Research
My primary areas of research are in epistemology, and in the philosophy of language, particularly, issues concerning linguistic meaning and cognition. The list of drafts and works in progress below gives you an idea into the kinds of issues that interest me.
Calibrated Probabilities and the Epistemology of DisagreementDRAFT
| This paper uses two different measures of reliability for probabilistic belief-revision rules, Calibration and Brier Scoring, to assess the comparative reliability of two belief-revision rules relevant to the epistemology of disagreement, the Equal Weight and Stay the Course rules. On the Calibration measure of reliability, epistemic peerhood is easy to come by, and employing the Equal Weight rule in the case of peer disagreement generally renders you less reliable than Staying the Course. On the Brier-Score measure of reliability, epistemic peerhood is much more difficult to come by, but employing the Equal Weight rule in the case of peer disagreement always renders you more reliable than Staying the Course. I conclude with some lessons we can draw from these formal results for the normative issues rational belief-change in the face of peer disagreement, foreshadowing part II of my work on this topic, ``On the Rationality of Belief-Invariance in Light of Peer Disagreement." |
The Rationality of Belief-Invariance in Light of Peer DisagreementDRAFT
| This is part II of the work on the epistemological significance of disagreement and a continuation of the paper posted above, "Calibrated Probabilities and the Epistemology of Disagreement". This paper draws two anti-skeptical lessons from the formal results of the first paper, namely, that it is not the case that you are always rationally obliged to change your mind in the face of disagreement, and that when you are so-obliged, the result is that you increase your knowledge. In the process, I respond to the Elga objection to Stay the Course views in the epistemology of disagreement by showing how, on any measure of reliability and epistemic peerhood, the inference from disagreement to epistemic inferiority or superiority is invalid. |
Are Cantonese Speakers Really Descriptivists? Revisiting Cross-cultural SemanticsDRAFT
| This is a response to Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich's 2004 "Semantics, Cross-cultural Style" in which I provide data that native Cantonese-speakers are not descriptivists about the referents of proper names. |
A New Argument Against the Instrumental Conception of Epistemic RationalityDRAFT
| I provide a novel argument against the Instrumental Conception of Epistemic Rationality on the basis of an unnoticed phenomenon I call "rational preemption." You can now revise your plans and actions rationally in order to preempt or prevent foreseeable future irrationality. However, you cannot now revise your beliefs rationally in order to preempt or prevent foreseeable future irrationality. The ability to be preemptively practically rational in your actions and plans, but not preemptively epistemically rational in your beliefs, implies that epistemic rationality is not a species of practical rationality. |
A Commitment Tracking Theory of Rational InferenceDRAFT
| According to my Commitment-tracking theory of the rationality of inference, an inference is rational only if it is properly evidence-tracking. What counts as evidence for a subject is a matter of a subject's commitments. This commitment- tracking theory of evidence states that, for a subject S, what counts as evidence for what depends both on the structure and content of S's knowledge, beliefs, and credences, and on a set of objective, subject-independent normative principles that generate from that noetic structure a new structure, the class of beliefs and credences to which S is committed. This latter class of commitments is what S's inferences must track in order to be rational. The Commitment-Tracking theory makes sense of the way in which evidence seems to be both subjective and objective, and it blocks a certain kind of skepticism regarding the rationality of inferences. |
The Dynamic Foundations of Epistemic Rationality
PhD Thesis, Princeton University. January 2007
| Abstract: Classical theories of epistemic rationality take an agent’s individual beliefs to be the only things that are rational or irrational. For them, rationality is wholly static. Recent work in epistemology take sets of individual beliefs and also changes of belief over time to be rational or irrational. For these theories, rationality is both static and dynamic. However, for both groups, static rationality is fundamental. In my dissertation, I argue to the contrary that, in fact, all rationality is dynamic rationality. Epistemic reasons, rationality, and justification as applying only to changes of belief. This wholly dynamic view of rationality, which I call "Dynamicism" has wide-ranging epistemological consequences. A small set of simple, elegant, and independently motivated principles of dynamic rationality can illuminate and solve otherwise interminable epistemological disputes. |
Works in Progress
Relative Truth and Its Commitments: The Problem of Individuation
| Recent work in truth-relativity attempts to make good on two promises: (1) to make literal sense of the claim that one and the same proposition can be true in one context but false in another, and (2) to argue that some sentences in natural language express such relatively-true propositions. According to John MacFarlane, the most prominent and developed advocate of relative-truth, the way in which we make sense of relative-truth is to embed it into a general theory of meaning and assertion, where relative-truth can be understood in terms of a kind of commitment one makes in asserting a sentence. For MacFarlane, we recover the sense in which a proposition can be relatively true by looking at the norms involved in defending one's assertion of a sentence expressing that proposition. This paper explores the extent to which we can individuate meanings from the commitments of assertion, and concludes that we can make sense of relative-truth in terms of commitments of assertion only at the cost of making it implausible that natural language sentences express relatively-true propositions. |
In Defense of Universal Grammar
| This is a response to recent critics, both theoretical and empirical, of the principles and parameters version of universal grammar, construed as a theory of the innate mental architecture responsible for the acquisition of some aspects of language. I criticize the critics of UG for failing to distinguish between the various kinds of "errors" that children can make in speech-production, one-off production errors and rule-based production errors, for overgeneralizing from production tasks at the cost of attention to comprehension tasks, for failure to attend to certain aspects of CORPUS data that undermine their critiques of UG, and for making illegitimate charges of "question-begging." I do not mean to endorse UG, but rather merely to show that current criticisms do not undermine it. |