Work in progress

(*=under review)

Unattended Omissions: unifying the role of attention in the epistemology of perception

There exists an apparent conflict between the view that unconscious perception can

justify beliefs independent of attention (call this view ‘Stagnant’) and the recent push

in the epistemology of perception that attention is central to belief justification (call

this view ‘Focus’). What is the role of attention in the epistemology of perception

if in some cases it is unnecessary for belief and in other cases necessary? I identify

the conflict as arising from two distinct understandings of attention. The first is as a

spotlight device in experience, and the second, is as a structural organizer of experi-

ence. I provide a unifying account of the role of attention where an understanding of

attention as structuring experience supports Focus without undermining Stagnant.

Formative Ignorance: a reframing

Various philosophers believe that attitudes that reflect on a person’s normative stand-

ing are static—they are (mental) states, and telic—they are completed. In addition,

to reflect on a person’s epistemic standing, such attitudes are often said to be reason-

responsive. Ignorance, traditionally, is neither static nor telic. Instead, ignorance is

most notable for being characterized as the absence of an epistemic state, typically

achieved unwittingly or unintentionally. Absences are not targets of normativity.

They are neither good nor bad. They are neither rational nor irrational. In this pa-

per, I argue for a certain kind of normativity of absences by offering a view of igno-

rance that is not characterized as the absence of an epistemic state. The view on offer

is not a unifying account of ignorance but rather identifies a species of ignorance we

can call ‘Formative Ignorance.’ Formative ignorance, unlike absence ignorance, will

be evaluable as static, telic, and reason-responsive. The differences between forma-

tive ignorance and our more familiar notion, is that it constructs the space of possible

answers a person can have while inquiring. This construction, I argue, is not as ratio-

nally ’hands off’ as previously supposed. The upshot of the view is that it extends the

normative application of the ethics and epistemology of ignorance by suggesting that

other unintentional processes in addition to ignorance such as omissions and apathy

also likely impact a person’s normative standing.

Non-Ideal Inquiry

Many philosophers argue that inquiry aims at the truth. According to standard Bayesian-

ism, conditioning on new evidence eventually leads inquirers to converge on the

truth. However, inquirers are often selective in what they pay attention to, that is,

they often miss information given ideological influences. Standard Bayesianism is

poorly equipped to explain the normative conditions for such selection since the ra-

tional standards only involve the background priors an inquirer considers along with

the evidence they observe, rather than the priors they exclude and the evidence they

miss. I will argue and explain how non-ideal inquirers are not Bayesian inquirers.

The upshot: If people are inquiring rationally, truth may not be the only aim of in-

quiry we should appeal to.

Closed-mindedness as a defensible fortress of mind*

Closed-mindedness is typically understood as an epistemic vice. The thought is that

given competing viewpoints, positions, ideas, or beliefs, we (epistemically) should

have a willingness to engage with viewpoints that differ from our own. But given

the noxious outcomes of certain ideological perspectives, are there cases where we

should be closed-minded? In this paper I will explore cases of closed-mindedness

that appear (epistemically) acceptable. I will sketch a view where the ideas that are

acceptable to be closed-minded about are those that are irrelevant to our inquiries.

This view has important implications for inquiry given noxious ideological structures

within non-ideal environments.

Negotiating the Afrolatinx Identity: Beyond anti-eliminativist consturctionism

Constructionism is the dominating viewpoint on racial identity. For constructionists,

racial schemas are a matter of visible (or non-visible) unifying features of a group

and/or the groups situatedness within certain structures of oppression. The Afro-

Latinx identity, as an emergent social group, appears to challenge the qualifying

features of constructionism (and its variants) that unify racial groups. If racial anti-

eliminativists believe that races are socially constructed and racial realists think races

are ‘real’ kinds, then Afro-Latinx people, in their non-conformity with traditional

racial schemas, suggest eliminativist and anti-realist conceptions of race. This is the

position I will defend in this paper. I will bring into discussion the nascent concept

of an ‘Afro-Latinx identity’, to bear on debates about the semantics and metaphysics

of race with the aim of better understanding what terms express group membership,

along with the content of those memberships. Philosophers have traditionally ap-

proached these aspects of racial identity separately given the presumed analytic-

continental divide. The upshot of this paper is that it bridges this divide and ad-

vances understanding of racial identity beyond the constructionist viewpoint.

Kant on Ignorance and Error

With few exceptions, much of Kant’s work on ignorance has been under-explored.

