About

I am a philosopher at the University of Minnesota. I work on epistemology, logic, and social philosophy.

Research topics

• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Psychology

Selected publications

• <i>Idealization in Epistemology: A Modest Modeling Approach</i> <i>Non-Ideal Epistemology</i>

  The Philosophical Review · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Epistemology is rife with idealization. And, although concern about particular idealizations—logical omniscience, infinite iterations of common knowledge, and so on—is long-standing, systematic metaepistemological reflection has been lacking. This excellent new pair of books, Daniel Greco’s Idealization in Epistemology and Robin McKenna’s Non-Ideal Epistemology, aims to rectify this. Fruitfully, these authors take cues from different corners of philosophical inquiry, drawing on rich literatures within philosophy of science and political philosophy, respectively. Given their far-flung starting points, discovering strong parallels and congruities between these projects is surprising. In this review, therefore, I highlight these resonances, though not to the neglect of dissonance.Two preliminary notes: First, McKenna focuses on questions within inquiry epistemology (What is a responsible inquirer or inquiry? How can we improve inquiry?), while Greco is squarely concerned with more traditional topics. While this difference explains the particular applications each author pursues, it is largely independent of their metaepistemological reflections. Second, Greco makes much of the distinction between modeling and theory-building. McKenna largely ignores this distinction, using the terms interchangeably. This is appropriate to the different projects each author undertakes and, pace Greco (and at the loss of some nuance), I adopt McKenna’s convention in the interest of mutual intelligibility.Idealization in Epistemology (henceforth, Idealization) offers a balm for anxious Bayesians and other modelers. The book’s centerpiece is Greco’s modest modeling approach. After introducing this approach in chapters 1 and 2, Greco turns to applications: defending fragmentationalist approaches to inconsistent belief (chap. 3) and the role of certainty in formal models (chap. 4); arguing against the need for a sui generis, non-decision-theoretic belief attitude (chap. 5) and against analysis in terms of higher-order epistemic attitudes (chap. 6); and defending the value of common knowledge (chap. 7). Throughout, these discussions are admirably clear and approachable, demanding relatively little from the reader in the way of prior familiarity with the topics and their associated formalisms. In chapter 8, Greco closes by reflecting on how modest modeling interacts with the ideal/nonideal distinction in epistemology—or, at least, one way of drawing that distinction. As we’ll see below, the distinction Greco considers is quite distant from McKenna’s.Modest modeling is best understood in contrast with its foil, ambitious modeling, which Greco takes to be the default approach in epistemology, insofar as a default exists. As Greco defines them, ambitious modelers are those who assume there to be some final or canonical model—some one model that will capture all relevant aspects of the subject in question—to be discovered or built. For example, the ambitious Bayesian takes there to be some “canonical Bayesian model into which all possible episodes of learning could be fit” (21). This is a common understanding of modeling in fundamental physics: we are looking for a model that captures reality as it is at its most fundamental level, and we expect there to be one. Such ambitious modelers see inconsistencies and unaccounted-for phenomena as crises to be overcome, whether by integration or revolution. Modest modelers, however, are not so bothered.Drawing on a distinction between models, particular representations intended to illuminate a subject, and modeling frameworks, general techniques for building models of the same family, Greco defines two ways we might be modest modelers (36):A modest modeler may use different frameworks to model different phenomena, relying essentially on good judgment in making her selection, and without any hope of an uber-framework that would provide systematic rules for which framework to use when.Once the modest modeler has settled on a framework to use to model some phenomenon, the question of which model within that framework to construct may be similarly unsystematic.Thus, the modest modeler takes, for example, David K. Lewis’s (1982) fragmentationalism in stride. If it is true for Lewis that he believes Nassau Street runs east-west in one fragment and true in a different fragment that he believes the railroad runs east-west, but true in no fragment that he believes the two are parallel, then we simply need multiple, inconsistent models in order to capture Lewis’s behavior. As Greco explains, “depending on the situation, one or another model will fit best” (62). Here, one might complain that despite looking well placed to offer retrospective explanations for Lewis’s behavior, such an approach is poorly placed to predict it. Greco’s response is this: at least when it comes to incoherent Princetonians, we