Paul Artin Boghossian (; born June 4, 1957) is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he chaired the department from 1994 to 2004. His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is also director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.
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.
Boghossian is known for defending a version of the analyticâÂÂsynthetic distinction in the face of Quine's influential critique. In Analyticity Reconsidered (1996) and subsequent work, he distinguishes between metaphysical analyticityâÂÂa statement being true purely in virtue of its meaningâÂÂand 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 knowledgeâÂÂsuch as knowledge of color exclusion facts or normative principlesâÂÂand 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 propertiesâÂÂfeatures 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 contextsâÂÂsuch as moving from Earth to a Twin Earth where terms like "water" refer to chemically different substancesâÂÂcan 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.