Below you'll find abstracts and links for some of my work. Click here for my philpapers page. 

The Ethics, Economics, and Demographics of Delaying Aging

forthcoming in Essays on Longtermism, eds. Greaves & MacAskill, Oxford University Press

Efforts to slow aging are likely to be under-resourced due to a variety of misconceptions and cognitive errors, as well as social discounting. We argue that the social benefits of delaying aging would be enormous across a wide range of ethical frameworks, because more and better life-years would be lived by the same number of people. For any policymakers or philanthropists undeterred by the uncertain time horizons of such an endeavor, research into potential treatments to slow aging is a valuable and neglected investment.

Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking

2nd edition, Tophat, 2022

This text rewrites the standard critical thinking curriculum by combining the most important insights from philosophy, cognitive science, social psychology and behavioral economics. Both practical and rigorous, the text emphasizes developing a mindset that can avoid systematic errors. It also presents a unified picture of evidence that covers statistical, causal, and best-explanation inferences. Students will come away with a sense of how to assess the strength of evidence for claims, adjust their beliefs accordingly, and recognize the errors they're most prone to making. Reason Better is rich with instructor resources to support delivering a course that will have lasting effects on students’ lives.

On Being a Random Sample

Work in progress

At times we are inclined to reason as though we are random samples from a group of individuals. Sometimes we start with a fact about the group and draw conclusions about ourselves. (I call this reasoning 'inwards.') And sometimes we start with ourselves and work our way out to the group or the world at large. (This is reasoning 'outwards'.) A principled rule for how de se evidence should affect de dicto credences, and vice versa, would help us solve several puzzles in confirmation theory. (For example: Sleeping Beauty, Doomsday, and the question whether the fine-tuning of the universe counts as evidence for the existence of many universes.) This paper looks at three competing rules for reasoning inwards and outwards, each of which replaces the standard conditionalization rule for updating on evidence. 

God and the Bayesian Conception of Evidence

forthcoming in Religious Studies

Evidential arguments for and against the existence of God ask us to do something we are not very good at: set aside our knowledge of some very salient facts in order to reconstruct the hypothetical probability of those facts given competing hypotheses. There may be no alternative, but this process is beset with the danger of cognitive bias. I discuss this problem as it pertains to some well-known arguments for and against the existence of God. 

See also these notes criticizing the theistic fine-tuning argument, from an exchange with Luke Barnes, William Lane Craig, and Neil Manson.  

Dispositions, Conditionals, and Counterexamples

Mind, 120: 1191-1227

Our earlier paper about dispositions in Mind elicited three response papers: one by Daniel Bonevac, Josh Dever, and David Sosa; one by Sungho Choi, and one by Barbara Vetter. In this paper, we respond to our critics, focusing on the role of centering and of counterexamples in refuting conditional analyses of dispositions. (Coauthored with Ryan Wasserman)

Dispositionality: Beyond the Biconditionals

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90(2): 321-334.

Suppose dispositions bear a distinctive connection to counterfactual facts, perhaps one that could be enshrined in a variation on the well-worn schema ‘Necessarily, x is disposed to ϕ in ψ iff x would ϕ in ψ’. Could we exploit this connection to provide an account of what it is to be a disposition? This paper is about four views of dispositionality that attempt to do so. 

In this book, we rethink the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought. Rejecting any special relation of causal or epistemic acquaintance, we explore a semantic account that unifies definite and indefinite descriptions with names and demonstratives. On our account, all four types of expression are specific existentials, each with its own presuppositional profile. We argue that many of the phenomena associated with reference are due to the covert use of singular restrictions on the quantifier domain. 

