•  59
    Critical Reasoning and the Inferential Transparency Method
    Res Philosophica 98 (1): 23-42. 2021.
    Alex Byrne (2005; 2011a; 2011b; 2018) has argued that we can gain self-knowledge of our current mental states through the use of a transparency method. A transparency method provides an extrospective rather than introspective route to self-knowledge. For example, one comes to know whether one believes P not by thinking about oneself but by considering the world-directed question of whether P is true. According to Byrne, this psychological process consists in drawing inferences from world-directe…Read more
  •  53
    Inferential Self-Knowledge Reimagined
    Philosophical Psychology. forthcoming.
    In the epistemology of self-knowledge, Inferentialism is the view that one’s current mental states are normally known to one through inferences from evidence. This view is often taken to conflict with widespread claims about normally-acquired self-knowledge, namely that it is privileged (essentially more secure than knowledge of others’ minds) and peculiar (obtained in a way that fundamentally differs from how others know your mind). In this paper I argue that Inferentialism can be reconceived s…Read more
  •  51
    Ontological Entanglement in the Normative Web
    Dialogue 56 (3): 483-501. 2017.
    Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his arg…Read more
  •  44
    Inference and Self-Knowledge
    Logos and Episteme 12 (1): 77-98. 2021.
    A growing cohort of philosophers argue that inference, understood as an agent-level psychological process or event, is subject to a “Taking Condition.” The Taking Condition states, roughly, that drawing an inference requires one to take one’s premise(s) to epistemically support one’s conclusion, where “takings” are some sort of higher-order attitude, thought, intuition, or act. My question is not about the nature of takings, but about their contents. I examine the prospects for “minimal” and “ro…Read more
  •  44
    Davidson, first-person authority, and direct self-knowledge
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 13421-13440. 2021.
    Donald Davidson famously offered an explanation of “first-person authority”. However, he described first-person authority differently across different works—sometimes referring to the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions of their current mental states, and sometimes referring to the direct self-knowledge that agents often have of said states. First, I show that a standard Davidsonian explanation of first-person authority can at best, and with some modification, explain the presumptive t…Read more
  •  39
    Bots: Some Less-Considered Epistemic Problems
    Social Epistemology 37 (5): 713-725. 2023.
    Posts on social media platforms like Twitter are sometimes the products of deceptively designed bots. These bots can cause obvious epistemic problems, such as tricking human users into believing the contents of misleading posts. However, less-considered epistemic problems involve false bot judgements where a human user mistakes another human user’s post for a bot-post, or where a human user mistakenly believes that bots are the primary vehicles for tokening certain content on social media. This …Read more
  •  33
    There Is Something to the Authority Thesis
    Journal of Philosophical Research 47 115-132. 2022.
    Many philosophers accept an ‘Authority Thesis’ according to which self-ascriptions of one’s current mental states ordinarily are or ought to be met with a distinctive presumption of truth. Recently, however, Wolfgang Barz (2018) has argued that there is no adequately specified Authority Thesis. This, he argues, is because available specifications are either (1) philosophically puzzling but implausible, or (2) plausible but philosophically unpuzzling. I argue that there are several plausible and …Read more
  •  29
    Authoritatively avowing your imaginings by self-ascriptively expressing them
    Philosophical Explorations 26 (1): 23-29. 2022.
    Neo-expressivism is the view that avowals—first-personal, present tense self-ascriptions of mental states—ordinarily express the very mental states that they semantically represent, such that they carry a strong presumption of truth and are immune to requests for epistemic support. Peter Langland-Hassan (2015. “Self-Knowledge and Imagination.” Philosophical Explorations 18 (2): 226–245) has argued that Neo-expressivism cannot accommodate avowals of one’s imaginings. In this short paper I argue t…Read more
  •  20
    Authority As (Qualified) Indubitability
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Self-ascriptions of one's current mental states often seem authoritative. It is sometimes thought that the authority of such self-ascriptions is, in part, a matter of their indubitability. However, they do not seem to be universally indubitable. How, then, should claims about self-ascriptive indubitability be qualified? Here I consider several such qualifications from the literature. Finding many of them wanting, I nevertheless settle on multiple specifications of the thesis that self-ascription…Read more
  •  17
    How to commit to commissive self‐knowledge
    European Journal of Philosophy 32 (1): 210-223. 2024.
    At least some of your beliefs are commitments. When you believe that P as a commitment, your stance on P is such that you believe it on the basis of your considered judgement. Sometimes, you also believe that you believe P. Such self‐beliefs can also be commissive in a sense, as when they are reflective endorsements of your lower‐order commissive beliefs. In this paper I argue that one's commissive self‐beliefs ontologically constitute one's lower‐order commissive beliefs because one's commissiv…Read more
  •  16
    Knowing and Expressing Ourselves
    Dissertation, York University. 2021.
    This dissertation concerns two epistemologically puzzling phenomena. The first phenomenon is the authority that each of us has over our minds. Roughly, to have authority is to be owed a special sort of deference when self-ascribing your current mental states. The second phenomenon is our privileged and peculiar self-knowledge. Roughly, self-knowledge is privileged insofar as one knows ones mental states in a way that is highly epistemically secure relative to other varieties of contingent empiri…Read more