•  204
    Partisan Epistemology and Misplaced Trust
    Episteme 1-21. forthcoming.
    The fact that each of us has significantly greater confidence in the claims of co-partisans – those belonging to groups with which we identify – explains, in large part, why so many people believe a significant amount of the misinformation they encounter. It's natural to assume that such misinformed partisan beliefs typically involve a rational failure of some kind, and philosophers and psychologists have defended various accounts of the nature of the rational failure purportedly involved. I arg…Read more
  •  444
    Epistemic obligations and free speech
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Largely thanks to Mill’s influence, the suggestion that the state ought to restrict the distribution of misinformation will strike most philosophers as implausible. Two of Mill’s influential assumptions are particularly relevant here: first, that free speech debates should focus on moral considerations such as the harm that certain forms of expression might cause; second, that false information causes minimal harm due to the fact that human beings are psychologically well equipped to distinguis…Read more
  •  427
    Misperceiving properties
    Mind and Language 38 (2): 431-445. 2023.
    Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that property illusions—cases in which we perceive a property, but that property is not the property it seems to us to be in virtue of our perceptual experience—and veridical illusions—cases in which we veridically perceive an object’s properties, but our experience of some specific property is nonetheless unsuccessful or illusory—can occur. I defend the contrary view. First, I maintain that there are compelling reasons to conclude that property i…Read more
  •  485
    Misinformation and the Limits of Individual Responsibility
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (12): 8-21. 2021.
    The issue of how best to combat the negative impacts of misinformation distributed via social media hangs on the following question: are there methods that most individuals can reasonably be expected to employ that would largely protect them from the negative impact that encountering misinformation on social media would otherwise have on their beliefs? If the answer is “yes,” then presumably individuals bear significant responsibility for those negative impacts; and, further, presumably there a…Read more
  •  599
    Epistemic Obligations of the Laity
    Episteme 20 (2): 232-246. 2023.
    Very often when the vast majority of experts agree on some scientific issue, laypeople nonetheless regularly consume articles, videos, lectures, etc., the principal claims of which are inconsistent with the expert consensus. Moreover, it is standardly assumed that it is entirely appropriate, and perhaps even obligatory, for laypeople to consume such anti-consensus material. I maintain that this standard assumption gets things backwards. Each of us is particularly vulnerable to false claims when …Read more
  •  544
    Perceiving properties versus perceiving objects
    Analytic Philosophy 63 (2): 99-117. 2022.
    The fact that you see some particular object seems to be due to the causal relation between your visual experience and that object, rather than to your experiences’ phenomenal character. On the one hand, whenever some phenomenal element of your experience stands in the right sort of causal relation to some object, your experience presents that object (your experience’s phenomenology doesn’t need to match that object). On the other hand, you can’t have a perceptual experience that presents some…Read more
  •  578
    The Information Environment and Blameworthy Beliefs
    Social Epistemology 33 (6): 525-537. 2019.
    Thanks to the advent of social media, large numbers of Americans believe outlandish falsehoods that have been widely debunked. Many of us have a tendency to fault the individuals who hold such beliefs. We naturally assume that the individuals who form and maintain such beliefs do so in virtue of having violated some epistemic obligation: perhaps they failed to scrutinize their sources, or failed to seek out the available competing evidence. I maintain that very many ordinary individuals who acqu…Read more
  •  303
    Learning to see
    Mind and Language 35 (5): 601-620. 2019.
    The reports of individuals who have had their vision restored after a long period of blindness suggest that, immediately after regaining their vision, such individuals are not able to recognize shapes by vision alone. It is often assumed that the empirical literature on sight restoration tells us something important about the relationship between visual and tactile representations of shape. However, I maintain that, immediately after having their sight restored, at least some newly sighted ind…Read more
  •  792
    Shared Epistemic Responsibility
    Episteme 18 (4): 493-506. 2021.
    It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared (or joint) moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a…Read more
  •  460
    Thinking with Sensations
    Journal of Philosophy 114 (3): 134-154. 2017.
