Research & Work in progress

Closed-mindedness as a defensible fortress of mind

In this paper, I will present a puzzle about closed-mindedness motivated by cases where agents rightly ignore certain viewpoints. The puzzle is that while closed-mindedness is often indisputably an intellectual vice (Cassam 2019), there are several examples where closed-mindedness appears rationally acceptable while inquiring. Some philosophers argue closed-mindedness is acceptable when agents find themselves in hostile environments (Battaly 2018), or when undertaking collective inquiry (Bland 2022), or when they are inquiring about complex moral and political questions (Levy 2006). But such counterexamples tend to focus on extreme or border cases. What we need is a story about what bridges examples of closed-mindedness, and the conditions that make it a defensible fortress of mind. I will argue that by tackling the elusive notion of an answer’s relevance to a question (or Q-relevance), we get clearer on the divide and can resolve the puzzle with verdicts that track the intuitive idea that closed-mindedness is sometimes acceptable.

Does the afro-latinx identity undermine ‘race’?

The dominant ideas in discussions about racial identity are that racial schemas are a matter of visible (or non-visible) unifying features of a group and/or the groups situatedness within certain structural injustices of oppression. The Afro-Latinx identity, as a cohesive social group, seems to challenge both conceptions. If racial anti-eliminativists believe that races are valuably socially constructed, and racial realists think races are ‘real’ kinds, then Afro-Latinx communities, in their non-conformity to traditional racial schemas, suggest eliminativist and anti-realist conceptions of race. This is the position I will defend in the paper. I bring into discussion the nascent concept of an ‘Afro-Latinx identity,’ as well as debates about the semantics of race with those about the metaphysics of race to better understand what terms express group membership, along with the content of those memberships. Philosophers have traditionally approached these aspects of racial identity separately given the presumed analytic-continental divide.

What is rational responsibility for ignorance?

There exists an intuitive difference between not knowing the capitol of Idaho and failing to see that a Latinx person is not your server. Both are instance of ignorance, yet only the latter call for a certain kind of rational responsibility. Defining and epistemic distinction between the two cases is challenging given the current presumption that ignorance is absence of knowledge or true belief. Absence ignorance generates a problem for rational responsibility—How do we rationally evaluate epistemic absences? This paper offers a solution to that problem. I argue that a person is ignorant when they ignore certain relevant possibilities central to inquiry that they ought not ignore. But rather than manifest as an absence, such ignoring is a sui generis attitude. The upshot: (1) the account explains the difference between non-normative and normative cases of ignorance; (2) it provides and evaluative method whereby epistemic responsibility is a matter of how well we have responded to evidence .