Academic Publications

​Abominable KK Failures. (Forthcoming). Mind.​​ [Link]

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KK is the thesis that if you can know p, you can know that you can know p. Though it’s unpopular, a flurry of considerations have recently emerged in its favor. Here we add fuel to the fire: standard resources allow us to show that any failure of KK will lead to the knowability and assertability of abominable indicative conditionals of the form, ‘If I don’t know it, p.’ Such conditionals are manifestly not assertable—a fact that KK defenders can easily explain. I survey a variety of KK-denying responses and find them wanting. Those who object to the knowability of such conditionals must either (i) deny the possibility of harmony between knowledge and belief, or (ii) deny well-supported connections between conditional and unconditional attitudes. Meanwhile, those who grant knowability owe us an explanation of such conditionals’ unassertability—yet no successful explanations are on offer. Upshot: we have new evidence for KK.

Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain. (Forthcoming). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.  [Link]

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Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. It is surprisingly difficult to vindicate these dual constraints. But diagnosing why this is so leads to a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology. ​

Lockeans Maximize Expected Accuracy. (2019). Mind  128 (509): 175–211.  [Link]

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The Lockean Thesis says that you must believe p iff you’re sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must’ asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, ‘sufficiently confident’ refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory—the view that rational requirements are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. Different versions of this theory generate different versions of Lockeanism; moreover, a plausible version of epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations, yielding a new Lockean picture that helps to model and explain the role of beliefs in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the epistemic priorities of your context. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different from what many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence.

Higher-Order Uncertainty. (Forthcoming). In M. Skipper Rasmussen & A. Steglich-Peterson (eds.), Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford University Press.

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You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. I defend three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition---that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions---is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers---but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it.

Can the Knowledge Norm Co-Opt the Opt-Out?  (2014). Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (4): 273 – 282.  [Link]                                                                                                                                                                 

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The Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) claims that it is proper to assert that p only if one knows that p. Though supported by a wide range of evidence, it appears to generate incorrect verdicts when applied to utterances of “I don’t know.” Instead of being an objection to KNA, I argue that this linguistic data shows that “I don’t know” does not standardly function as a literal assertion about one’s epistemic status; rather, it is an indirect speech act that has the primary illocutionary force of opting out of the speaker’s conversational responsibilities. This explanation both reveals that the opt-out is an under-appreciated type of illocutionary act with a wide range of applications, and shows that the initial data in fact supports KNA over its rivals.

Public Philosophy

Why Rational People Polarize. (2019). The Phenomenal World, January 24.  [Link]

Dissertation:  Modest Epistemology

Higher-order uncertainty is uncertainty about what you should think. Mundane cases abound. I'm very confident that the plane is safe, but  I wonder whether I should be more (less) so—statistics is hard, after all. Theoretically significant cases do too. Disagreement: I thought Kim was the best candidate, but my colleagues thought otherwise—I'm probably more confident than I should be. Impairment: The answer to question 17 seems obvious, but I'm running on 5 hours of sleep—I'm probably missing something. Tendencies: My argument seems convincing, but I always think my arguments are convincing—I might be overconfident. And so on.

The Question: How does uncertainty about what you should think affect what you should think?

Part one ("Higher-Order Uncertainty") sets the stage. After arguing that the "higher-order evidence" literature can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty, I introduce a general framework for studying it. Using this framework, I defend a Modest Truism that sometimes it's rational to have higher-order uncertainty, and therefore to be modest: to be uncertain whether you're rational.  I argue that this fact lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement.

Part two ("Building Bridges") argues for a Guiding Truism—that you always should treat rationality as a guide—and shows how many justifications for rational norms (including Dutch Books, money pumps, and accuracy arguments) presuppose it. However, there is a tension between our Modest and Guiding Truisms: if you leave open various possibilities for what the rational opinions might be, what guarantees that those opinions are correlated with the truth?  I argue that no extant theory navigates this tension: those that try to vindicate the Guiding Truism wind up trivializing higher-order uncertainty; those that try to vindicate the Modest Truism wind up undermining the guidance-value of rationality. 

