My research focuses on epistemological issues in metaethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. I've recently been writing and thinking about moral disagreement and uncertainty. I'm also interested in sound and auditory perception.
Objectivity and Moral Judgments: Just Ask
There is a small but growing literature in moral psychology interested in the objectivity of moral judgments. The received view in this literature is that objectivity is tightly linked to the impossibility of faultless disagreement. Roughly: a claim or judgment C is objective if and only if, when two parties disagree over C, at least one must be incorrect. In this paper I argue that this received view is mistaken. The link between faultless disagreement and objectivity is indirect and contingent, such that asking subjects about the possibility of faultless disagreement is an inadequate test for whether they are committed to the objectivity of a moral judgment. Moreover, there is a better way to discover whether---and in what ways---people are committed to the objectivity of a moral judgment: ask them directly.Two Puzzles for the Study of Auditory Perception
In this paper I present two puzzles for our understanding of auditory perception. The puzzles are both musical, and this is what makes them so puzzling. Why do we have musical perceptual abilities? Can they be explained in terms of other perceptual capacities? If so, how? If not, what purpose do they serve, if any? I argue that apparently mysterious musical perceptual abilities can be explained in terms of more general, evolutionary-fitness-enhancing, auditory perceptual abilities. Although the puzzles raise important, unanswered questions for the study of auditory perception, we have good reason to be optimistic about the prospects of answering them.Recent work on the epistemology of disagreement has focused on doxastic disagreement between epistemic peers: cases where equally knowledgeable and capable agents discover that they have opposing beliefs or credences. In part one of the dissertation, I argue that this narrow focus has created large blind spots and serious mistakes in our understanding of disagreement's epistemic significance. In response, I propose a more comprehensive, Reasons-Based epistemology of disagreement. This approach starts with a distinction between disagreements in which you know something about the reason for the disagreement, and disagreements in which you don't. In any given disagreement, your interlocutor's broad relative epistemic status as peer, expert, or inferior, plays at most a subordinate role in determining how you ought to adjust your opinion.
In part two of the dissertation, I focus on moral disagreement. There are various metaethical positions that seem to pose problems for treating moral disagreements as epistemically significant in just the same way as disagreements over more uncontroversially objective matters. For example, one might think that encountering a disagreement about who will win an election (a strictly empirical question) is importantly different from encountering a disagreement about who ought to win the election, all things considered (a question laden with moral value). One might think that even if the former disagreement should cause you to re-assess your belief, and all else is equal, the latter disagreement might not mandate any such re-assessment. I push back on this general idea. It turns out that various metaethical positions that might appear have serious implications for the epistemic significance of moral disagreement are not so consequential at all.
The Substance of Ontological Disputes
There is a large philosophical literature focused on what sorts of things can be said to exist. This field is called “ontology”. Ontological disputes have sometimes been accused of being “merely verbal disputes”: that they are concerned only with language and not with facts. Some think that if this accusation is correct, philosophers should give up doing ontology. This is the argument I engaged with in my MA thesis. I came to several conclusions: First, there are a variety of importantly different ways to understand the idea of a "verbal dispute"; whether any particular ontological dispute really is a verbal dispute depends on how this term is understood. Second, even if some ontological disputes are verbal in a certain sense, they may still be worthwhile disputes in a variety ways (not "merely" verbal). Third, although many ontological disputes might be worthwhile, there's still good reason to be somewhat modest about the prospects for ontology.