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 Promising Puzzle
Consider the following three claims.
  1. The Evidence Claim: if your total evidence doesn't support p, it is irrational to believe that p.
  2. The Sincerity Claim: your promise to φ is sincere only if you believe that you will φ.
  3. The Propriety Claim: you should promise to φ only if your promise is sincere and the belief required for sincerity is rational.
On the face of it, all three claims are plausible. But if all three claims are true, the implication is that you shouldn’t ever promise against the evidence which, in turn, seems to imply that you shouldn’t ever promise to do hard things (think: promising to stay faithful to your spouse-to-be or to be on time when you’re perpetually late - things which you have undefeated evidence that suggests that there’s a significant chance you won’t do). But that can’t be right either. Promises to do hard things are some of our most important promises! In this paper, I accept all three claims and affirm that idea that you shouldn’t promise against the evidence, but I argue that this doesn’t prohibit promises to do hard thing because, in many cases of promising, the promiser’s total evidence does suggest that she’ll follow through.
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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.