In the heat of debate with my niece.

I’m a Ph.D candidate in NYU’s department of philosophy. This fall I’ll be on the job market. My specialization is epistemology, though my work also concerns philosophy of logic, language and mind. My advising committee consists of Jim Pryor, Paul Boghossian, and Hartry Field.

My email address is my first name followed by “@nyu.edu”. 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.