steven Diggin

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Inland Norway in Lillehammer.  

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, and then a few more years doing my PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. 

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

I'm currently working on a few different projects in several areas of analytic philosophy. My background is mainly in epistemology and action theory, and my current postdoctoral position is attached to Olav Vassend's ERC-funded project 'Towards a Theory of Rational Desire' (mostly taking a decision-theoretic and causal-modelling approach). But I also have interests in several other areas; especially the philosophy of language, (meta-)ethics, the intersection between action theory and the philosophy of mind, and temporal metaphysics. Outside of core analytic philosophy, I think a lot about existentialism and the philosophy of literature & other arts. 

Works-in-progress include: 

• A theory of the nature of propositional knowledge

• A theory of improvisational agency

• 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 to other phenomenon. In particular, exploring what it would be to improvise with the application of concepts during a conversation or extended inquiry, and the suggestion that this is what conceptual engineering could be; as well as exploring normative considerations that arise from the temporal distinctiveness of scorekeeping in improvised games. 

Feel free to email me for drafts or discussion. 

PAPERS: 

Ethical Presuppositions in Narrative Art.  (forthcoming) British Journal of Aesthetics. 

Draft available here. 

Abstract: Ethical Criticism is the practice of pointing towards a flaw in the ethical content or character of an artwork as a reason why this artwork is aesthetically faulty in some respect. This paper develops novel account of the mechanism by which this critical practice works. In contrast to the standard approach, this does not involve positing an interaction between the intrinsic ethical value and aesthetic value of an artwork. The argument runs as follows. Narrative artworks are sometimes criticizable on the grounds that they make inaccurate presuppositions about the actual facts. There are ethical facts, at least in a minimal sense. Therefore, artworks are sometimes criticizable on the grounds that they make mistaken presuppositions about the ethical facts. I argue that this Factual Criticism approach gives a satisfactory diagnosis of the examples that initially motivate the philosophical debate about ethics and aesthetics. 

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.

DISSERTATION: 

How to Improvise: a philosophical account of the nature, scope and limits of improvisational agency. University of British Columbia, 2025. (supervised by Jonathan Ichikawa and Chris Mole). 

Available here. 

Short abstract: Most human action is improvised rather than planned in advance. But how do we improvise? I develop an account of what it means for improvisation to involve ‘making things up as you go along’: improvising involves planning what to do after you have already started doing it. I explore the philosophical consequences of this account of improvisation: what psychological profile improvisors must have; how the improvisational plans that are adopted during action can causally guide the action that one is already in the course of performing; what this means for how we should deliberate about and decide upon various options in the course of an improvisational performance. The main payoƯ is a discussion that improv(is)es on existentialist themes, in order to argue that humans can gain meaningful unity in their lives by means of improvising the performance of a self-constituting project over the whole course of their existence.