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Paul Artin Boghossian (; born June 4, 1957) is an Americans 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.
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. American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012 Fellows (and their affiliations at the time of election)
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.David Kirp (2003). Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, pp. 68, 73, 76–77.
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.
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