I think that it would be a good idea for researchers to believe that the claims they publish are right, and that this should be the norm for academic publishing. That’s what I believe + published here: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/3117/
Should philosophy worry about the replication crisis?
Yes. We should.
New paper at Philosophy and the Mind Sciences explains why: https://philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phimisci/article/view/9193
What does having a moral responsibility mean?
New paper in Philosophical Psychology underlies a lot of my thinking over the years on the subject of moral responsibility and may explain the persistence of many philosophical debates.
Toxic Intentions
This paper takes a look at the Toxin Puzzle and questions whether it really is a challenge to pure voluntarism or supports a reasons constraint on intentions.
Knowledge before Belief
New Position at GMU
This winter I’ll be leaving my position as Presidential Fellow at the University of Manchester to join the philosophy department at George Mason University. Excited to work with such amazing new colleagues and be closer to our family after nearly a decade abroad. I’ll deeply miss the University of Manchester and everyone who helped me in my first few years as a professor. Thank you for your support friends!
New NBCNewsTHINK Opinion Piece
Rising Covid cases means Americans may face health care rationing. Here's how they view that. Academics often debate what the criteria should be for determining who gets care in a crisis, but laypeople never had to think about it. That's changing.
Speaking at Extra.6
I present my paper Moral Encroachment, Statistical Evidence, and the Truth-Sensitivity of Epistemic Justification to the EXTRA.6 research colloquium
New target article at BBS
Research on the capacity to understand others’ minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one doesn't even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that non-human primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibit a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind—one that is focused on understanding others’ minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.
Who should get scarce resources?
In a new paper in PLoS ONe we test people’s intuitions about the allocation of scarce resources during the COVID-19 epidemic