•  22
    Hidden Depths: Testimonial Injustice, Deep Disagreement, and Democratic Deliberation
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (3): 361-381. 2023.
    .Deep disagreements are those involving a disagreement about (relatively) fundamental epistemic principles. This paper considers the bearing of testimonial injustice, in Miranda Fricker’s sense, on the depth of disagreements, and what this can teach us about the nature and significance of deep disagreements. I start by re-evaluating T. J. Lagewaard’s recent argument that disagreements about the nature, scope, and impact of oppression will often be deepened by testimonial injustice, since the peo…Read more
  •  102
    Propaganda and the Authority of Pornography
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 31 (3): 329-343. 2016.
    Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works characterises and explores one democratically problematic kind of propaganda, ‘undermining propaganda’, which involves ‘[a] contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet is of a kind that tends to erode those very ideals’. Stanley’s model for how undermining propaganda functions is Rae Langton and Caroline West’s treatment of moves in pornographic language games. However, Stanley doesn’t consider whether his theory…Read more
  •  37
    Epistemic rights violations and epistemic injustice
    Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 1-14. 2023.
    I offer a detailed discussion of the connections Lani Watson posits in her book The Right to Know between violations of a person’s epistemic rights on the one hand and the distinctively epistemic forms of injustice influentially discussed in the work of Miranda Fricker on the other. I argue that if we specify the content of the relevant epistemic rights (and the corresponding duties of others) carefully enough, it becomes plausible that there is an even tighter relationship between violations of…Read more
  •  237
    Making life more interesting: Trust, trustworthiness, and testimonial injustice
    Philosophical Psychology 37 (1): 126-147. 2024.
    A theme running through Katherine Hawley’s recent works on trust and trustworthiness is that thinking about the relations between these and Miranda Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice offers a perspective from which we can see several limitations of Fricker’s own account of testimonial injustice. This paper clarifies the aspects of Fricker’s account that Hawley’s criticisms target, focusing on her objections to Fricker’s proposal that its primary harm involves a kind of epistemic objectifi…Read more
  •  2
    Mismeasure of the Self (review)
    Mind. forthcoming.
  •  13
    Educating for intellectual virtue in a vicious world
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    I offer an overview of Alessandra Tanesini’s discussion of how best to educate for intellectual virtue in the final chapter of her book The Mismeasure of the Self. I identify the unifying theme behind most of her objections to existing approaches, namely that they fail to instil the proper motivations for intellectual virtue, and I raise an issue about whether Tanesini’s preferred approach, self-affirmation, avoids this worry. I argue that it is not clear that it does; in particular, it’s left u…Read more
  •  25
    What can philosophy contribute to ‘education to address pornography's influence’?
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 56 (5): 774-786. 2022.
    Responses to the pernicious influences of mainstream pornography on its viewers fall into two main sorts: regulation and education. Pornography has long been a core topic in analytic feminist philosophy, but it has largely focused on issues around regulation, in particular with trying to undermine arguments against regulation on the grounds that pornography should count as protected speech. Here I instead look at some ways that philosophy can contribute to an education-based approach, in particu…Read more
  •  122
    Blurred lines: How fictional is pornography?
    Philosophy Compass 16 (4). 2021.
    Many pornographic works seem to count as works of fiction. This apparent fact has been thought to have important implications for ongoing controversies about whether some pornography carries problematic messages and so influences the attitudes (and perhaps even the behaviour) of its audience. In this paper, I explore the claim that pornographic works are fictional and the significance that this claim has for these issues, with a particular focus on pornographic films. Two related morals will eme…Read more
  •  42
    Immunity to wh-misidentification
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 2293-2313. 2020.
    This paper responds to arguments due to Joel Smith and Annalisa Coliva that try to show that James Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification is philosophically uninteresting, and perhaps even spurious. It also proposes definitions of wh-misidentification and immunity to wh-misidentification which try to improve in various ways on the characterisations that standardly figure in the literature, and explores the relationship between misidentification and the epistemic structures characteristic of some…Read more
  •  6
    Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2024.
  •  142
    Objects or Others? Epistemic Agency and the Primary Harm of Testimonial Injustice
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (5): 831-845. 2020.
    This paper re-examines the debate between those who, with Miranda Fricker, diagnose the primary, non-contingent harm of testimonial injustice as a kind of epistemic objectification and those who contend it is better thought of as a kind of epistemic othering. Defenders of the othering account of the primary harm have often argued for it by presenting cases of testimonial injustice in which the testifier’s epistemic agency is affirmed rather than denied, even while their credibility is unjustly i…Read more
  •  55
    Redrawing the Map: Medina on Epistemic Vices and Skepticism
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (3): 261-283. 2019.
