book project

I'm writing a book on the epistemology and politics of narrative; a proposal is under review with Oxford University Press. You can read the proposal here, and a paper on which the book will build here.

journal 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.

The Limits of Immanent Critique
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2023.

• The tradition of immanent critique promises a lot. It promises to be critical of the existing social order without appealing to ‘external’ normative standards. I argue that the prospects for immanent criticism are bleak: they must either commit to an implausible social ontology, a flawed meta-normative theory, or both.

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

• Hate speech and misinformation are rife. How to respond? Counterspeech proposals say: with more and better speech. This paper considers the treatment of counterspeech in Maxime Lepoutre’s Democratic Speech In Divided Times. Lepoutre provides a nuanced defence of counterspeech. Some counterspeech, he grants, is flawed. But, he says: counterspeech can be debugged. Once we understand why counterspeech fails – when fail it does – we can engineer more effective counterspeech strategies. Lepoutre argues that the failures of counterspeech can be theorised using the ideology of salience. Negative counterspeech fails because it reinforces the salience of the very ideas or associations that it contests. His solution? Positive counterspeech – a form of counterspeech which avoids the salience trap. I argue that the salience paradigm is ill-suited to theorise the failures of counterspeech. I suggest some alternatives. Further, I show that these alternative paradigms make importantly different practical recommendations – recommendations concerning how we ought to engineer our counterspeech – from those issued by the salience paradigm.

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. We defend absolutism on epistemological grounds, by showing that one prominent and attractive alternative to absolutism---schematism---is epistemologically unacceptable. 

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.

• Often, we speak figuratively. Some figurative language exploits what is ethically laden and politically contested. We speak of factory farming as 'a holocaust', of cultures as 'schizophrenic', and of invaded cities as 'raped'. Such metaphors often come in for strenuous political critique. Jewish groups condemn Holocaust imagery, mental health organisations, the metaphorical exploitation of psychosis, and feminists, 'rape metaphors'. In this paper, I develop a novel model for making sense of such distinctively political 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. The view that knowledge is stakes sensitive comes in different flavours: one can go for subjective or objective conceptions of stakes, where subjective views of stakes take stakes to be a function of an agent’s non-factive mental states, and objective views of stakes do not. I argue that there is a tension between subjective accounts of stakes sensitivity and Paul’s epistemology of transformative experience.

Risk, Doubt, and Transmission.
Philosophical Studies. 173 (10): 2803 - 2821. 2016. ​

• Despite their substantial appeal, closure principles have fallen on hard times. Both anti-luck conditions on knowledge and the defeasibility of knowledge look to be in tension with natural ways of articulating single-premise closure principles (Lasonen-Aarnio, 2008, Schechter, 2013). 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. First I show how Lasonen-Aarnio's claim that there is a tension between single premise closure and anti-luck constraints on knowledge can be extended to make trouble for transmission theses. Second, I show how Schechter's claim that there is a tension between single premise closure and the thought that knowledge is defeasible can be extended to make trouble for transmission theses. I end the paper by sketching the consequences of this trouble for the dialectic in the epistemology of testimony.

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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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​papers in edited collections

Testimonial Pessimism.
In: Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Essays in Religious Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp 203-227. 2018.

• Recent epistemological history has inclined towards ‘testimonial optimism’, keen to stress the division of epistemic labour and how ubiquitously we depend upon the words of others. Its counterpart, ‘testimonial pessimism’, marks out a cluster of gloomier views, which stress -- in different ways -- testimony’s' epistemic shortcomings. My project in this paper is to 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. I do not aim to say, in this paper, what I think we ought to do with these connections; that is, I aim to remain agnostic on whether we should take the connections I sketch to give us a way of vindicating pessimism, or whether they are better read as part of an error theoretic project.

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​The Epistemology of (Compulsory) Heterosexuality.
In: 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. My starting point will be with a paper of Charles Mills, in which he considers the ethics - and in doing so, charts the epistemological dynamics - of sexual and romantic relationships between black men and white women. I will show that Mills’ arguments can be used as a map, or scaffold, which we can use to construct structurally similar arguments against (certain) heterosexual relationships. Doing so will allow us to pick out and diagnose important epistemic structures embedded  in the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. This project can be thought of as an attempt to integrate into analytic feminism some important insights associated with queer feminism and queer theory.

​reviews

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.

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