•  262
    Despair and Hopelessness
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-18. forthcoming.
    It has recently been argued that hope is polysemous in that it sometimes refers to hoping and other times to being hopeful. That it has these two distinct senses is reflected in the observation that a person can hope for an outcome without being hopeful that it will occur. Below, I offer a new argument for this distinction. My strategy is to show that accepting this distinction yields a rich account of two distinct ways in which hope can be lost, ways that map onto the two senses of hope: A pers…Read more
  •  149
    Gatekeeping the Mind
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 2023 1-24. 2023.
    This paper proposes that we should think of epistemic agents as having, as one of their intellectual activities, a gatekeeping task: To decide in light of various criteria which ideas they should consider and which not to consider. When this task is performed with excellence, it is conducive to the acquisition of epistemic goods such as truth and knowledge, and the reduction of falsehoods. Accordingly, it is a worthy contender for being an intellectual virtue. Although gatekeeping may strike one…Read more
  •  588
    The Phenomenology of Hope
    American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (3): 313-325. 2022.
    What is the phenomenology of hope? A common view is that hope has a generally positive and pleasant affective tone. This rosy depiction, however, has recently been challenged. Certain hopes, it has been objected, are such that they are either entirely negative in valence or neutral in tone. In this paper, I argue that this challenge has only limited success. In particular, I show that it only applies to one sense of hope but leaves another sense—one that is implicitly but widely employed in the …Read more
  •  11
    Practitioner Wisdom: A Conceptual Approach
    with Peter R. Fawson
    British Journal of Social Work 1 1-17. 2022.
    This conceptual paper explores the role that wisdom plays in social work. In the literature, this topic is primarily discussed in terms of ‘Practice Wisdom’, a kind of implicit and intuitive-based body of knowledge that is acquired through practice experience. After reviewing some formulations of it, we argue that practice wisdom faces a number of difficulties and is a misguided approach. To replace it, we propose a novel framework called ‘Practitioner Wisdom’, which emphasises that the proper s…Read more
  •  254
    How to theorize about hope
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4): 1426-1439. 2022.
    In order to better understand the topic of hope, this paper argues that two separate theories are needed: One for hoping, and the other for hopefulness. This bifurcated approach is warranted by the observation that the word ‘hope’ is polysemous: It is sometimes used to refer to hoping and sometimes, to feeling or being hopeful. Moreover, these two senses of 'hope' are distinct, as a person can hope for some outcome yet not simultaneously feel hopeful about it. I argue that this distinction betwe…Read more
  •  228
    Bitterness without hope
    Journal of Social Philosophy 54 (1): 130-144. 2022.
    This paper develops and defends an anger-based account of bitterness. In particular, it argues that contrary to what some scholars have maintained, an adequate account of bitterness does not require the concept of hope. That is, bitterness is neither disappointed hope (McFall) nor hopeless anger (Stockdale). Instead, it proposes that bitterness is better understood as unresolved anger, an emotion experienced when a lack of resolution to our violated moral expectations forces us to swallow our an…Read more
  •  52
    Pluralism, Eliminativism, and the Definition of Art
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2): 100-113. 2021.
    Traditional monist theories of art fail to account for the diversity of objects that intuitively strike many as belonging to the category art. Some today argue that the solution to this problem requires the adoption of some version of pluralism to account for the diversity of art. We examine one recent attempt, which holds that the correct account of art must recognize the plurality of concepts of art. However, we criticize this account of concept pluralism as being unable to offer an explanatio…Read more
  •  690
    The Social Dimension of Open-Mindedness
    Erkenntnis 88 (1): 235-252. 2021.
    This paper explores how open-mindedness and its exercise can be social in nature. In particular, it argues that an individual can be regarded as open-minded even though she does not conduct all of the intellectual tasks as required by open-mindedness _by herself;_ that is, she delegates some of these tasks to her epistemic peers. Thinking about open-mindedness in such social terms not only opens up the possibility that there are different and surprising ways for an individual to be open-minded, …Read more
  •  424
    Hope and Hopefulness
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (7): 832-843. 2020.
    This paper proposes a new framework for thinking about hope, with certain unexpected consequences. Specifically, I argue that a shift in focus from locutions like “x hopes that” and “x is hoping that” to “x is hopeful that” and “x has hope that” can improve our understanding of hope. This approach, which emphasizes hopefulness as the central concept, turns out to be more revealing and fruitful in tackling some of the issues that philosophers have raised about hope, such as the question of how ho…Read more
  •  311
    Shame and moral autonomy
    Ratio 34 (1): 44-55. 2020.
    Does shame have a place in a mature moral agent's psychology? Does it play a useful and positive role in morality? One skepticism that disputes shame's compatibility with mature moral agency or its being a useful moral emotion is that shame appears heteronomous in nature: We experience shame not because we have behaved badly by our own moral standards, but because we have been reproved by other people and suffered an injury to our social image. To mitigate this skepticism, this paper will propos…Read more
  •  54
    Cultivating Open‐Mindedness
    Educational Theory 69 (4): 507-515. 2019.
