Research

My work on the Virtue Epistemology of Trust Project examines the relationship between trust and risk - and in particular what type of risk trust involves - with a view to addressing how we can best trust in order to mitigate the right type(s) of risk. 

I am also interested in how to characterise risk more generally, and especially on what makes the concept of risk a useful and action-guiding concept. 

My PhD thesis defends a novel theory in epistemology: Epistemic Fictionalism, on which sentences of the form "S knows that P" are best understood as metaphorical. My current research expands and develops the arguments from my thesis, and puts Fictionalism to work in explaining puzzles in epistemology, such as the problem of scepticism and explaining the context sensitivity of knowledge attributions. 

My research is informed by the idea that concepts are shaped by their function: by what having that concept enables us to do, that we could not otherwise do (Craig 1990). I am interested in both the meta-philosophical question of how function affects a concept's shape, and in applying the method to illuminate concepts of philosophical interest. In addition to 'knowledge', I am working on function-first analyses of 'trust', 'risk' and 'work'.