Part three ("Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain") shows how to reconcile the Modest and Guiding Truisms. I propose a new deference principle---Trust​---that requires you to think it likely that rational judgments are correct.  Unlike other deference principles, Trust both allows higher-order uncertainty and guarantees that rationality has many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust characterizes the Guiding Truism—for it is necessary and (in a wide class of cases) sufficient to vindicate the value of rationality: the principle that you should always prefer to let rationality guide your decisions.  Upshot: in reconciling our Modest and Guiding Truisms, Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology.

Work in Progress                                                                          

Moore Can be Said

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The knowledge norm of assertion claims that you are warranted in asserting p only if you know p. It’s false. Given the right context, Moore sentences of the form "p but I don’t know that p” are felicitous, despite being unknowable. What’s true is a conditional knowledge norm of assertion: you are warranted in asserting p only if conditional on the conversational presuppositions you know p.

​Building Bridges

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You have higher-order uncertainty iff you’re uncertain of which opinions are rational—uncertain of what you should think. On the one hand, there’s compelling reason to think that such epistemic modesty can be rational: sometimes you should be uncertain of what you should think. Call this our Modest Truism. On the other hand, there’s compelling reason to think that rationality must be a guide. I defend this Guiding Truism, showing how many justifications of rational norms—including Dutch Books, money pumps, and accuracy arguments—implicitly presuppose it. The problem is that there’s a tension between our two truisms: once we allow you to be uncertain of what the rational opinions are, what guarantees that you think it likely that they’re correct? I argue that no extant theory successfully navigates this tension: those strong enough to vindicate the Guiding Truism wind up trivializing higher-order uncertainty; those weak enough to allow the Modest Truism wind up allowing rationality to be an anti-guide.

Evidence of Evidence: A Higher-Order Approach (with Branden Fitelson and Brooke Husic)

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"Evidence of evidence is evidence" (EEE) is a slogan that has stirred much recent debate in epistemology. The intuitive idea seems straightforward: if you have reason to think that there is evidence supporting p, then---since what's supported by evidence is likely to be true---you thereby have (some) reason to think that p. However, formulating precise, nontrivial versions of this thesis has proven difficult. In this paper we propose to do so using a higher-order approach---a framework that lets us model (higher-order) opinions about what opinions you should have, i.e. opinions about what opinions your evidence warrants. This framework allows us to formulate propositions about your evidence as objects of uncertainty, and therefore to formulate principles connecting evidence about evidence for p to evidence about p. Drawing on a general theory of rational higher-order uncertainty developed elsewhere, we examine which versions of EEE principles are tenable---showing that although many are not, several strong, intuitive ones are. If these details are correct, then it has (broadly conciliationist) implications for the peer disagreement debate that started the EEE discussion. And regardless of the details, we hope to show that a higher-order approach is fruitful for formulating and testing precise versions of the "evidence of evidence is evidence" slogan.

Rational Polarization

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Research suggests that people tend to interpret conflicting evidence as supporting their prior beliefs ("biased assimilation"); to seek out new arguments that they expect to confirm their prior beliefs ("confirmation bias"); and to react to discussion by becoming more extreme in the same direction as the group’s initial inclination ("group polarization"). Contra the standard interpretation, I argue that each of these “biases” can in fact be fully rational. This is due to the possibility of ambiguous evidence: evidence that is difficult to know how to react to, i.e. that engenders rational uncertainty about whether you've responded rationally. Using a general theory of ambiguous evidence developed elsewhere, I defend three claims: (i) ambiguous evidence tends to be weaker than unambiguous evidence; (ii) the more conflicting your body of evidence is, the more ambiguous it is; and therefore, (iii) a rational preference for strong evidence can lead to a rational preference for confirmatory evidence. Using these general dynamics, I develop precise models that show how each of our "biases" can be rational.