papers

publications

forthcoming. Permissivism. In the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Third Edition. Edited by Kurt Sylvan, Mattias Steup, Ernest Sosa, and Jonathan Dancy. [draft]

This article presents an overview of the current state of the debate between permissivists and impermissivists about epistemic rationality. The article identifies important choice points for both the permissivist and impermissist, and highlights how successfully different versions of the views handle objections. 

2020. Unacknowledged Permissivism. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101, 1: 158-183. [draft] [final version] 

Abstract: Epistemic permissivism is the view that it is possible for two people to rationally hold incompatible attitudes toward some proposition on the basis of one body of evidence. In this paper, I defend a particular version of permissivism – unacknowledged permissivism (UP) – which says that permissivism is true, but that no one can ever rationally believe that she is in a permissive case. I show that counter to what virtually all authors who have discussed UP claim, UP is an attractive view: it is compatible with the intuitive motivations for permissivism and avoids a significant challenge to permissivism: the arbitrariness objection. 

2019. Collectivized Intellectualism. (with Benjamin Wald). Res Philosophica 96, 2: 199-227. [draft] [final version]

Abstract: We argue that the evolutionary function of reasoning is to allow us to secure more accurate beliefs and more effective intentions through collective deliberation. This sets our view apart both from traditional intellectualist accounts, which take the evolutionary function to be individual deliberation, and from interactionist accounts such as the one proposed by Mercier and Sperber, which agrees that the function of reasoning is collective but holds that it aims to disseminate, rather than come up with, accurate beliefs. We argue that our collectivized intellectualism offers the best explanation of the range of biases that human reasoning is prone to, and that it does better than interactionism at offering a function of reasoning that would have been adaptive for our distant ancestors who first evolved this capacity.

2017. The Psychological Context of Contextualism. (with Jennifer Nagel). In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, edited by Jonathan Ichikawa, 94-104. New York: Routledge. [draft] [final version at Routeledge handbooks online]

work in progress

Here are some projects I'm currently working on. In some cases, titles have been removed to preserve the integrity of the peer review process. Please email me if you would like to see a draft.


 

Abstract: Permissivism about rationality is the claim that it is possible for incompatible beliefs to be rational, given a single body of evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of this claim. A primary argument that has been raised against permissivism is what we call the inconsistency argument. In this paper, we formulate a precise version of the inconsistency argument, which has the form of a reductio ad absurdum against permissivism. We argue that permissivists ought to reject one of the auxiliary principles used to derive the contradiction, a principle that we call combinability. We also argue that this move is independently motivated by the fact that rejecting combinability generates elegant resolutions of both the lottery paradox and the preface paradox.


 

Abstract: In the literature on philosophical progress it is often assumed that agreement is a necessary condition for progress. This assumption is sensible only if agreement is a reliable sign of the truth, since agreement on false answers to philosophical questions would not constitute progress. Because agreement is a sign of progress only when it is agreement on the correct answers to philosophical questions, it is worth considering whether agreement, insofar as it exists among philosophers, is likely to be a reliable sign of truth. This paper draws on insights from social choice theory to identify the conditions under which agreement among philosophers would be a reliable indicator of the truth and defends the thesis that we lack good reason to think that philosophical inquiry meets these conditions. The upshot is the philosophical agreement is epistemically uninformative: it does not give us even a prima facie reason to think that the agreed-upon view is true. However, the epistemic uninformativeness of philosophical agreement is not an indictment of philosophy’s progress, because philosophy is valuable independent of its ability to generate consensus on the correct answers to philosophical questions.



Abstract: How if at all would the presence of disagreement within a discipline undermine that discipline’s progress? Dellsén et. al. argue that widespread, longstanding expert disagreement within a discipline is compatible with progress in that discipline. The authors articulate two accounts of progress—proportional veritism and enabling noeticism—on which agreement is not a necessary condition for progress. I argue that showing that disagreement and progress are compatible is not enough to discharge the threat to progress raised by disagreement, because according to the authors’ preferred accounts of progress, widespread disagreement of the kind that characterizes philosophy serves as evidence against progress.



Abstract: The activity of inquiry is subject to norms. These norms tell us when ought to inquire, the kinds of actions we should take over the course of our inquiries, and when the inquiry ought to close. Recently, several authors have defended the view that inquiry is subject to an Ignorance Norm that prohibits us from inquiring into a question whose answer we already know (Friedman 2017, Whitcomb 2017). I argue in this paper that there is no Ignorance Norm of inquiry, as it is sometimes perfectly appropriate for a subject to inquire into a question whose answer she already knows. I draw on the psychological literature on metacognitive feelings, in particular, the feeling of knowing (FOK) to show that it is not only sometimes permissible to inquire into a question whose answer one already knows, it’s sometimes permissible to inquire into a question whose answer one knows that one knows.