steven Diggin

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. 

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

I'm currently working on a few different projects and aim to resist excessive specialization in philosophy at all costs. My dissertation is on the philosophy of action -- specifically, on the philosophy of improvisation. See below for an overview. 

My background is in epistemology, and my two publications to date concern the nature of evidence. (See below for abstracts and links).  'Everything is Self-Evident' defends the surprising claim 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 a perennial work-in-progress which develops 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: 

• A paper on the meta-ethics of normative mental states and, in particular, on the (constitutive) normativity of desire -- I argue that desire aims at mere practicality rather than goodness or value

• A paper on Ethical Criticism of artworks -- I argue that this typically involves attributing mistaken factual presuppositions about the actual ethical facts to the artwork, rather than making a judgement about the intrinsic ethical value of the artwork

• A paper on the semantics of the progressive aspect and the metaphysics of processes

• A paper on artistic creativity and rule following, building on the early writings of TS Eliot

• A paper on the temporal metaphysics of natural selection

• Some papers applying my work on improvisational agency (see below) to other phenomenon, for instance, exploring what it would be to improvise with the application of concepts during a conversation or extended inquiry, and the suggestion that this can explicate what goes on during conceptual engineering 

Feel free to email me for drafts or discussion. 

DISSERTATION: 

My dissertation develops a novel account of the distinctive nature, scope and limits of improvisational agency. I defend (what I call) the Contemporaneous Planning view of improvisation, where improvising involves adopting a holistic plan for the temporally extended action one is performing, after one has already begun performing that action. For instance, this is what happens when someone stumbles accidently, and then plans to incorporate this stumble into a temporally extended dance routine, by performing a further sequence of movements which retroactively integrate this stumble into a temporal whole. 

What's special about this kind of planning is that, because the agent's plan for their improvised action as a whole is adopted after that action has already begun, part of this plan is backwards-looking, and represents the actions which the agent has already performed as having been performed (and to-have-been performed) under new end-oriented descriptions. For instance, the dancer who improvises their stumble into a dance routine retrospectively represents their stumble as the initial step of their extended dance. 

I argue that this retrospective component of improvisational planning is undergirded by the retroactive power of improvisational difference-making. That is, improvising agents really can retroactively make a difference to the descriptions under which they (intentionally) performed actions in the past, by means of exercising a kind of diachronic control over their past agential activity in producing these actions. For instance, when the improvising dancer performs a further series of dance moves after their stumble, they cause an entire dance routine to have taken place, which retroactively metaphysically determines that their initial stumble has the relational property of constituting the first step of this dance routine. 

I use this account of the psychology and metaphysics of improvisational agency to answer a series of normative questions about improvisation -- in particular, concerning the reasons to improvise rather than plan one's actions in advance, and concerning the distinctive deliberative problems which arise due to the progressive temporal structure of improvisation. 

Finally, I apply this account of improvisation to the existential question of how people can bind their lives into potentially-meaningful wholes and take responsibility for these entire lives. I argue against the Sartrean idea that existential self-determination occurs during a moment of 'original choice' and the MacIntyrean/postmodernist idea that self-determination is founded on autobiographical narration. Instead, I argue that the failings of both of these approaches point towards a further theoretical possibility: self-determination is not originally chosen, nor retrospectively narrated, but rather improvised over the whole course of one's life. I use the Contemporaneous Planning account to outline how it is possible to choose the course and character of one's life as a whole by means of improvising a fundamental project, as well as to sytematically map out and explicate the series of deliberative challenges and crises which are involved in this kind of grand-scale improvisation. 

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.