Even within those literatures, most have focused on what goes on “upstream” prior to

the formation of conscious propositional attitudes and ignores what goes on “down-

stream” (Chignell, 2007). Another plausible explanation for the lack of interest in

Kant’s remarks on ignorance consists in an understanding of epistemology as strictly

3the study of knowledge (epistem¯ e), rather than the study of ignorance (ágnoia). For-

tunately, challenges to this explanation are on the rise in contemporary epistemology

where ignorance has taken a “normative turn.” I take it that historical approaches are

insightful for this turn as well and will argue that Kant offers much insight on how

we should address ignorance and error. In this paper, I will focus on Kant’s metaphor

of a cognitive “horizon” in the Jäsche Logic, along with his three maxims for address-

ing error: 1) think for yourself; 2) think from the position of someone else; and 3)

think in agreement with yourself. Though controversial in its attribution to Kant, the

horizon metaphor is insightful for defining limits on ignorance that inform when ig-

norance is impermissible.

Epistemic Authority and Oppression: the connoisseur view of expertise*

Recently philosophers have worried that the claim that the oppressed have epistemic

authority on matters of oppression is indefeasible. The thought is that a person can

lose epistemic authority when, e.g., they have internalized their oppression in ways

that undermine proper evidence gathering. The critique of the oppressed puts pres-

sure, not only on the legitimacy of testimonial claims from those who suffer under

unjust social structures, but also on the justification requirements for any person

who lives and forms beliefs within an oppressive society. In particular, the critique

of authority appears to generalize to expertise claims for many believers, not only

for those who are oppressed. To address the worry about epistemic authority and

the generalization problem, I explore two questions. The first is—What does it mean

for a person to be an expert with respect to certain subject matter? And the second—If

the oppressed can lose epistemic authority by internalizing improper patterns of evidence-

gathering, how can others (e.g., scientists perhaps) remain experts when they too are sim-

ilarly compromised? To address these questions, I explore and develop a notion of

epistemic expertise that I refer to as being an epistemic connoisseur. The connoisseur

view, drawing on a kind of epistemic skill gained through attention, has two impor-

tant upshots. First, it is not committed to the relational claim where a person only

has epistemic authority when they have “special knowledge” inaccessible to others.

Second, it introduces a distinction between being oppressed and being marginalized

where the latter but not the former is sensitive to the critique that the oppressed un-

duly suffer from “false consciousness.”

A few more papers at earlier stages of development

A paper on internal duplicates

A paper on intellectual humility and inquiry

A paper on ignorance and inquiry

A paper on impermissible ignorance and responsibility

A paper on anger

publications

Epistemic norms and the obligation to combat ignorance. In Positive Epistemology. Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.) Routledge. forthcoming.

There are things that we ought not to believe. These represent our ‘negative’ epistemic duties. There are also things that we ought to believe. These represent our ‘positive’ epistemic duties. Some epistemologists argue there are no positive epistemic duties (NPD) for doxastic attitudes, particularly duties to believe on the basis of our perceptual experiences. I provide counterexamples to NPD that are cases of what I call ‘perceptual ignorance’, with the aim of defending the thought that we (sometimes) ought not to be ignorant. These obligations depend on the nature of ignorance. When ignorance is irreducible to knowledge, we get negative epistemic duties: “It is not permissible to be ignorant”. When knowledge and ignorance are contradictories, we get positive epistemic duties: “It is obligatory that I am not ignorant”. I explore the extent to which duties to combat ignorance extend to positive duties for belief.

Trauma as Epistemic Skill. In The Philosophy of Sexual Violence. Yolanda Wilson and Georgi Gardiner (eds.). Routledge/ Taylor Francis Group, forthcoming .

Trauma survivors are often judged as having irrational responses, involving aberrant reasoning patterns, such as memory suppression, self-deception, and impaired moral decision-making. These reasoning patterns violate norms on evidence gathering such as duties to believe (see, for example, Simion, 2023) and duties to inquire (Whitcomb, 2010; Friedman, 2017). How should we reconcile these epistemic norms with the reasonable coping mechanisms many trauma survivors display? This paper targets and rejects the Epistemic Deficit Thesis, the claim that trauma survivors are prone to faulty reasoning that leaves them with unjustified epistemic attitudes. Instead, I argue that trauma responses and reasoning are sometimes exemplary of epistemic \textit{skill} and epistemic \textit{grit} rather than deficit. In this way, the trauma survivor is not always epistemically compromised.

Book Review: Ignorance, Empathy, and Resisting Racism Radical Philosophy Review 24(1): 105-108, 2021