    My aim in this paper is to closely examine José Medina’s account of socially-situated knowledge and ignorance in terms of epistemic virtues and vices in his 2013 book The Epistemology of Resistance. First, I’ll offer a detailed examination of the similarities and differences between Medina’s account and both standpoint epistemology and epistemologies of active ignorance. Medina presents his account as capturing and integrating the insights of both, but I will argue that, for better or worse, his…Read more
  •  249
    This paper criticises Miranda Fricker's account of the primary harm of testimonial injustice as a kind of epistemic objectification, where the latter is understood on the model provided by Martha Nussbaum's influential analysis of sexual objectification and where it is taken to involve the denial of someone's epistemic agency. I examine the existing objections to Fricker's account of the primary harm, criticising some while accepting the force of others, and I argue that one of Fricker's own cen…Read more
  •  211
    Testimonial Injustice, Pornography, and Silencing
    Analytic Philosophy 60 (4): 405-417. 2019.
    In this paper, I develop two criticisms of Miranda Fricker’s attempt to offer an interpretation of MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women that conceives of the silencing in question as an extreme form of testimonial injustice. The intended contrast is with the speech act theoretical model of silencing familiar from Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby, who appeal to MacKinnon’s claim to argue against the standard liberal line on pornography, which takes a permissive stance to be demanded …Read more
  •  133
    ‘This Is the Bad Case’: What Brains in Vats Can Know
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 92 (1): 183-205. 2018.
    The orthodox position in epistemology, for both externalists and internalists, is that a subject in a ‘bad case’—a sceptical scenario—is so epistemically badly off that they cannot know how badly off they are. Ofra Magidor contends that externalists should break ranks on this question, and that doing so is liberating when it comes time to confront a number of central issues in epistemology, including scepticism and the new evil demon problem for process reliabilism. In this reply, I will questio…Read more
  •  39
    Porn as propaganda
    Forum for European Philosophy Blog. 2016.
    Aidan McGlynn on how pornography can function as propaganda.
  • Mindreading Knowledge
    In Joseph Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon & Benjamin W. Jarvis (eds.), Knowledge First: Approaches in Epistemology and Mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 72-94. 2017.
  •  182
    Interpretation and knowledge maximization
    Philosophical Studies 160 (3): 391-405. 2012.
    Timothy Williamson has proposed that we should give a ‘knowledge first’ twist to David Lewis’s account of content, maintaining that for P to be the content of one’s belief is for P to be the content that would be attributed by an idealized interpreter working under certain constraints, and that the fundamental constraint on interpretation is a principle of knowledge maximization. According to this principle, an interpretation is correct to the extent that it maximizes the number of knowledgeable…Read more
  •  141
    Justification as 'Would-Be' Knowledge
    Episteme 9 (4): 361-376. 2012.
    In light of the failure of attempts to analyse knowledge as a species of justified belief, a number of epistemologists have suggested that we should instead understand justification in terms of knowledge. This paper focuses on accounts of justification as a kind of ‘would-be’ knowledge. According to such accounts a belief is justified just in case any failure to know is due to uncooperative external circumstances. I argue against two recent accounts of this sort due to Alexander Bird and Martin …Read more
  •  152
    Knowledge First?
    Palgrave Macmillian. 2014.
    According to a tradition reaching back to Plato, questions about the nature of knowledge are to be answered by offering an analysis in terms of truth, belief, justification, and other factors presumed to be in some sense more basic than knowledge itself. In light of the apparent failure of this approach, knowledge first philosophy instead takes knowledge as the starting point in epistemology and related areas of the philosophies of language and mind. Knowledge cannot be analyzed in the tradition…Read more
  •  140
    The problem of true-true counterfactuals
    Analysis 72 (2): 276-285. 2012.
    Early commentators on David Lewis's account of counterfactuals noted that certain examples suggest that some counterfactuals with true antecedents and true consequents are false. Lewis's account has the consequence that all such counterfactuals are true, leaving us to choose between explaining away our intuitions about the examples in question or offering an alternative to Lewis's account. Here I argue that a simple modification of the familiar Lewisian truth conditions yields the intuitively co…Read more
  •  2
    On Epistemic Alchemy
    In Dylan Dodd Elia Zardini (ed.), Scepticism and Perceptual Justification, Oxford University Press. pp. 173-189. 2014.
    Crispin Wright has proposed that one has entitlements to accept certain propositions that play a foundational role within one’s body of belief. Such an entitlement is a kind of warrant that does not require the possessor to have acquired evidence speaking in favor of the proposition in question. The proposal allows Wright to concede much of the force of the most powerful arguments for scepticism, while avoiding the truly sceptical conclusion that one lacks warrant for most of one’s beliefs. Here…Read more
  •  506
    This paper reassesses the case against Evidential Externalism, the thesis that one's evidence fails to supervene on one's non-factive mental states, focusing on two objections to Externalism due by Nicholas Silins: the armchair access argument and the supervenience argument. It also examines Silins's attempt to undermine the force of one major source of motivation for Externalism, namely that the rival Internalist picture of evidence is implicated in some central arguments for scepticism. While …Read more
  •  22
    The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard (review)
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (1): 72-75. 2013.