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The Affective Scaffolding of Grief in the Digital Age: The Case of DeathbotsTopoi 1-13. forthcoming.Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can serve as affective …Read more
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Friendship and the Structure of TrustIn Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 186-206. 2016.In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral virtues are exactly like friendship…Read more
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Negative Epistemic ExemplarsIn Benjamin R. Sherman & Stacey Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtuetheoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases…Read more
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Vectors of epistemic insecurityIn Ian James Kidd, Quassim Cassam & Heather Battaly (eds.), Vice Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.Epistemologists have addressed a variety of modal epistemic standings, such as sensitivity, safety, risk, and epistemic virtue. These concepts mark out the ways that beliefs can fail to track the truth, articulate the conditions needed for knowledge, and indicate ways to become a better epistemic agent. However, it is our contention that current ways of carving up epistemic modality ignore the complexities that emerge when individuals are embedded within a community and listening to a variety of…Read more
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Vulnerability in Social Epistemic NetworksInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (5): 1-23. 2020.Social epistemologists should be well-equipped to explain and evaluate the growing vulnerabilities associated with filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization in social media. However, almost all social epistemology has been built for social contexts that involve merely a speaker-hearer dyad. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization all presuppose much larger and more complex network structures. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for a properly social epistemology that g…Read more
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Motivated numeracy and active reasoning in a Western European sampleBehavioral Public Policy 1. 2020.Recent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Wes…Read more
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Online trust and distrustIn Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, Routledge. 2021.Trust makes cooperation possible. It enables us to learn from others and at a distance. It makes democratic deliberation possible. But it also makes us vulnerable: when we place our trust in another’s word, we are liable to be deceived—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Our evolved mechanisms for deciding whom to trust and whom to distrust mostly rely on face-to-face interactions with people whose reputation we can both access and influence. Online, these mechanisms are largely …Read more
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A normative framework for sharing information onlineIn Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2023.People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are …Read more
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The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkitIn Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè (eds.), Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1, Springer. 2023.The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter…Read more
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Ethical pitfalls for natural language processing in psychologyIn Morteza Dehghani & Ryan Boyd (eds.), The Atlas of Language Analysis in Psychology, Guilford Press. forthcoming.Knowledge is power. Knowledge about human psychology is increasingly being produced using natural language processing (NLP) and related techniques. The power that accompanies and harnesses this knowledge should be subject to ethical controls and oversight. In this chapter, we address the ethical pitfalls that are likely to be encountered in the context of such research. These pitfalls occur at various stages of the NLP pipeline, including data acquisition, enrichment, analysis, storage, and shar…Read more
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Humility in networksIn Mark Alfano, Michael Patrick Lynch & Alessandra Tanesini (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility, Routledge. 2021.What do humility, intellectual humility, and open-mindedness mean in the context of inter-group conflict? We spend most of our time with ingroup members, such as family, friends, and colleagues. Yet our biggest disagreements —— about practical, moral, and epistemic matters —— are likely to be with those who do not belong to our ingroup. An attitude of humility towards the former might be difficult to integrate with a corresponding attitude of humility towards the latter, leading to smug tribalis…Read more
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More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish CofnasPhilosophical Psychology 33 (7): 893-898. 2020.
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The Affiliative Use of Emoji and Hashtags in the Black Lives Matter Movement in TwitterSocial Science Computer Review (N/A). 2022.Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platf…Read more
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The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Humility (edited book)Routledge. 2021.Humility is a vital aspect of political discussion, social media and self-help, whilst recent empirical research has linked humility to improved well-being, open-mindedness and increased accuracy in assessing persuasive messages. It is also a topic central to research and discussion in philosophy, applied ethics and religious studies. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility is the first collection to present a comprehensive overview the philosophy of humility, whilst also covering impor…Read more
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Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of Crowds?In Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2014.In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discuss…Read more
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Natural Language Processing and Semantic Network Visualization for PhilosophersIn Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy, Bloomsbury Press. 2019.Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak. In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions. However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication. Experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we describe and showcas…Read more
CUNY
Alumnus, 2011
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language, Miscellaneous |
PhilPapers Editorships
Skepticism about Character |