Publications

Why Epistemic Partiality Is Overrated
Forthcoming in a special issue of Philosophical Topics (eds. Rima Basu and Mark Schroeder), co-authored with Nomy Arpaly
 
Review of Christensen and Lackey (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays
 2015 - Analysis, co-authored with Tomás Bogardus

In the works

The Cognitive Demands of Friendship (under review)
Friendship places demands on us – both on what we do and on how we think. The goal of this paper is to characterize the cognitive demands of friendship. The most prominent view is that they are doxastic demands. In other words, friendship places demands on what we believe. I consider both motivations and worries for this belief-based view before introducing an attention-based alternative. According to it, friendship places demands – not on what we believe – but on how we direct our attention. I argue that the attention-based view can accommodate the considerations that motivate the belief-based view, weather the worries that trouble it, and support a more robust picture of friendship.

The Promising Puzzle: An Evidentialist-Friendly Solution (in progress)
Consider the following three claims.
  1. Evidentialism: if you have evidence that there is a significant chance that not-p, it is irrational to believe that p.
  2. Sincerity: your promise to φ is sincere only if you believe that you will φ.
  3. Propriety: you should promise to φ only if your promise is sincere and the belief required for sincerity is rational.
On the face of it, each of these claims is plausible. But if all three are true, then it seems you shouldn’t promise to do hard things – things which statistical evidence suggests there’s a significant chance you won’t do (e.g., staying faithful to your spouse). But surely that can’t be right. This gives rise to the promising puzzle: deny one of the three plausible claims above, or accept that you shouldn’t promise to do hard things. One prominent solution is to deny Evidentialism. The goal of this paper is to solve the puzzle in an evidentialist-friendly way. I argue that it's rational accept all three claims without accepting that you shouldn’t make promises to do hard things. Sometimes (oftentimes!) statistical evidence is defeated and your total evidence suggests that you will follow through on a promise to do something hard.

Our Beliefs about Logic are Self-Evident (in progress)
We take ourselves to know that the fundamental laws of logic are valid. In fact, we’re confident that if we know anything at all, it’s that. Unfortunately, our confidence may be overrated. Knowledge entails justification, so if we know that, say, modus ponens is valid, it must that our belief that modus ponens is valid is justified. But it’s hard to make a case for such justification. The goal of this paper is to develop and defend a view that’s too often overlooked: our beliefs about logic are justified because they are self-evident.