Though my research interests range widely across epistemology and the philosophy of language, much of my work over the past several years has been focused on questions concerning the metasemantics and epistemology of nonempirical areas of discourse such as logic and mathematics. I have also recently taken up, as a side project, the question of how to integrate reasonable approaches to higher-order evidence and self-locating belief into a broadly Bayesian picture of belief update. Below are brief descriptions of a few of the things I’m working on.
In progress/under review
Naturalism and the A Priori or: The Inevitability of Conventionalism (under contract at Cambridge University Press)
I explain why conventionalism—i.e., the doctrine that certain sentences of our lanuage are true by convention alone—provides the only real hope of a satisfying naturalist-friendly explanation of our knowledge in areas of discourse such as logic and mathematics, and I develop a conventionalist view that remains attractive even in the face of objections to conventionalism that have almost universally been taken to be decisive. Material from the manuscript is available on request.
“Whence admissibility constraints? From inferentialism to tolerance”
I argue that, despite what most inferentialists insist, there’s no inferentialist-friendly way to motivate constraints on admissibility, which means badly behaved expressions like Prior’s ‘tonk’ turn out, from an inferentialist perspective, to be legitimate. I then explain why this isn’t actually a problem for inferentialism.
“Can we follow the omega rule?”
I respond to Jared Warren’s recent argument that we can follow the omega rule, showing that in the thought experiment on which he relies, there’s conclusive reason to think we’re inferring from the generalization to its instances rather than the other way around and so aren’t engaging in infinitary reasoning after all.
“Self-location, ur-priors, and metaconditionalization: A diagnosis”
I show that there procedures that have been proposed to replace conditionalization when self-locating beliefs (understood as attitudes toward centered propositions) are incorporated into a broadly Bayesian framework all lead to absurdity, and then I diagnose the common error underlying those proposals.
“What is Carnap’s problem and how can we solve it?”, with Julien Murzi
We offer a more precise account of how Carnap-style categoricity worries are to be understood than has ever before been given and, in so doing, demonstrate that our own account of the categoricity of the quantifiers isn’t threatened by any of the alleged deviant interpretations that have been discussed in the literature.