simply don’t have enough information to provide a more encompassing model—the activation conditions for one fragment over another are not forthcoming, so neither is unification. By accepting the modest approach and allowing inconsistent models of the same believer, we can offer some model rather than none.This laissez-faire attitude toward inconsistency is underwritten by Greco’s view that idealization is both ubiquitous and indispensable within epistemology. Belief, knowledge, and the like, on his view, are themselves idealizations, quite distant from the physical, biological substrate of the mind and further still from fundamental physics (2).Three main consequences fall out of this view. First, because epistemic concepts are our conceptual tools, and quite distant from fundamental physics, they are unlikely to carve nature at its joints (sec. 2.3). Thus, we ought not be surprised at inconsistencies between attempted carvings or between the world and its image. This gives rise to the second consequence, which is the book’s methodological upshot: ambitious modeling results in wasteful hypochondria. By contrast, a modest modeler’s agnosticism means that she is not moved to abandon a model by gaps and inconsistencies alone. She “see[s] less motivation to explore alternatives” (38), remaining freer to continue exploring and developing a framework that would agitate her ambitious counterpart.Here I want to make the case for moderation in modesty—at least at the level of our community as epistemologists. I agree that there is value in modesty; hewing too tightly to intermodel consistency can stifle development and exploration. Nevertheless, an entire community of modest modelers may be stifled in a different way. As Greco stresses, the modest modeler will generally be content with inconsistencies she encounters unless there is a better, more encompassing model available. But this raises a question: Where would a better model come from?Ambitious modeling inspires the Model → Inconsistency → Demolition cycle Greco looks to break. But this cycle has the virtue of driving development of new, more encompassing models.Thus, I enter a plea for metaepistemological diversity. Just as diversity among members of an epistemic community is beneficial, the same, I think, holds of methodological approaches. A monoculture of modest modelers may be unwilling to stray from favored, fruitful territory, while a monoculture of ambitious modelers may leave a trail of serviceable, but lightly used models discarded in their wake. Happily, this plea sits well with Greco’s approach in two ways. First, it is required for aptly taking up modesty at the metaepistemological level. While Greco takes a skeptical (if not outright anti-realist) perspective on the objects of epistemological theorizing, this stance is not required of modest modelers. One might well believe (as, I think, McKenna does) that there are genuine things like beliefs and still maintain (as, again, McKenna does) that there is no single, canonical model to be had. This sort of modest modeler should want that there be other, less skeptical epistemologists around in case she is wrong to have set ambition aside. Second, any modest modeler will gladly incorporate the benefits of ambitious toil when they appear.We will return to this omnivorous theme below. For the moment, however, we consider the final consequence: rejecting the project of nonideal epistemology.Greco adopts Jennifer Rose Carr’s (2021: 1132) characterization of the ideal/nonideal distinction: ideal epistemology is “concerned with questions about what perfectly rational, cognitively idealized, computationally unlimited believers would believe,” while nonideal epistemology is “concerned with questions about epistemic norms that are satisfiable by most humans much of the time.” Carr’s characterization of the relationship between these approaches is much like Rawls’s—we need the ideal theory so that we know what the nonideal theorist is striving toward. This leads to a “top-down” understanding of the relationship between ideal and nonideal epistemology: the ideal model guides our development of nonideal models and governs our interpretation of their normative outputs.For Greco, this is not a viable project because it misleads about the prospects and purposes of de-idealization: “While I agree that modeling us as being certain of our evidence in particular and of the limits of our knowledge more generally also involves idealization, it doesn’t follow that we actually are uncertain about what our evidence is and what we know” (171). Greco’s point is that there is no neat mapping between ideal and nonideal models in epistemology, in whole or in part. For some models—for example, incorporating or ignoring air resistance—de-idealization yields a more cumbersome but more accurate or encompassing model that is easily mapped onto the more idealized version. Not so for epistemology. This, Greco argues, is because the idealizations common in epistemology generate holistic distortion of the target system. