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Meta‐SkepticismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research. 2022.The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might wond…Read more
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Why Think for Yourself?Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 1-19. 2022.Life is a group project. It takes a village. The same is true of our intellectual lives. Since we are finite cognitive creatures with limited time and resources, any healthy intellectual life requires that we rely quite heavily on others. For nearly any question you want to investigate, there is someone who is in a better epistemic position than you are to determine the answer. For most people, their expertise does not extend far beyond their own personal lives, and even here we can sometimes fi…Read more
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First-Person Authority Through the Lens of Experimental PhilosophyFilozofia Nauki 29 (2): 209-227. 2021.
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A Tale of Two Injustices: Epistemic Injustice in PhilosophyIn Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Applied Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 215-250. 2021.This chapter has two aims. First, I distinguish between two forms of testimonial injustice: identity-based testimonial injustice and content-based testimonial injustice. Second, I utilize this distinction to develop a partial explanation for the persistent lack of diverse practitioners in academic philosophy. Specifically, I argue that both identity-based and content-based testimonial injustice are prevalent in philosophical discourse and that this prevalence introduces barriers to participation…Read more
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Content Focused Epistemic InjusticeOxford Studies in Epistemology 7. 2023.There has been extensive discussion of testimonial epistemic injustice, the phenomenon whereby a speaker’s testimony is rejected due to prejudice regarding who they are. But people also have their testimony rejected or preempted due to prejudice regarding what they communicate. Here, the injustice is content focused. We describe several cases of content focused injustice, and we theoretically interrogate those cases by building up a general framework through which to understand them as a genuine…Read more
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Disagreement and Epistemic Injustice from a Communal PerspectiveIn Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement, Routledge. 2020.I will consider disagreement from a communal perspective. Thus, my focus will not primarily be on disagreement between different groups although this case will figure as well. My main focus is on the epistemic pros and cons of disagreement for a community and on how the social structure of the community bears on these pros and cons. A central lesson will be that disagreement has more epistemic costs at the communal level than is often recognized, and that these epistemic costs often yield episte…Read more
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When is a belief justified? I consider three sorts of arguments for different accounts of justification on the spectrum from extreme internalism to extreme externalism: arguments from intuitive responses to examples; arguments from the theoretical role of the term in epistemology; and arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to use the term. I focus particularly on the third sort, considering arguments from Clayton Littlejohn (2014) and Amia Srinivasan (2018) in f…Read more
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Rational Agency and the Struggle to Believe What Your Reasons DictateIn Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind, Oxford University Press. 2021.According to an influential view that I call agentialism, our capacity to believe and intend directly on the basis of reasons—our rational agency—has a normative significance that distinguishes it from other kinds of agency (Bilgrami 2006, Boyle 2011, Burge 1996, Korsgaard 1996, Moran 2001). Agentialists maintain that insofar as we exercise rational agency, we bear a special kind of responsibility for our beliefs and intentions; and it is only those attitudes that represent the exercise of ratio…Read more
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Moral outrage pornJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 18 (2): 147-72. 2020.We offer an account of the generic use of the term “porn”, as seen in recent usages such as “food porn” and “real estate porn”. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of generic porn by using it to isola…Read more
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Is searching the internet making us intellectually arrogant?In Alessandra Tanesini & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Polarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2021.In a recent and provocative paper, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu and Frank Keil (2015) have argued, on the basis of experimental evidence, that ‘searching the internet leads people to conflate information that can be found online with knowledge “in the head”’ (2015, 675), specifically, by inclining us to conflate mere access to information for personal knowledge (2015, 674). This chapter has three central aims. First, we briefly detail Fisher et al.’s results and show how, on the basis of recent …Read more
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Expanding the scope of reflective knowledge: From MINE to OURSPhilosophical Issues 29 (1): 241-253. 2019.Ernest Sosa has suggested that we distinguish between animal knowledge, on the one hand, and reflective knowledge, on the other. Animal knowledge is direct, immediate, and foundationally structured, while reflective knowledge involves a knower's higher‐order awareness of her own mental states, and is structured by relations of coherence. Although Sosa's distinction is extremely appealing, it also faces serious problems. In particular, the sorts of processes that would be required for reflective …Read more
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Vices of the Mind, by Quassim Cassam [Book Review] (review)Mind 129 (515): 959-964. 2020.
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The Meta-Problem of ConsciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 25 (9-10): 6-61. 2018.
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Deepfakes and the Epistemic BackstopPhilosophers' Imprint 20 (24): 1-16. 2020.Deepfake technology uses machine learning to fabricate video and audio recordings that represent people doing and saying things they've never done. In coming years, malicious actors will likely use this technology in attempts to manipulate public discourse. This paper prepares for that danger by explicating the unappreciated way in which recordings have so far provided an epistemic backstop to our testimonial practices. Our reasonable trust in the testimony of others depends, to a surprising ext…Read more
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The puzzle of transparency and how to solve itCanadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (7): 916-935. 2019.According to the transparency approach, achievement of self-knowledge is a two-stage process: first, the subject arrives at the judgment ‘p’; second, the subject proceeds to the judgment ‘I believe that p.’ The puzzle of transparency is to understand why the transition from the first to the second judgment is rationally permissible. After revisiting the debate between Byrne and Boyle on this matter, I present a novel solution according to which the transition is rationally permissible in virtue …Read more
York University
PhD, 2021
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language |
Metaphilosophy |
Meta-Ethics |