Paul Boghossian
American philosopher (born 1957)
- 3 min read
- 2 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Americans, Philosophy and Intuition
Education and career
The child of Armenian genocide survivors, Boghossian was born in Haifa and left Israel at age 15 for Canada. He earned a B.S. in physics at Trent University in 1978 and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1987. Before joining the faculty at NYU, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan from 1984 to 1992, and was also a visiting professor at Princeton. He has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Magdalen College, Oxford, the University of London, and the Australian National University, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He has served on the editorial board of Philosophers' Imprint, Episteme, and Philosophical Studies. In postmodern circles, he is known for his response to the Sokal hoax.
His book Fear of Knowledge won a Choice Award as an outstanding Academic Book of 2006.
In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
As chair of the NYU philosophy department from 1994 to 2004, Boghossian is credited with transforming it from a department without a Ph.D. program into the top-ranked philosophy program in the United States, through an intensive hiring campaign focused on core areas of analytic philosophy.
In 2025 and 2026, Boghossian chaired a group commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University to examine the state of the academic humanities. The resulting report criticized these fields for "deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity".
Sign in to keep reading
One more chapter is free with a Lably account.
Philosophical work
Boghossian is known for defending a version of the analytic–synthetic distinction in the face of Quine's influential critique. In Analyticity Reconsidered (1996) and subsequent work, he distinguishes between metaphysical analyticity—a statement being true purely in virtue of its meaning—and epistemic analyticity, where understanding a statement's meaning is sufficient to justify belief in its truth. Boghossian concedes that Quine was right to doubt the metaphysical notion of analyticity, but argues that the epistemic notion remains coherent and valuable for explaining certain kinds of a priori knowledge. In subsequent (and ongoing) work, he acknowledges that epistemic analyticity cannot account for all instances of a priori knowledge—such as knowledge of color exclusion facts or normative principles—and increasingly emphasizes the role of rational intuition as a complementary, non-linguistic source of a priori justification.
In metaepistemology, Boghossian is a leading critic of epistemic relativism and constructivism. In Fear of Knowledge (2006), he challenges what he terms the doctrine of Equal Validity, the idea that there are many radically different yet equally valid ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. Boghossian argues that such relativist positions are inherently self-defeating, as they cannot be consistently formulated without appealing to non-relativistic standards.
In the philosophy of color, Boghossian, in collaboration with David Velleman, has challenged both dispositional and physicalist accounts of color properties. Arguing that neither view can adequately capture the nature of color as we experience and conceptualize it, they propose instead that colors are monadic, non-relational, essentially qualitative properties—features that, on their view, cannot be instantiated by external objects. This leads them to endorse a form of color eliminativism.
In the philosophy of mind, Boghossian is known for introducing the "slow switching" argument against the compatibility of content externalism with privileged self-knowledge. Drawing on earlier work by Tyler Burge, Boghossian argues that if the content of one's thoughts depends on external environmental or linguistic factors, then gradual shifts in such contexts—such as moving from Earth to a Twin Earth where terms like "water" refer to chemically different substances—can alter the content of one's thoughts without the subject being introspectively aware of the change. Since individuals may remain unaware of such environmental shifts, they cannot, solely through introspection, determine the precise content of their thoughts (e.g., whether they are thinking of water or twin-water). This, Boghossian argues, undermines the notion that we possess authoritative, introspective access to the contents of our minds if those contents are externally individuated.