•  45
    Evidence and Self-Fulfilling Belief
    American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4): 319-330. 2019.
    This paper considers the relationship between evidence and self-fulfilling beliefs—beliefs whose propositional contents will be true just in case—and because—an agent believes them. Following Grice, many philosophers hold that believing such propositions would involve an impermissible form of bootstrapping. This paper argues that such objections get their force from a popular but problematic function-model of theoretical deliberation, and that attending to the case of self-fulfilling belief can …Read more
  •  56
    Evidence and Self-Fulfilling Belief
    American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4): 319-331. 2019.
    This paper considers the relationship between evidence and self-fulfilling beliefs. Following Grice (1971), many philosophers hold that adopting a self-fulfilling belief would involve an impermissible form of bootstrapping. I argue that such objections gets their force from a popular but problematic model of theoretical deliberation which pictures deliberation as a function, treating the deliberation’s inputs as given, fixed prior to and independently from the deliberation. Though such a picture…Read more
  •  58
    Agency, Akrasia, and the Normative Environment
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (3): 321-338. 2019.
    Just as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather t…Read more
  •  103
    Epistemic freedom revisited
    Synthese 197 (2): 793-815. 2020.
    Philosophers have recently argued that self-fulfilling beliefs constitute an important counter-example to the widely accepted theses that we ought not and cannot believe at will. Cases of self-fulfilling belief are thought to constitute a special class where we enjoy the epistemic freedom to permissibly believe for pragmatic reasons, because whatever we choose to believe will end up true. In this paper, I argue that this view fails to distinguish between the aim of acquiring a true belief and th…Read more
  •  52
    This dissertation examines how we ought to reason about propositions whose truth is determined by whether we believe them. In it, I defend the thesis that in cases of self-fulfilling belief we ought to believe whatever would be best, if true. Though believing whatever would be best if true appears to be a form of wishful thinking, and so unwarranted, this dissertation develops an account according to which, when a belief is self-fulfilling, optimistic reasons which show what we believe to be goo…Read more