steven Diggin

PhD Student, University of British Columbia

I'm a PhD student in philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  

Here's a link to my PhilPeople account. 

I grew up on the east coast of Ireland, before spending some years doing my BA and BPhil at the University of Oxford. I wrote a blog post which is somewhat critical of aspects of the Oxford BPhil in philosophy. You can find it here. 

My email is steven [dot] diggin [at] gmail. Feel free to get in touch. 



PNPC Handout 13 October 2023: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vecvsZ6NQGjySpC1ShP8oiaW2U9q-DKT/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100075137455397720187&rtpof=true&sd=true>

I'm currently working on several different projects, and aim to avoid specialization in philosophy at all costs. My dissertation covers the philosophy of history, biology and language, as well as metaphilosophy. (See below for an overview). 

My main background is in epistemology, and my two publications to date both concern the nature of evidence. (See below for abstracts and links).  'Everything is Self-Evident' defends the surprising conclusion that the evidential support relation is reflexive (i.e., every true proposition is perfect evidence for itself). 'Ethical Evidence' argues that we can permissibly rely upon ethical propositions which we justifiably believe as evidence for or against propositions about the empirical world,  which has important consequences for the roles that value-judgements can play in scientific inquiry. 

My current work in epistemology, stemming from my BPhil thesis, concerns the nature of the (epistemic) basing relation -- i.e., what it is to form beliefs and perform actions on the basis of normative reasons -- and what this can tell us about the connection between reasons and knowledge. I have two works-in-progress which develop a somewhat novel account of the nature of knowledge -- where knowing a proposition is just believing it on the basis of the reason that it's true. 

Other works-in-progress include: 

Feel free to email me for drafts (or just to tell me that you don't buy the ideas). 


DISSERTATION: 

My dissertation has three parts: 

(i) Philosophy of History: I'm interested in understanding the nature and character of social practices -- paradigmatically, linguistic practices. Historians typically emphasize that there is a distinctively historical kind of knowledge which can we have of these practices, but that this essentially involves taking up a retrospective viewpoint from the future. I'm interested in prospective and deliberative historical knowledge of practices which are still ongoing in the present (and in which we are still actively engaged and which have the ability to alter). I use philosophical work on the nature of (artistic) improvisation to explain how this kind of knowledge and understanding is possible, and why it is so interesting. 

(ii) Function and Meaning: Philosophers of biology and language have given historical accounts of how (biological or artifactual) function and semantic content (i.e., linguistic meaning) are determined over and across time. For instance, on the selected effects account of the biological function of a trait, this trait has a particular function in virtue of its selection history (within a population). Likewise, on a Kripke/Putnam/Burge externalist metasemantics, a particular name or kind-term has its denotation in virtue of the history of its use (within a linguistic practice). I argue that properties like function and content are determined by the whole history of their selection or use in a population or linguistic practice, which sometimes includes factors from the relative future. So, to put it bluntly, the meanings of words can depend not just on how they have been used in the past and present, but also how they will be used by developments of our current linguistic practice in the future. This part of the dissertation aims to develop and refine work by other Temporal Externalists about metasemantics, and also to extend this general framework across other areas of philosophy. 

(iii) Metaphilosophy: The reason why I'm so interested in the way that properties like function and meaning get determined across time is because this generates extremely deep consequences for how to perform inquiry and to understand the function of social practices. First, the Temporal Externalist approach to metasemantics enables us to develop an account of Conceptual Engineering where we can think about what meanings our concepts should have, and thereby affect what meaning they already have (by means of determining the future usage of those concepts). I argue that this creative aspect of inquiry can be fruitfully understood as analogous to musical improvisation. Second, philosophers sometimes develop genealogies of social practices or activities in order to critique (e.g., Nietzsche, Foucault) or vindicate (e.g., Bernard Williams) those practices or activities. This typically involves looking at the past history of the practice or activity, in order to identify its function. I argue that critical or vindicatory genealogies need to look at the future histories of social practices, as well as just their past. For example, etymologies typically look at past associations and meanings of linguistic items, in order to find out what the current meaning of these linguistic items are. But if we do have access to the future associations and meanings of these terms (e.g., because we are concerned with a word in a historical language, like Latin), then this future-focused genealogy is also relevant to understanding the meaning of the word. 

PAPERS: 

Ethical  Evidence. (2022) Synthese 200 (4). 

Paper available here. 

Draft available here.

Abstract: This paper argues that ethical propositions can legitimately be used as evidence for and against empirical conclusions. Specifically, I argue that this thesis is entailed by several uncontroversial assumptions about ethical metaphysics and epistemology. I also outline several examples of ethical-to-empirical inferences where it is extremely plausible that one can rationally rely upon their ethical evidence in order to gain a justified belief in an empirical conclusion. The main upshot is that ethical propositions can, under perfectly standard conditions, play both direct and indirect evidential roles in (social) scientific inquiry.


Everything is Self-Evident. (2021) Logos and Episteme: An International Journal of Epistemology 12 (4):413-426.  
Paper available (open access) here.

Abstract: Plausible probabilistic accounts of evidential support entail that every true proposition is evidence for itself. This paper defends this surprising principle against a series of recent objections from Jessica Brown. Specifically, the paper argues that: (i) explanationist accounts of evidential support convergently entail that every true proposition is self-evident, and (ii) it is often felicitous to cite a true proposition as evidence for itself, just not under that description. The paper also develops an objection involving the apparent impossibility of believing P on the evidential basis of P itself, but gives a reason not to be too worried about this objection. Establishing that every true proposition is self-evident saves probabilistic accounts of evidential support from absurdity, paves the way for a non-sceptical infallibilist theory of knowledge and has distinctive practical consequences.