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of biology, Greco argues that models involving holistic distortions are such that “we can’t always make them ‘more realistic’ along some dimension of variation and still have a functioning model of their target phenomenon” (167). Insofar as nonideal epistemology is a matter of taking an ideal model and relaxing one constraint or another, such projects risk creating models that are merely differently idealized and potentially less useful.These are potentially less useful, Greco argues, because we lack a general picture of how agents who diverge from the idealizations with which we normally theorize ought to behave (175). This may be a perplexing claim in light of Greco’s view that idealization is ubiquitous and ineliminable. Of course we know how agents who diverge from these idealizations ought to behave: insofar as our models produce any normative recommendations for actual agents, they produce normative recommendations for agents who diverge dramatically from the idealizations thereof. One poltroon response is that they produce no such recommendations. A better response draws on the modest modeler’s reliance on experience and judgment: we can draw normative recommendations when idealized models are apt characterizations of the important, explanatory features of the case at hand. So it is not divergence from idealization per se but rather explanatorily relevant divergence. Where there are holistic distortions arising from idealization, simply “turning them down” will not help us understand what happens (or ought to happen) when, for example, Lewis realizes that Nassau and the rail line are parallel.In view of this, Greco is best interpreted narrowly, rejecting only the omnibus, ambitious vision of nonideal epistemology that Carr offers, rather than the sorts of projects McKenna pursues. This is particularly evident when we observe that here, in the midst of what would seem to be the starkest objection to a project like Non-Ideal Epistemology, we instead find three points of resonance between Greco and McKenna.First, the problem. Greco’s argument against Carr’s vision of ideal and nonideal epistemology invokes a version of the fallacy of approximation. On Carr’s view, the ideal serves to regulate the nonideal—improving one’s nonideal lot is a matter of better approximating the ideal. McKenna, too, is animated by exactly this concern: when we diminish an idealization, the ramifications of doing so may be widespread or unpredictable (26).Second, the solution. Rather than fully rejecting it, Greco argues that modeling in nonideal epistemology should begin from the perspective of the particular, concrete situation that we already understand, rather than from the perspective of the ideal model. And this is exactly McKenna’s tack in Non-Ideal Epistemology. Rather than trying to approximate an ideal model of the situations he considers, McKenna begins from concrete, nonideal situations and builds models from that perspective.Finally, the rejection. McKenna, like Greco, rejects Carr’s characterization of the ideal/nonideal distinction. While Greco does so because “we’re all ideal theorists, and inevitably so” (175), McKenna does so because this way of drawing the distinction obscures what he aims to illuminate. With this in mind, we turn to Non-Ideal Epistemology.Like Idealization, Non-Ideal Epistemology is organized around metaepistemological reflections and their application. For McKenna, this reflection concerns the analytical fault lines of social epistemology. The central aim of McKenna’s work is identifying a heretofore underappreciated fault line—the ideal/nonideal distinction—and defending its importance. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to this task directly. Here McKenna persuasively argues that this distinction (the substance of which is discussed below) differs from more familiar fault lines, such as the feminist/traditional and social/traditional distinctions. The remainder of the book applies McKenna’s understanding of nonideal epistemology, building toward a robust defense of what he deems “New Skepticism” in chapter 8. This the idea that our beliefs about politically contentious issues—climate change is McKenna’s central case—are particularly likely to be unjustified.On McKenna’s view, the skeptical potholes surrounding contentious issues arise not only from our environments but also from our foibles as individual, socially and politically situated epistemic agents. To demonstrate this, McKenna begins with the problem of identifying experts (chap. 3), defending Elizabeth Anderson’s (2006) “institutional” solution as an example of nonideal epistemology done right. McKenna contrasts Anderson’s solution—curating better epistemic environments at the institutional level—with Alvin Goldman’s (2001) “individualist” approach, on which the solution is a matter of individuals applying a set of carefully chosen criteria to assess potential experts. Goldman, McKenna argues, is “intending to do something like what I am calling non-ideal institutional epistemology but failing because he still relies on too many idealizations” (58)—most importantly, the idealization that we can abstract away from individuals’ sociopolitical contexts and affiliations. As McKenna demonstrates throughout, empirical data suggests that these features have a profound influence on agents’ epistemic lives, so idealizing them away creates