I'm a philosopher, essayist, and critic. I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT. My CV is here.

In 2021, I won the Marc Sanders Prize in epistemology for my paper on dogmatism. In 2022, I took up a three year British Academy Wolfson Fellowship; I'm using that time to write a book about the epistemology and politics of narrative. You can read my book proposal here.

I write essays and reviews for places like The Times Literary Supplement, The Point, and The Boston Review. You can find my essays and reviews here.

Resources for students (reading lists, handouts, advice etc) are all available here. (Other instructors should feel free to use them; just credit me where appropriate.)

Email me at: refraser [at] mit.edu.

papers

The Will in Belief.
Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Forthcoming. [Winner of the 2021 Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology.]
  • I develop a novel variant of the dogmatism puzzle. I argue that a range of puzzles about dogmatism can be solved by adopting a view I called volitionism: the view that beliefs involve the will.

Aesthetic Injustice. 
Ethics, 2024.
  • I argue that artists can be wronged by aesthetic judgements of their work.[pdf]

The Limits of Immanent Critique.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2023.
  • The prospects for immanent criticism are bleak: they must either commit to an implausible social ontology, a flawed meta-normative theory, or both.

Absolutely General Knowledge.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3): 547-566. 2022. [With Beau Madison Mount.]
  • There is extensive debate among contemporary philosophers about the possibility of absolutely unrestricted quantification; thus far, the debate  been almost entirely logically and metaphysically focused. We argue for a third axis of evaluation: the epistemological.

KK Failures are not Abominable.
Mind (522): 575-584. 2022.
  • Kevin Dorst has recently presented an ingenious and novel argument for the controversial KK-principle.   I counter his argument by appealing to Lewisian pragmatic resources.

Mushy Akrasia.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.  105 (1): 79-106. 2021. 
  • I present a novel argument for the permissibility of mushy credences. I argue that the permissibility of mushy credences flows naturally from widely accepted enkratic constraints on rationality. 

Narrative Testimony.
Philosophical Studies. 178 (12): 4025-4052. 2021. 
  • Epistemologists of testimony have focused almost exclusively on the epistemic dynamics of simple testimony. We do sometimes testify by way of simple, single sentence assertions. But much of our testimony is narratively structured. I argue that narrative testimony gives rise to a form of epistemic dependence that is far richer and more far-reaching than the epistemic dependence characteristic of simple testimony. 

​The Ethics of Metaphor.
Ethics 128 (4): 728-755. 2018.
  • I develop a novel model for making sense of political-cum-ethical critiques of metaphorical speech.

Stakes Sensitivity and Transformative Experience.
Analysis 78 (1): 34-39. 2018.
  • I trace the relationship between the view that knowledge is stakes sensitive and Laurie Paul’s (2014) account of the epistemology of transformative experience.

Testimonial Pessimism.
Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Essays in Religious Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp 203-227. 2018.
  • I establish a robust connection between pessimist readings of testimony, and two different commitments one might have in the philosophy of language: 'emotionism', and what I call ‘strong’ readings of the de re.

​The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism. London: Bloomsbury. pp 329 -354. 2018.
  • I explore the epistemic structures associated with the system of compulsory heterosexuality, in particular, the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality structures both our mental lives and our access to it, and the epistemic costs, for women, associated with  entering into heterosexual relationships.

Risk, Doubt, and Transmission.
Philosophical Studies. 173 (10): 2803 - 2821. 2016. ​
  • The project of this paper is to show that plausible theses in the epistemology of testimony ('transmission theses') face problems structurally identical to those faced by closure principles.
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Cretan Deductions.
Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1): 163 - 178. 2015. [With John Hawthorne.]
  • We explore a series of puzzles related to closure principles and self-reference.

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works in progress

Practical Assurance.
  • A paper about the puzzle of promising against the evidence.[email for draft]

reviews, symposia, etc

How To Talk Back.
Philosophy, Politics, and Economics 22 (3): 315-335. 2023.

Lorna Finlayson's "An Introduction to Feminism". Mind 126 (504): 1251-1259. 2017.

Katherine Hawley's "How To Be Trustworthy". European Journal of Philosophy. 28 (2):533-536. 2020.

students

Nick Clanchy works on feminist philosophy and epistemology. They have particular interests in hermeneutical injustice. Check out their paper on hermeneutical injustice in gender-affirming healthcare.

Becky Clark works on political philosophy and feminist philosophy; her main interests are in questions about how labour should be organised. Check out her paper on the prospects for political realism.

Livia von Samson works in social and political philosophy. They are especially interested in family abolition.