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210A social epistemology of aesthetics: belief polarization, echo chambers and aesthetic judgementSynthese 191 (11): 2513-2528. 2014.How do we form aesthetic judgements? And how should we do so? According to a very prominent tradition in aesthetics it would be wrong to form our aesthetic judgements about a particular object on the basis of anything other than first-hand acquaintance with the object itself (or some very close surrogate) and, in particular, it would be wrong to form such judgements merely on the basis of testimony. Further this tradition presupposes that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements typic…Read more
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5Fiction and Fictional Worlds in VideogamesIn J. R. Sageng, T. M. Larsen & H. Fossheim (eds.), The Philosophy of Computer Games, Springer. pp. 201-18. 2012.
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153Aesthetic Testimony and the Norms of Belief FormationEuropean Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 750-763. 2013.Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony w…Read more
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757An Absolutist Theory of Faultless Disagreement in AestheticsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3): 429-448. 2017.Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement…Read more
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114Norms of Belief and Norms of Assertion in AestheticsPhilosophers' Imprint 15. 2015.Why is it that we cannot legitimately make certain aesthetic assertions – for instance that ‘Guernica is harrowing’ or that ‘The Rite of Spring is strangely beautiful’ – on the basis of testimony alone? In this paper I consider a species of argument intended to demonstrate that the best explanation for the impermissibility of such assertions is that a particular view of the norms of aesthetic belief – pessimism concerning aesthetic testimony – is correct. I begin by outlining the strongest insta…Read more
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292Aesthetic TestimonyPhilosophy Compass 7 (1): 1-10. 2012.It is frequently claimed that we can learn very little, if anything, about the aesthetic character of an artwork on the basis of testimony. Such disparaging assessments of the epistemic value of aesthetic testimony contrast markedly with our acceptance of testimony as an important source of knowledge in many other areas. There have, however, been a number of challenges to this orthodoxy of late; from those who seek to deny that such a contrast exists as well as attempts by those who accept the d…Read more
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601Comics and EthicsIn Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook & Aaron Meskin (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Comics, Routledge. 2016.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Aesthetics |
Philosophy, Misc |
Philosophy of Religion |
Areas of Interest
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