Research
Research Statement
Research
My research explores questions at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind, often through the lens of social issues. While my dissertation focuses primarily on analogies between action and belief (in terms of reasons, control, and moral duties), I am interested in the control we have over mental states more broadly.
Against Doxastic Transparency
(currently under review)
Abstract: Many have thought that only evidential considerations can be reasons for which we believe. This is in large part because we’ve assumed doxastic transparency is true: that when we deliberate about what to believe, the question of whether to believe that p gives way to the question of whether p is true. This paper challenges those assumptions by drawing attention to the different functional roles reasons can play in deliberation. In different roles, reasons engage different deliberative questions. Not all of these neatly collapse into that of whether p is true; transparency is false. The illusion to the contrary is generated when we focus on overly simplistic cases of deliberation that encourage us to neglect the existence of what I term ‘indirect’ reasons. The implications for popular arguments about normative evidentialism and the aim or norm of belief are grim.
Evidentialism and #MeToo: Understanding the Slogan 'Believe Women'
(currently in progress)
To be presented at the upcoming conference, Old Dilemmas, New Voices: Feminist Ethics and #MeToo, hosted by the Centre for Ethics at the University of Iceland
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Abstract: The #MeToo slogan `Believe Women’ looks like an imperative of some sort, and many of us would say we agree with it. But what, exactly, is it telling us to do? In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the slogan `Believe Women’ that makes sense of the public debate, provides general guidance about who to believe and when, and explains how and why the slogan is, in fact, an imperative we can and should follow when considering women’s testimony about sexual misconduct. In doing so, I consider and reject alternative interpretations and argue that the correct one provides us with a special but often neglected kind of reason for belief that attaches to and ‘intensifies’ the weight of victims’ testimony. Moreover (I argue), the character of the reason is fundamentally moral, as opposed to primarily evidential or `epistemic.’ This has significant implications for both normative epistemology and everyday doxastic life.
Agentive Phenomenology and Loss of Control While Eating
(currently under review)
Abstract: Is all consciousness ultimately perceptual in nature? Many have thought so, and for good reason: if this is not the case, then popular reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are false. Enter reductive sensory views. These views attempt to reduce cognitive, affective, and agentive phenomenology to the phenomenology of familiar sensory modalities, such as sight, hearing, touch, proprioception, and so on. In this paper, I offer a novel argument against reductive sensory views of agentive phenomenology. The idea is something like this: the literature, historically, has focused on the phenomenology of controlled bodily movement. But moving our bodies is not the only thing we do as agents. We also, for example, reason, imagine, focus, and resist temptation. These are controlled mental events, and a complete theory of what it's like to act as an agent ought to account for the phenomenology of mental actions as well as bodily actions. To make my case, I focus on a specific, common example of a deficit in agentive phenomenology -- the feeling of lacking control over eating urges. This feeling is well-documented, and characterizes binge eating episodes as well as the eating disorders of which binge eating is a symptom. I argue that even if reductive sensory theories can account for the feeling of lacking control over bodily movement, they lack the resources to account for the feeling of lacking control over urges. In the end, perceptual reductionism about agentive phenomenology is out, and the implications for reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are grim.