Publications
Ignorance and Autonomous Belief (w/ J. Adam Carter)
Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
A subject can escape ignorance of a proposition without thereby coming to know it. We argue that beliefs produced through manipulation, brainwashing, or hypnosis can do this, which gives us reason to reject the widely held view that to be ignorant is to fail to know.
Modal Luck and Buried Treasure
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2026) 107: 99–107.
When two things were each bound to happen, can their happening together still be a matter of luck? Lackey’s Buried Treasure case says yes, which has been taken to refute the modal theory of luck. I show the case rests on a hidden assumption about how the luck of combined events relates to the luck of their parts, and that once it is rejected, the theory survives.
Pointless Facts and the Normativity of Ignorance
Philosophical Studies (2025) 182: 2905–2924.
Calling someone ignorant seems to involve a negative assessment that merely noting they lack knowledge does not. I argue that this evaluative dimension is real but does not come from ignorance having a normative nature; rather, it comes from tokening a missing explanatory connection between a person’s epistemic state and the world.
A Capacity View of Ignorance
Synthese (2025) 205, 249.
Lacking knowledge or true belief is not the same as being ignorant. I propose that ignorance is the absence of an explanatory connection between a person’s epistemic abilities and her believing the truth, an account that can handle cases where rival views struggle.
Nudging for Judging that p (w/ Matthew Vermaire)
The Philosophical Quarterly (2025)
The “nudge” has been borrowed from behavioral science to talk about how beliefs are influenced, yet what a nudge to a belief actually amounts to has been left unclear. We argue that what marks off a doxastic nudge is normative rather than psychological: it makes a person more likely to hold a belief without that effect being explained by the rational force of what it presents.
Can A.I. Believe? (w/ J. Adam Carter)
Philosophy and Technology (2024) 37, 89.
Does whether AI systems can know turn on whether knowing requires conscious experience? We argue that consciousness is not the main obstacle here; the harder question is whether a purely artificial system can form the kind of belief that is a candidate for knowledge in the first place.
Lucky Ignorance, Modality and Lack of Knowledge
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2021) 102: 468–490.
Epistemologists standardly treat ignorance as equivalent to the lack of knowledge. Drawing on cases of environmental epistemic luck, I argue that one can lack knowledge without being ignorant, because in those cases the subject still has epistemic access to the fact through the exercise of her epistemic agency.
Can Hinge Epistemology Close the Door on Epistemic Relativism?
Synthese (2021) 199: 4645–4671.
All justification rests on basic assumptions, or hinges, that cannot themselves be justified, which raises a worry: when two parties start from different hinges, is there any rational way to resolve their disagreement? I argue that the leading hinge accounts leave room for relativism here, and I develop an alternative on which hinges are propositions that remain open to rational revision.