Research

Research project

My research areas are logic and formal epistemology.

There are two main strands to my current research.

• Cases where one's beliefs (thought of as probabilistic degrees-of-belief) undermine themselves. For example, suppose you're going to forget your passport just if you believe you won't, and you know this about yourself. What's the rational response to such cases? Such cases bear a close relationship to the liar paradox and we can apply such solution from the liar paradox to beliefs and develop well-motivated proposals for rational responses. In particular, a supervaluational Kripke account motivates adopting imprecise probabilities in such cases.
• Accuracy, or closeness-to-truth considerations have been used to motivate various epistemic rationality requirements. I have been thinking about how these apply in unusual settings, such as where one evaluates options by risk-weighted expected utility theory, or where one adopts imprecise probability.

Contact me for further information about what I'm working on.

Published Papers

Avoiding Risk and Avoiding Evidence with Bernhard Salow. Forthcoming in Australasian Journal of Philosophy

This argues that evidence gathering is epistemically irrational for the (Buchak-style) risk-avoidant agent. To do this we consider how accuracy should be measured once risk-awareness is rationally permissible.

Limits in the Revision Theory. More than Definite Verdicts. In Journal of Philosophical Logic.

This provides a new proposal for what to do at limit stages of the revision theory of truth: one shouldn't only consider definite verdicts that are brought about, but more general closed properties. This is important if one wishes to consider a revision theory for probability.

How to Express Self-Referential Probability. A Kripkean Proposal. Review of Symbolic Logic. doi

This presents a Kripke-style construction for a language with self-referential probability as well as an ω-complete axiomatisation. It also follows Stern in arguing that principles like introspection should be formulated using a truth predicate.

Rational Probabilistic Incoherence? A Reply to Michael Caie. (preprint, please cite published version). Philosophical Review.

In addition to specific responses to Caie's paper, this presents some bullets that need to be bitten if one adopts a consequentialist view of epistemic utility. Further such bullets are also presented in my thesis (ch.7)

Self-Referential Probability. PhD thesis. A quick handout/summary and an extended abstract.

This discusses self-referential probabilities in some gory detail. We discuss a number of semantics models and initial work on how rationality considerations should apply in such cases.

Probability for the Revision Theory of Truth. In Journal of Philosophical Logic.

We investigate how to assign semantic (probability) values to sentences by tracking how often a sentence is true in transfinite sequences; particularly sequences from Gupta and Belnap’s revision theory of truth.

Believing Probabilistic Contents: On the Expressive Power and Coherence of Sets of Sets of Probabilities with Jason Konek. Analysis Reviews collection on Moss's "Probabilistic Knowledge".

We compare the framework advanced by Moss (that one holds beliefs towards sets of probabilities) to imprecise probability frameworks, showing it is very expressively powerful. And we consider coherence for such Mossean agents, giving a limited Dutch bookability result.