•  65
    Another kind of pragmatic encroachment
    In Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, Routledge. 2019.
  •  29
    Moral Agency in Believing
    Philosophical Topics 46 (1): 53-74. 2018.
    Ordinary moral practice suggests that our beliefs, themselves, can wrong. But when one moral subject wrongs another, it must be something that the first subject, herself, does or brings about which constitutes the wronging: wronging involves exercising moral agency. So, if we can wrong others simply by believing, then believing involves an exercise or expression of moral agency. Unfortunately, it is not at all obvious how our beliefs could manifest our moral agency. After all, we are not capable…Read more
  •  15
    Functional belief and judgmental belief
    Synthese 1-17. forthcoming.
    A division between functional belief, on the one hand, and judgmental belief, on the other, is central to Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. For Sosa, mere functional belief is constituted by a first-order affirmation. In contrast, a judgmental belief is an intentional affirmation; a performance which is partially constituted by the believer’s endeavor to affirm truthfully, and reliably enough. If, qua performance, judgmental belief is like the hunter’s shot or the baseball player’s swing, mer…Read more
  •  139
    How to be a Normativist about the Nature of Belief
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 181-204. 2015.
    According to the normativist, it is built into the nature of belief itself that beliefs are subject to a certain set of norms. I argue here that only a normativist account can explain certain non-normative facts about what it takes to have the capacity for belief. But this way of defending normativism places an explanatory burden on any normativist account that an account on which a truth norm is explanatorily fundamental simply cannot discharge. I develop an alternative account that can achieve…Read more
  •  82
    Why is Epistemic Evaluation Prescriptive?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (1): 97-121. 2014.
    Epistemic evaluation is often appropriately prescriptive in character because believers are often capable of exercising some kind of control—call it doxastic control—over the way in which they regulate their beliefs. An intuitively appealing and widely endorsed account of doxastic control—the immediate causal impact account—maintains that a believer exercises doxastic control when her judgments about how she ought to regulate her beliefs in a particular set of circumstances can cause the believe…Read more
  •  67
    Which Mental States Are Rationally Evaluable, And Why?
    Philosophical Issues 25 (1): 41-63. 2015.
    What makes certain mental states subject to evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification, and others arational? In this paper, I develop and defend an account that explains why belief is governed by, and so appropriately subject to, evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification, one that does justice to the complexity of our evaluative practice in this domain. Then, I sketch out a way of extending the account to explain when and why other kinds of mental …Read more