Research
My research lies at the intersection of epistemology, the philosophy of science, and political philosophy. Generally speaking, I am interested in exploring obstacles to knowledge and the social and political implications of ignorance.
More specifically, my current research program uses the resources of epistemology and the philosophy of science to address questions concerning the rationality of deferring to experts. I then use those insights about the rationality of deference to address questions in political philosophy and bioethics.
Published Articles
Expert Disagreement and the Duty to Vote (forthcoming). Philosophers’ Imprint
(pre-print | doi: 10.3998/phimp.6172 | a brief summary for New Work in Philosophy)
Should you Defer to Individual Experts? (2025). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Authority or Autonomy? Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives on Deference to Experts (2025). Philosophical Psychology
Co-authored (second author) with Alex Worsnip, Samuel Pratt, Giulia Napolitano, Kurt Gray, and Jeff Greene.
Works-in-Progress
There’s More to It Than That! How Scientific Literatures Undermine Justification (draft available upon request)
In this paper, I argue that knowing of the existence of a large scientific literature related to some belief of yours undermines your justification for that belief. This is so because the best explanation of that literature’s existence suggests that the relevant experts took the existing evidence to be insufficient and so produced more. And this suggests that your evidence is insufficient, thus undermining the justification of your belief.
Prediction, Accommodation, and Illegal Searches (draft available upon request)
In this paper, I argue that a piece of evidence having been gathered illegally by police reduces its confirmatory value. According to a view in the philosophy of science called predictivism, evidence that is predicted by a theory is more confirmatory than evidence that is merely accommodated by a theory. That is, evidence that a theory isn’t explicitly designed to capture confirms that theory more than evidence that the theory is explicitly designed to capture. I argue that evidence gathered under conditions of probable cause is akin to evidence that has been predicted, whereas evidence gathered without probable cause is akin to evidence that has merely been accommodated. Illegally gathered evidence is thus less confirmatory than it would be were it to be gathered legally.
Informed Non-Consent: An Epistemic Condition on Mandatory Vaccination
In this paper, I argue for an epistemic condition on permissible mandatory vaccination: those subject to such policies must be in a position to know that the vaccine in question is safe and effective. I then identify some obstacles to being in a position to know that a vaccine is safe and effective: (1) the relevant scientific evidence is inaccessible to most of us, and (2) we are sometimes not in a position to rationally defer to experts. I conclude by suggesting that, in order to promote the satisfaction of the position-to-know condition, the medical and scientific communities should focus their efforts on effectively communicating scientific consensus.
What Scientific Evidence and Misinformation Have in Common
In this paper, I evaluate the epistemic justification for subjecting misinformation to content moderation strategies. Does it make sense to, for instance, remove content from a platform because that content is likely to lead to false or unjustified beliefs? If so, I argue that such reasoning generalizes in surprising ways. Misinformation is not the only sort ofcontent that reliably leads to false or unjustified beliefs. Scientific evidence is another sort of content that does so as well. Philosophical discussion has long noted laypeople’s lack of capacity to accurately assess scientific evidence, and empirical work finds that laypeople do in fact tend to draw false conclusions from scientific evidence. What this suggests is that, like misinformation, scientific evidence is likely to lead to unjustified or false beliefs. Either the epistemic case for content moderation justifies moderating both scientific evidence and misinformation, or it justifies moderating neither.