In the heat of debate with my niece.

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. I recently completed my Ph.D. at NYU.

My email address is my first and last names, separated by a period, followed by “@gmail.com”. My name is Turkish. Most people pronounce my first name by using the two English words “sin” and “on”. The last name is pronounced “dor-uh-mudge-uh”.

Abstract: What accounts for how we know that certain rules of reasoning, such as reasoning by Modus Ponens, are valid? If our knowledge of validity must be based on some reasoning, then we seem to be committed to the legitimacy of rule-circular arguments for validity. This paper raises a new difficulty for the rule-circular account for our knowledge of validity. The source of the problem is that, contrary to traditional wisdom, a universal generalization cannot be inferred just on the basis of reasoning about an arbitrary object. I argue in favor of a more sophisticated constraint on reasoning by universal generalization, one which undermines the rule-circular account of our knowledge of validity.

Knowledge of Validity pre-print

(appeared in Nous, 44:3, (2010), 403-432)

Abstract: In this paper, I explore a question about deductive reasoning: why am I in a position to immediately infer some deductive consequences of what I know, but not others? I show why the question cannot be answered in the most natural ways of answering it, in particular in Descartes’s way of answering it. I then go on to introduce a new approach to answering the question, an approach inspired by Hume’s view of inductive reasoning.

Inferences to Easy Deductive Consequences draft of January, 2011

(under review)

Apriority draft of December, 2010

(forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, eds. Delia Graff Fara and Gillian Russell)

Abstract: After briefly expositing some fundamental issues in current debates about apriority, I go on to critically examine meaning-based explanations of how we acquire apriori justification.

Sinan Dogramaci

Reverse-Engineering Epistemic Rationality draft of July, 2011

(co-winner of the biennial Rutgers Young Epistemologist Prize, 2011;

forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.)

Abstract: This paper begins by raising a puzzle about what function our use of the word ‘rational’ could serve. To solve the puzzle, I introduce a view I call Epistemic Communism: we use epistemic evaluations to promote coordination among our basic belief-forming rules, and the function of this is to make the acquisition of knowledge by testimony more efficient.