Symposium

In Mind & Language 2014 29(4), with four discussions:

• Kent Bach, 'Consulting The Reference Book'

• Michael Devitt, 'Lest Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot'

• Genoveva Martí, 'For the Disunity of Semantics'

• James McGilvray, 'Review of The Reference Book'

And our response from that issue:

• Hawthorne & Manley, Response to Symposium Critics

Moral Realism and Semantic Plasticity

Work in progess

Are moral terms semantically plastic—that is, would very slight changes in our patterns of use have shifted their meanings? This is a delicate question for moral realists. A 'yes' answer seems to conflict with the sorts of intuitions that support realism; but a 'no' answer seems to require a semantics that involves hefty metaphysical commitments. This tension can be illustrated by thinking about how standard accounts of vagueness can be applied to the case of moral terms, and also by considering how realists should respond to the Moral Twin Earth problem. I argue that moral realists can accept the semantic plasticity of moral expressions while accounting for contrary intuitions in a way that is nearly cost-free.

Keeping Up Appearances: A Reducer's Guide

forthcoming in Journal of Philosophy

Metaphysicians with reductive theories of reality like to say how those theories account for ordinary usage and belief. A typical strategy is to offer theoretical sentences, often called ‘paraphrases’, to serve in place of various sentences that occur in ordinary talk. But how should we measure success in this endeavor? Those of us who undertake it usually have a vague set of theoretical desiderata in mind, but we rarely discuss them in detail. My purpose in this paper is to say exactly what they are, and why. 

Dispositions Without Teleology

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol 10

We argue against accounting for dispositions (and of the progressive aspect) in terms of a fundamentally teleological metaphysics, and we defend our previous conditional account from some novel objections.  (Coauthored with Ryan Wasserman)

The Folk Probably Do Think What You Think They Think

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91(3): 421-441

Much of experimental philosophy consists of surveying 'folk' intuitions about philosophically relevant issues. Are the results of these surveys evidence that the relevant folk intuitions cannot be predicted from the ‘armchair’? We found that a solid majority of philosophers could predict even results claimed to be 'surprising'. But, we argue, this does not mean that such experiments have no role at all in philosophy. (Co-authored with Billy Dunaway & Anna Edmonds)

Safety, Content, Apriority, Self-Knowledge

Journal of Philosophy, 104:403-423

I motivate a revised version of safety and then use it to (i) challenge traditional conceptions of apriority, (ii) refute ‘strong privileged access’, and (iii) resolve a well-known puzzle about externalism and self-knowledge by showing that it can be treated as any other closure puzzle. Along the way I illustrate why sensitivity is of little use when it comes to certain kinds of closure puzzle. 

When Best Theories Go Bad

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 78(2): 392-405

It is common for contemporary metaphysical realists to adopt Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment while at the same time repudiating his ontological pragmatism. This paper argues that the resulting approach to meta-ontology is unstable. In particular, if we are metaphysical realists, it may be best to repudiate some of the ontological commitments incurred by our best first-order theories. This version fixes typos in the published version.

A Gradable Approach to Dispositions

The Philosophical Quarterly, 57:68-75

We argue that previous theories of the relationship between dispositions and conditionals are unable to account for the fact that dispositions come in degrees. We also propose a fix for this problem which also avoids the familiar problems of finks and masks. (Coauthored with Ryan Wasserman.)

On Linking Dispositions With Conditionals

Mind, 117: 59-84

Analyses of dispositional ascriptions in terms of conditional statements famously confront the problems of finks and masks. We argue that even conditional analyses of dispositions tailored to avoid finks and masks, face a battery of new difficulties: (i) Achilles' heels, (ii) accidental closeness, (iii) comparatives, (iv) explaining context sensitivity, and (v) absent stimulus conditions. We conclude by offering a proposal that avoids all seven problems. (Coauthored with Ryan Wasserman.)

Properties and Resemblance Classes

Noûs, 36: 75-96

I examine the competing merits of resemblance-class theories of properties, arguing that the ‘companionship’ and ‘imperfect community’ problems are not avoided by appealing to classes of tropes instead of objects. If I am right, trope theory loses one of its primary selling points, and resemblance nominalists of either type must appeal to certain troublesome remedies. 

A Guided Tour of Metametaphysics

in Metametaphysics (OUP, 2009).

In this introductory chapter,  sketch a taxonomy of positions in metametaphysics and present a tentative account of verbal disputes.

Critical study of Mumford’s Dispositions

Noûs, 39:179-195 (with John Hawthorne)

review of Correia's Existential Dependence and Cognate Notions

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 07.02.01