•  105
    IV—The Limits of Immanent Critique
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. forthcoming.
    The tradition of immanent critique promises a lot. It promises to be critical of the existing social order without appealing to ‘external’ normative standards. I argue that the prospects for immanent criticism are bleak: they must either commit to an implausible social ontology, a flawed meta-normative theory, or both.
  •  71
    How to talk back: hate speech, misinformation, and the limits of salience
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 22 (3): 315-335. 2023.
    Hate speech and misinformation are rife. How to respond? Counterspeech proposals say: with more and better speech. This paper considers the treatment of counterspeech in Maxime Lepoutre’s Democratic Speech In Divided Times. Lepoutre provides a nuanced defence of counterspeech. Some counterspeech, he grants, is flawed. But, he says: counterspeech can be debugged. Once we understand why counterspeech fails – when fail it does – we can engineer more effective counterspeech strategies. Lepoutre argu…Read more
  •  109
    KK Failures Are Not Abominable
    Mind 131 (522): 575-584. 2022.
    Kevin Dorst has recently provided a novel argument for the KK principle. In this paper I sketch a rejoinder.
  •  116
    Mushy Akrasia: Why Mushy Credences Are Rationally Permissible
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1): 79-106. 2021.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  189
    Narrative testimony
    Philosophical Studies 178 (12): 4025-4052. 2021.
    Epistemologists of testimony have focused almost exclusively on the epistemic dynamics of simple testimony. We do sometimes testify by ways of simple, single sentence assertions. But much of our testimony is narratively structured. I argue that narrative testimony gives rise to a form of epistemic dependence that is far richer and more far reaching than the epistemic dependence characteristic of simple testimony.
  •  212
    Absolutely general knowledge
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3): 547-566. 2022.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 547-566, November 2021.
  •  425
    The Ethics of Metaphor
    Ethics 128 (4): 728-755. 2018.
    Increasingly, metaphors are the target of political critique: Jewish groups condemn Holocaust imagery; mental health organizations, the metaphorical exploitation of psychosis; and feminists, “rape metaphors.” I develop a novel model for making sense of such critiques of metaphor.
  •  97
    Stakes sensitivity and transformative experience
    Analysis 78 (1): 34-39. 2018.
    I trace the relationship between the view that knowledge is stakes sensitive and Laurie Paul’s account of the epistemology of transformative experience. The view that knowledge is stakes sensitive comes in different flavours: one can go for subjective or objective conceptions of stakes, where subjective views of stakes take stakes to be a function of an agent’s non-factive mental states, and objective views of stakes do not. I argue that there is a tension between subjective accounts of stakes s…Read more
  •  114
    An Introduction to Feminism, by Lorna Finlayson (review)
    Mind 126 (504): 1251-1259. 2017.
    Philosophers are often rude about each other, but their rudeness tends to be off the record, anonymous or sneaked in under the bloodless academic lexicon of ‘the worry’, ‘the concern’ and ‘the potential limitation’. But Lorna Finlayson’s rudeness comes with no softening frills: against her tailored prose, her insults pop. They make for quite a treat: desert landscapes may be all very well, but there is no need for philosophical writing to share their wearying climate. Introductory texts — and th…Read more
  •  114
    Cretan Deductions
    Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1): 163-178. 2015.
  •  130
    Risk, doubt, and transmission
    Philosophical Studies 173 (10): 2803-2821. 2016.
    Despite their substantial appeal, closure principles have fallen on hard times. Both anti-luck conditions on knowledge and the defeasibility of knowledge look to be in tension with natural ways of articulating single-premise closure principles. The project of this paper is to show that plausible theses in the epistemology of testimony face problems structurally identical to those faced by closure principles. First I show how Lasonen-Aarnio’s claim that there is a tension between single premise c…Read more