    Open-mindedness is widely regarded as an epistemic virtue and, more recently, a moral one: its exercise is supposed to be conducive not only to the acquisition of epistemic goods such as truth, knowledge, and understanding, but also to the development of moral goods such as the promotion of social cohesion and the fostering of people’s respect and care for one another. This glossy view of open-mindedness, however, has come under challenge. Critics have argued that adopting a default stance of op…Read more
  •  107
    Why concepts can't be theories
    Philosophical Explorations 9 (3): 309-325. 2006.
    In this paper, I present an alternative argument for Jerry Fodor's recent conclusion that there are currently no tenable theories of concepts in the cognitive sciences and in the philosophy of mind. Briefly, my approach focuses on the 'theory-theory' of concepts. I argue that the two ways in which cognitive psychologists have formulated this theory lead to serious difficulties, and that there cannot be, in principle, a third way in which it can be reformulated. Insofar as the 'theory-theory' is …Read more
  •  122
    What is hope?
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 243-254. 2019.
    According to the standard account, to hope for an outcome is to desire it and to believe that its realization is possible, though not inevitable. This account, however, faces certain difficulties: It cannot explain how people can display differing strengths in hope; it cannot distinguish hope from despair; and it cannot explain substantial hopes. This paper proposes an account of hope that can meet these deficiencies. Briefly, it argues that in addition to possessing the relevant belief–desire s…Read more
  • Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem (review)
    Philosophy in Review 28 (4): 257-260. 2008.
  •  115
    Epistemic Injustice and Open‐Mindedness
    Hypatia 30 (2): 337-351. 2015.
    In this paper, I argue that recent discussions of culprit-based epistemic injustices can be framed around the intellectual character virtue of open-mindedness. In particular, these injustices occur because the people who commit them are closed-minded in some respect; the injustices can therefore be remedied through the cultivation of the virtue of open-mindedness. Describing epistemic injustices this way has two explanatory benefits: it yields a more parsimonious account of the phenomenon of epi…Read more
  •  113
    Resisting aliefs: Gendler on belief-discordant behaviors
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (1). 2012.
    This paper challenges T. S. Gendler's notion of aliefs, a novel kind of mental state which she introduces to explain a wide variety of belief-discordant behaviors. In particular, I argue that many of the cases which she uses to motivate such a mental state can be fully explained by accounts that make use only of commonplace attitudes such as beliefs and desires
  •  93
    Open-Mindedness as a Critical Virtue
    Topoi 35 (2): 403-411. 2016.
    This paper proposes to examine Daniel Cohen’s recent attempt to apply virtues to argumentation theory, with special attention given to his explication of how open-mindedness can be regarded as an argumentational or critical virtue. It is argued that his analysis involves a contentious claim about open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue, which generates a tension for agents who are simultaneously both an arguer and a knower (or who strive to be both). I contend that this tension can be eased or re…Read more
  •  310
    Why Concepts Should Not Be Pluralized or Eliminated
    Polish Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 7-23. 2014.
    Concept Pluralism and Concept Eliminativism are two positions recently proposed in the philosophy and the psychology of concepts. Both of these theories are motivated by the view that all current theories of concepts are empirically and methodologically inadequate and hold in common the assumption that for any category that can be represented in thought, a person can possess multiple, distinct concepts of it. In this paper, I will challenge these in light of a third theory, Conceptual Atomism, w…Read more
  •  116
    Is conceptual atomism a plausible theory of concepts?
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (3): 413-434. 2007.
    Conceptual atomism is the view according to which most lexical concepts lack ‘internal’ or constituent structure. To date, it has not received much attention from philosophers and psychologists. A centralreason is that it is thought to be an implausible theory of concepts, resulting in untenable implications. The main objective of this paper is to present conceptual atomism as a viable alternative, with a view toachieving two aims: the first, to characterize and to elucidate conceptual atomism; …Read more
  •  52
    Open‐Mindedness as Engagement
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (1): 70-86. 2016.
    Open-mindedness is an under-explored topic in virtue epistemology, despite its assumed importance for the field. Questions about it abound and need to be answered. For example, what sort of intellectual activities are central to it? Can one be open-minded about one's firmly held beliefs? Why should we strive to be open-minded? This paper aims to shed light on these and other pertinent issues. In particular, it proposes a view that construes open-mindedness as engagement, that is, a willingness t…Read more
  •  63
    Is Open‐mindedness a Moral Virtue?
    Ratio 30 (3): 343-358. 2017.
    Is open-mindedness a moral virtue? Surprisingly, this question has not received much attention from philosophers. In this paper, we fill this lacuna by arguing that there are good grounds for thinking that it is. In particular, we show that the extant account of open-mindedness as a moral virtue faces an objection that appears to show that exercising the character trait may not be virtuous. To offset this objection, we argue that a much stronger argument can be made for the case that open-minded…Read more
  •  159
    Is Open-Mindedness Conducive to Truth?
    Synthese 194 (5). 2017.
    Open-mindedness is generally regarded as an intellectual virtue because its exercise reliably leads to truth. However, some theorists have argued that open-mindedness’s truth-conduciveness is highly contingent, pointing out that it is either not truth-conducive at all under certain scenarios or no better than dogmatism or credulity in others. Given such shaky ties to truth, it would appear that the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is in jeopardy. In this paper, I propose to de…Read more