distance between the model and our realities as epistemic agents.Nevertheless, this institutional perspective raises significant questions: Isn’t curating an epistemic environment rather paternalistic? Does it infringe on individuals’ intellectual autonomy? Would such an environment harm individuals epistemically by shielding them from challenges with which they ought to engage? Much of the book concerns itself with addressing these worries from the perspective of nonideal epistemology. McKenna argues that some forms of epistemic paternalism are justified (chap. 4), that intellectual autonomy is not a general epistemic virtue (chap. 5), and that our obligation to engage with challenges (and our epistemic obligations more generally) are dependent upon the details of our socio-epistemic situation (chaps. 6, 7). Though their details are beyond the scope of this review, these are insightful and nuanced arguments.Importantly, however, these arguments rely on the aforementioned empirically grounded conclusion that we are epistemically unscrupulous when it comes to politically contentious beliefs. But the data on which McKenna’s argument is based are less univocal than might be hoped. Reaching the conclusion that an agent’s sociopolitical affiliations exert undue influence on their epistemic practice requires distinguishing between two scenarios: one in which their differential treatment (of, say, new evidence for a politically contentious proposition) is determined by having a lower prior probability and one in which it is determined by ideology. So this raises a question: Does the empirical data provided make this distinction? Reviewing much of the data McKenna cites, Ben M. Tappin et al. (2021), at least, suggest that they do not. If these are within the this is a problem because the between them is in terms of epistemic is an idealization to assume that all agents do so And one that institutional like those McKenna of the of in their epistemic So an institutional solution may be as much as it is however, only in of the of the fault line to which McKenna draws our is nonideal nonideal epistemology, McKenna’s is of ideal This is true not only with to we might we are doing ideal theory or do by trying to approximate also with to the scope and of With to McKenna is not to Greco’s that idealization is ubiquitous in epistemology, we need to view ideal and non-ideal theory as on a to theory that is to the ideal to theory that is to the non-ideal But McKenna’s understanding of is much ideal epistemology is epistemology that or at least in of agents, such as having over features of our such as the nature of social such as the of and the nature our epistemic such as the and consequences of is the one we adopt understanding of which is McKenna’s On view, would concern idealizations about infinite perfectly and so But such idealizations take in Non-Ideal Epistemology. the central idealization McKenna is the idea that our sociopolitical affiliations do not influence how we that with them (chaps. In nonideal McKenna argues, we in of those conditions of sociopolitical the McKenna considers, be they a matter of our environments and (chaps. (chaps. 5), or between agents (chaps. 6, 7). While the is useful, this and distinction is no less in epistemology than in political sociopolitical as McKenna’s fault line is also because it to his picture with This is because like is an idealization that is both and On Greco’s view, idealizations are those we because they and the like, while normative idealizations are those we because they the the model is intended to things ought to be has both is in that means we can in epistemology as we them in that is that is the same between what to is is normative in the generally epistemologists agree that political affiliations and the like ought not influence epistemic practice McKenna argues against this claim in chapters and argues that the distinction is because holistic distortion is by (or idealizations If this for McKenna’s about using ideal epistemology to interpretation of nonideal McKenna’s provide for Greco’s For example, the ramifications of the agents relevant to their political and social affiliations to the this common McKenna’s a normative than While Greco that we may engage in some nonideal projects we have understanding of the case at he that we need not be anxious about may be content to on familiar sorts of ideal McKenna’s conclusion is the while there may be purposes for which ideal approaches are he that we toward nonideal epistemology, not only because it is but also because it is the only way to normative for the world we in parallels and Greco and McKenna ways in the one makes of this divergence will on the to which they believe that agents’ from the sorts of idealizations Greco and McKenna are relevant for or understanding their behavior. This is an empirical but it is also one of As McKenna it is only when we to the sorts of he points out that the need for in makes different epistemic and situations what as an explanatorily relevant divergence from idealizations will on the sorts of explanations available. while modest modeler may be content to continue in their ideal work (and leave McKenna’s nonideal to her to McKenna’s nonideal fault line may that

