•  63
    The Suspension Problem for Epistemic Democracy
    Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3): 799-821. 2023.
    Recently, many normative theories of democracy have taken an epistemic turn. Rather than focus on democracy's morally desirable features, they argue that democracy is valuable (at least in part) because it tends to produce correct political decisions. I argue that these theories place epistemic demands on citizens that conflict with core democratic commitments. First, I discuss a well-known challenge to epistemic arguments for democracy that I call the ‘deference problem’. I then argue that fram…Read more
  •  199
    Introduction and Discussion of a Special Issue in philosophy of law "Philosophical Dimensions of the Trial"
  •  100
    Can We Talk It Out?
    Episteme 21 (3): 837-855. 2024.
    Research on the normative ideal of democracy has taken a sharp deliberative and epistemic turn. It is now increasingly common for claims about the putative cognitive benefits of political deliberation to play central roles in normative arguments for democracy. In this paper, I argue that the most prominent epistemic defences of deliberative democracy fail. Relying on empirical findings on the workings of implicit bias, I show that they overstate the epistemic virtues of political deliberation. I…Read more
  •  570
    The Problem of Intuitive Presence
    Philosophers' Imprint 22 (n/a). 2022.
    The historically-influential perceptual analogy states that intuitions and perceptual experiences are alike in many important respects. Phenomenalists defend a particular reading of this analogy according to which intuitions and perceptual experiences share a common phenomenal character. The phenomenalist thesis has proven highly influential in recent years. However, insufficient attention has been given to the challenges that the phenomenalist thesis raises for theories of intuitions. In this p…Read more
  •  734
    Who’s afraid of cognitive diversity?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6): 1462-1488. 2024.
    The Challenge from Cognitive Diversity (CCD) states that demography-specific intuitions are unsuited to play evidential roles in philosophy. The CCD attracted much attention in recent years, in great part due to the launch of an international research effort to test for demographic variation in philosophical intuitions. In the wake of these international studies the CCD may prove revolutionary. For, if these studies uncover demographic differences in intuitions, then in line with the CCD there w…Read more
  •  565
    Why understanding-why is contrastive
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 6061-6083. 2021.
    Contrastivism about interrogative understanding is the view that ‘S understands why p’ posits a three-place epistemic relation between a subject S, a fact p, and an alternative to p, q. This thesis stands in stark opposition to the natural idea that a subject S can be said to understand why psimpliciter. I argue that contrastivism offers the best explanation for the fact that evaluations of the form ‘S understands why p’ vary depending on the alternatives to p under consideration. I also show th…Read more
  •  96
    No hope for the Irrelevance Claim
    Philosophical Studies 177 (11): 3351-3371. 2020.
    Empirical findings about intuitions putatively cast doubt on the traditional methodology of philosophy. Herman Cappelen and Max Deutsch have argued that these methodological concerns are unmotivated as experimental findings about intuitions are irrelevant for assessments of the methodology of philosophy—I dub this the ‘Irrelevance Claim’. In this paper, I first explain that for Cappelen and Deutsch to vindicate the Irrelevance Claim from a forceful objection, their arguments have to establish th…Read more
  •  164
    Recent empirical studies raise methodological concerns about the use of intuitions in philosophy. According to one prominent line of reply, these concerns are unwarranted since the empirical studies motivating them do not control for the putatively characteristic phenomenology of intuitions. This paper makes use of research on metacognitive states that have precisely this phenomenology to argue that the above reply fails. Furthermore, it shows that empirical findings about these metacognitive st…Read more
  •  1070
    Philosophical expertise under the microscope
    Synthese 197 (3): 1077-1098. 2020.
    Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussi…Read more