Understanding
My dissertation argues that standard epistemology lacks the resources to describe and evaluate various phenomena important to understanding including its acquisition and communication. Instead, I propose a novel framework where understanding is seen as structuring and organizing information in meaningful ways.
Here's a handout with an overview of the project. I develop this account through several papers addressing the nature of understanding, how we go about getting it, and how we communicate it.
Thinking Together
Descartes’ famous meditator retreats into his stove-heated room. He defeats scepticism and secures certain knowledge. He does it all alone. This is a strikingly odd picture: We rarely learn and inquire in isolation. The counterpoint to Descartes’s meditator is Socratic dialogue. We find a different picture of inquiry there, one where our efforts to understand the world in bound up by learning with others. Yet what difference does it make if we inquire alone or together? A lot, I think.
Thinking Together. a paper arguing that the practice of thinking together is characterised by what I call perspectival attunenment. handout talk
Shared Inquiry. a paper arguing that norms of shared inquiring are different from, and often conflict with, norms on individual inquiry.
Shared Inquiry & Contagion (w\Alex Fisher). a paper arguing that shared inquiry involves a hitherto under-appreciated risk, that of contagion of distorted or harmful perspectives. We explain how this works.
Love & Realism: The Philosophy of Iris Murdoch
This is a longer term book project, but I’m chipping away at developing a systematic account of Iris Murdoch’s epistemology. I have a longish paper in progress:
Humility and the Limits of Moral Understanding. I offer an account of Humility from Murdoch’s work and how it helps us articulate her account of moral understanding. I develop a murdochian account of understanding in terms of perspectives. I argue that this better captures her emphasis on metaphors, language, and images in shaping our moral vision.