  PublisherDOI

• The Epistemology of Attention

  2025-11-28 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Attention is deeply intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain. It influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember. And, it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This chapter surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing literature, sketching avenues for future investigation, and demonstrating how attention can unlock puzzles about self-deception and the paradox of proof.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of José Medina, The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance

  Criminal Law and Philosophy · 2025-01-03 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (What) Is Feminist Logic? (What) Do We Want It to Be?

  History and Philosophy of Logic · 2024-01-02 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance logic. Plumwood's work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways we might understand her argument and revisionist arguments like it: as a priori theorizing, as ameliorative conceptual engineering, or as instances of anti-exceptionalist approaches to logic. After arguing that the anti-exceptionalist approach seems to provide the most promising means of understanding the kind of project undertaken in a feminist challenge to classical logic, we briefly address the consequences that this might have for logic instruction. Here, we argue for the perhaps unexpected conclusion that feminist programs ought to offer more, not less, instruction in logic for those who take interest.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evidence in a Non-Ideal World *

  2024-08-22 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Our evidential environments are reflections of our social contexts. This is important because the evidence we encounter influences the beliefs we form. But, traditional epistemologists have paid little attention to the generation of this evidential environment, assuming that it is irrelevant to epistemic normativity. This assumption, the author argues, is dangerous. Idealizing away the evidential environment obscures the ways that our social contexts distort its contents. Such social distortion can lead to evidential oppression, an epistemic injustice arising from the ubiquity of ideologically inflected portrayals of oppressed social groups. In some cases, this distortion can be so pervasive as to create a skeptical pothole in agents’ epistemic environments – a limited region in which a skeptical scenario obtains. The skeptical challenge of social distortion is important because it suggests that prejudice and irrationality alone may not be enough to explain many harmful beliefs. Where justified belief is merely a matter of responding well to one’s evidence, the ubiquity of ideologically inflected evidence may impel a matching doxastic state, even for exemplary epistemic agents. Nevertheless, there is an asymmetry in blameworthiness between the Cartesian victim and someone laboring under evidential oppression. This asymmetry reveals the need for distinctively non-ideal epistemic norms. The author offers a characterization of one such norm: the internalist practice of self-stewardship.

  PublisherDOI

• Epistemic Virtue Signaling and the Double Bind of Testimonial Injustice

  Philosophers Imprint · 2023-10-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Virtue signaling—using public moral discourse to enhance one’s moral reputation—is a familiar concept. But, what about profile pictures framed by “Vaccines work!”? Or memes posted to an anti-vaccine group echoing the group’s view that “Only sheep believe Big Pharma!”? These actions don’t express moral views—both claims are empirical (if imprecise). Nevertheless, they serve a similar purpose: to influence the judgments of their audience. But, where rainbow profiles guide their audience to view the agent as morally good, these acts guide their audience to view the agent as epistemically good. They are instances of epistemic virtue signaling. The first goal of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic virtue signaling. I argue that epistemic virtue signaling occurs through both behavioral and propositional signals, and serves purposes similar to those of moral virtue signaling across a wide variety of discourses. The second is to show that there is much work for this concept to do. In particular, this concept illuminates a double bind faced by those who suffer from and seek to overcome testimonial injustice. I close by demonstrating how this double bind arises in the dissolution of medical autonomy, focusing on the care gap faced by pregnant women of color in the United States today, as compared with their white counterparts.

  PublisherDOI

• Rumination and Wronging: The Role of Attention in Epistemic Morality

  Episteme · 2022 · 42 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology

  Abstract The idea that our epistemic practices can be wrongful has been the core observation driving the growing literature on epistemic injustice, doxastic wronging, and moral encroachment. But, one element of our epistemic practice has been starkly absent from this discussion of epistemic morality: attention. The goal of this article is to show that attention is a worthwhile focus for epistemology, especially for the field of epistemic morality. After presenting a new dilemma for proponents of doxastic wronging, I show how focusing on attention not only allows us to defuse that dilemma, but also helps to substantiate accounts of what goes wrong in cases of doxastic wronging.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward

  Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward Catharine Saint-Croix Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, NYU Press, 2020, 216 pages, $26.95 (hbk), 9781479851553 the straights are not okay. The tragedy of heterosexuality is this: modern straightness dooms once-hopeful, loving couples to share dull, frustrating, and lonely lives together. After all, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and what’s a heterosexual to do about it? Against this dismal state of affairs, Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality offers a scholarly, empathetic intervention from the perspective of queer culture. Ward’s book reveals that the titular tragedy is rooted in the misogynistic ideology permeating straight culture, according to which women are at once objects of desire and derision. In a culture animated by this antimony, women and men are very different creatures and, by the same token, they are bound to struggle in communicating their needs to one another, to say nothing of living fulfilling lives together. Uncrossing these lovers’ stars, Ward contends, requires adopting a form of heterosexuality—deep heterosexuality—that excises misogyny from straight culture, thereby making room for a version of heterosexuality in which men not only lust for women, but actually like them. But, how did this situation come to be? Relying on the work of feminist historian Afsaneh Najmabadi among others, Chapter 2 draws readers’ attention to the historical tension that gives rise to this tragedy. Prior to the social evolution of modern companionate heterosexuality, marriage was an explicitly patriarchal, property-centric institution. Across many cultures, wives were merely a tool for property transfer and procreation. In patriarchal contexts like this, Ward contends, the possibility of love—the heart of today’s understanding of straightness—becomes suspicious and emasculating. A man who is devoted to a woman is subordinated to her. Thus, wherever the transition away from property-based marriage begins, it threatens the long-standing patriarchal social order (Ward 2020, p. 38). Such threats do not go unanswered. [End Page E-7] Ward focuses on the development of this tension in the United States, with particular attention to the influence of the eugenics movement and the relationship between heteronormativity and American white supremacy (Ward 2020, p. 39). Eugenicists of the early 1900s held that the preservation of white society required happy white homes, because happiness would lead to fecundity. Thus, the happy heterosexual home became an ideal of American life. Ward’s archival analysis reveals that this ideal was a demanding one: men and women of the time routinely loathed both the marriages in which they’d found themselves and the partners to whom they were bound. They regarded one another’s bodies as unfamiliar and disgusting (Ward 2020, p. 39), and women, routinely raped on their wedding nights and knowing little, if anything, of what they were about to experience, came to know their husbands as purveyors of an unspeakable, ungratifying, and ugly act (Ward 2020, p. 41). This, of course, is poor soil for seeds of love and companionship. In observation of this fallow state, sexologists at the Eugenics Publishing Company pioneered the techniques of the heterosexual-repair industry. This industry is central to Ward’s project: While it aims to diagnose and treat the problems that plague straight couples trying to forge lives together, Ward observes that the industry takes a decidedly heteronormative tack. In the early days, titles like the 1919 Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living normalized the disgust men and women felt for one another and urged them assuage it through professionally guided education and extensive rituals of “hygiene”, such as shaving, perfuming, douching, and so on (Ward 2020, p. 44). Emphasizing the otherworldliness and incomprehensibility of the opposite sex, even the earliest products of the heterosexual-repair industry advised men and women to lean into the analysis that misogyny provided and choose the solutions it placed in easy reach. By the 1950s, the industry shifted away from addressing the shortcomings of couples considered together, instead focusing on the many failings of the women in those couples. Women were advised to groom not only their bodies, but also their personalities. As explained by Dr. Edward Podolsky’s “10 Commandments for...

  PublisherDOI

• Privilege and Position

  Res Philosophica · 2020 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Sociology

  How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being Black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. For this reason, many regard standpoint theory as being out of step with epistemology more broadly. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. This account serves as the foundation for developing a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic.

  PublisherDOI

• 'Yep, I'm Gay': Understanding Agential Identity

  Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy · 2019-07-11 · 58 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  What's important about 'coming out'? Why do we wear business suits or Star Trek pins? Part of the answer, we think, has to do with what we call agential identity. Social metaphysics has given us tools for understanding what it is to be socially positioned as a member of a particular group and what it means to self-identify with a group. But there is little exploration of the general relationship between selfidentity and social position. We take up this exploration, developing an account of agential identity-the self-identities we make available to others. Agential identities are the bridge between what we take ourselves to be and what others take us to be. Understanding agential identity not only fills an important gap in the literature, but also helps us explain politically important phenomena concerning discrimination, malicious identities, passing, and code-switching. These phenomena, we argue, cannot be understood solely in terms of self-identity or social position.

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Frequent coauthors

• Roy T. Cook

  Twin Cities Orthopedics

  4 shared

• Richmond H. Thomason

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

• Robin Dembroff

  Yale University

  1 shared

Education

• Doctorate, Philosophy

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

• Master of Arts, Philosophy

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2014

• Bachelor of Individualized Studies, Logic, Philosophy of Science, History of Science

  University of Minnesota Twin Cities

  2011

• Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy

  University of Minnesota, Twin Citites

  2008

Awards & honors

• Institute for Advanced Study Residential Faculty Fellowship,…
• Stephen R. Setterberg, M.D. Faculty Fellow (2023-2026)
• DEI and Social Justice in Liberal Arts Pedagogies Grant from…
• Inclusive, Accessible, and Responsive Courses Grant from the…
• Faculty Driven Grant from the Institute for Diversity, Equit…