of Knowledge? Krista Lawlor Krista Lawlor Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2155, USA Email: klawlor@stanford.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Analysis, Volume 81, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 107–114, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anaa066 Published: 05 May 2021

  PublisherDOI

• Common Sense and Ordinary Language: Wittgenstein and Austin

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-11-06 · 2 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What role does ‘ordinary language philosophy’ play in the defense of common sense beliefs? J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein each give central place to ordinary language in their responses to skeptical challenges to common sense beliefs. But Austin and Wittgenstein do not always respond to such challenges in the same way, and their working methods are different. In this paper, I compare Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical positions, and show that they share many metaphilosophical commitments. I then examine Austin and Wittgenstein’s respective takes on the problem of other minds and the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Interestingly, we find Wittgenstein employing methods more frequently associated Austin and vice versa. Moreover, we find that a variety of defenses of common sense beliefs are compatible with ‘ordinary language philosophy.’

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Knowledge and reasonableness

  Synthese · 2020-07-31 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• B. Welsh

  University of Toronto

  2 shared

• AF Colver

  Newcastle University

  2 shared

• S N Jarvis

  University of Mannheim

  2 shared

• Svetozar I Mihaylov

  Newcastle University

  2 shared

• Kristie A. Abston

  Middle Tennessee State University

  1 shared

• Anaphora Memory

  1 shared

• Oron Shagrir

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  1 shared

• John H. Batchelor

  University of West Florida

  1 shared

Labs

• Symbolic Systems ProgramPI

Awards & honors

• Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, Stanford University…
• Pedagogy Award, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michi…