2025. "The Epistemic Insignificance of Doxastic Wronging" Southwest Philosophy Review 41(1): 129-138.
Abstract: Doxastic wronging is wronging that occurs in virtue of a belief. What epistemic significance, if any, does doxastic wronging have for the normativity of inquiry? Recently, some philosophers have defended views according to which doxastic wronging has an epistemic impact on the norms governing belief formation and revision. In this paper, I sketch a theory of the zetetic significance of doxastic wronging that denies its epistemic significance. In other words, although doxastic wronging is relevant to the normativity of inquiry, it is irrelevant to the normativity of belief formation and revision. To defend this thesis, I sketch a framework for thinking about zetetic structure and I combine this framework with an independently attractive picture of epistemic normativity according to which answers to questions are to be settled in whatever way is best supported by the evidence.
2024. "Toothlessness Is Not a Problem for Normative Realism: A Reply to Barta" Southwest Philosophy Review 40(2): 83-88.
This is a commentary on Walter Barta's article "Biting the Bullet on Toothlessness" (Southwest Philosophy Review, 2024). Anyone interested in the difference between reasons to believe that p and premises of a sound argument for p may enjoy the final paragraph of this commentary.
2022. "In Defense of Clutter" Ergo 9:1. (Co-authored with Brendan Balcerak Jackson and Kenji Lota).
Abstract: Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities". Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it. This is significant because the principle appears to have robust implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman (2018) has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision. In this paper, we present some new objections to a suitably formulated version of the clutter principle qua norm on belief revision. Moreover, we argue that the clutter principle is best understood as a norm on non-doxastic stages of inquiry. In our view, it is a norm of asking and considering questions rather than a norm of settling on an answer to a question by forming a belief.
2015. "The Epistemic Unity of Perception" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96(4): 535-549. (Co-authored with Elijah Chudnoff).
Abstract: Dogmatists and phenomenal conservatives think that if it perceptually seems to you that p, then you thereby have some prima facie justification for believing that p. Increasingly, writers about these views have argued that perceptual seemings are composed of two other states: a sensation followed by a seeming. In this article we critically examine this movement. First we argue that there are no compelling reasons to think of perceptual seemings as so composed. Second we argue that even if they were so composed, this underlying disunity in metaphysical or psychological structure would fall below the threshold of epistemic significance.
2023. Summary of "In Defense of Clutter" written for a general audience. Ergo Blog.
"Philosophy can and should deal with important issues. It should enable us both to understand our place in the world and to live in it. And yet what troubles me is that the structure of our profession is in danger of encouraging the production of work that is indeed competent, professional, subtle, and technically clever, but which adds little, if anything, to the sum total of human knowledge worth having." -David McNaughton, Why Is So Much Philosophy So Tedious?