    If we acknowledge that a perceptual experience’s sensory phenomenology is not inherently representational, we face a puzzle. On the one hand, sensory phenomenology must play an intimate role in the perception of ordinary physical objects; but on the other hand, our experiences’ purely sensory element rarely captures our attention. I maintain that neither indirect realism nor the dual component theory provides a satisfactory solution to this puzzle: indirect realism is inconsistent with the fact …Read more
  •  805
    The phenomenological directness of perceptual experience
    Philosophical Studies 170 (2): 235-253. 2014.
    When you have a perceptual experience of a given physical object that object seems to be immediately present to you in a way it never does when you consciously think about or imagine it. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) can provide a satisfying account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience while the content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world …Read more
  •  948
    Peacocke’s trees
    Synthese 174 (3): 445-461. 2010.
    In Sense and Content , Christopher Peacocke points out that two equally-sized trees at different distances from the perceiver are normally represented to be the same size, despite the fact that in a certain sense the nearer tree looks bigger ; he concludes on the basis of this observation that visual experiences possess irreducibly phenomenal properties. This argument has received the most attention of all of Peacocke’s arguments for separatism—the view that the intentional and phenomenal proper…Read more
  •  1230
    The Phenomenological Problem of Perception
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (3): 625-654. 2014.
    A perceptual experience of a given object seems to make the object itself present to the perceiver’s mind. Many philosophers have claimed that naïve realism (the view that to perceive is to stand in a primitive relation of acquaintance to the world) provides a better account of this phenomenological directness of perceptual experience than does the content view (the view that to perceive is to represent the world to be a certain way). But the naïve realist account of this phenomenology has a c…Read more
  •  834
    Colour constancy and Fregean representationalism
    Philosophical Studies 164 (1): 219-231. 2013.
    All representationalists maintain that there is a necessary connection between an experience’s phenomenal character and intentional content; but there is a disagreement amongst representationalists regarding the nature of those intentional contents that are necessarily connected to phenomenal character. Russellian representationalists maintain that the relevant contents are composed of objects and/or properties, while Fregean representationalists maintain that the relevant contents are composed …Read more
  •  785
    Sensory phenomenology and perceptual content
    Philosophical Quarterly 61 (244): 558-576. 2011.
    The consensus in contemporary philosophy of mind is that how a perceptual experience represents the world to be is built into its sensory phenomenology. I defend an opposing view which I call ‘moderate separatism’, that an experience's sensory phenomenology does not determine how it represents the world to be. I argue for moderate separatism by pointing to two ordinary experiences which instantiate the same sensory phenomenology but differ with regard to their intentional content. Two experience…Read more
  •  893
    Frege's Puzzle for Perception
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2): 368-392. 2016.
    According to an influential variety of the representational view of perceptual experience—the singular content view—the contents of perceptual experiences include singular propositions partly composed of the particular physical object a given experience is about or of. The singular content view faces well-known difficulties accommodating hallucinations; I maintain that there is also an analogue of Frege's puzzle that poses a significant problem for this view. In fact, I believe that this puzzle …Read more
  •  530
    The conflicted character of picture perception
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4). 2006.
    It is often assumed that there is a perceptual conflict in looking at a picture since one sees both a two-dimensional surface and a three-dimensional scene simultaneously. In this paper, I argue that it is a mistake to think that looking at pictures requires the visual system to perform the special task of reconciling inconsistent impressions of space, or competing information from different depth cues. To the contrary, I suggest that there are good reasons to think that the perception of depth …Read more
  •  807
    Naïve Realism and Illusion
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2 607-625. 2015.
    It is well-known that naïve realism has difficulty accommodating perceptual error. Recent discussion of the issue has focused on whether the naïve realist can accommodate hallucination by adopting disjunctivism. However, illusions are more difficult for the naïve realist to explain precisely because the disjunctivist solution is not available. I discuss what I take to be the two most plausible accounts of illusion available to the naïve realist. The first claims that illusions are cases in w…Read more