forthcoming. Permissivism. In the Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Third Edition. Edited by Kurt Sylvan, Mattias Steup, Ernest Sosa, and Jonathan Dancy. [draft]
Abstract: Epistemic permissivists believe that sometimes, incompatible doxastic attitudes—such as belief and suspension of judgment—can both be rational responses to a proposition given a single body of evidence. Epistemic impermissivists believe that a body of evidence always determines a unique rational doxastic attitude toward a proposition. This entry provides an overview of the current state of the debate between epistemic permissivists and impermissivists. Three important choice points for the permissivist are identified, and implications are discussed for the plausibility of the resulting versions of permissivism.
2024. Philosophical Agreement and Philosophical Progress. Episteme: 1-19. [final version, open access]
Featured in New Work in Philosophy
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. This paper asks whether agreement among philosophers is (or would be) likely to be a reliable sign of truth. Insights from social choice theory are used to identify the conditions under which agreement among philosophers would be a reliable indicator of the truth, and it is argued that we lack good reason to think that philosophical inquiry meets these conditions. The upshot is that philosophical agreement is epistemically uninformative: agreement on the answer to a philosophical question does not supply 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 agreement on the correct answers to philosophical questions.
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]
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.
A paper about the norms of inquiry (draft)
Abstract: The view that it is impermissible to be curious about a question whose answer is known has received broad support in the contemporary literature on inquiry. This paper draws on empirical work on memory search to argue for the opposite conclusion: that it is frequently epistemically appropriate to be curious about a question whose answer is known. I argue that this view highlights the importance of internally-directed inquiry for theorizing about curiosity and other question-directed attitudes, and discuss the implications for the view that curiosity aims at knowledge.
A paper responding to Dellsén et. al.'s recent piece in The Journal of Philosophy in which the authors argue that disagreement among philosophers is compatible with progress in philosophy (under review)
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.
A paper arguing that epistemic permissivists should reject the conjunction principle (with John M. Bunke)
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.
A paper about what we mean when we say that a person is "willing to revise" their belief
Abstract: The notion of being willing to revise one’s beliefs plays an important role both in everyday thought about intellectual traits of character and in academic contexts, yet settling on an account of willingness to revise that aligns with both academic use and ordinary intuitions proves to be difficult. This paper asks what motives, attitudes, or dispositions characterize the state of being willing to revise, and considers several accounts that, while initially plausible, are subject to counterexample.