Research Overview

My research focuses on epistemology, especially formal and social epistemology. I spend most of my time thinking about trust and testimony, epistemic virtue, inquiry, epistemic normativity, and the foundations of Bayesian epistemology.

My ultimate aim is to develop what I’ve come to call formal virtue epistemology, bringing into contact two areas of epistemology that do not traditionally talk to one another. To do so, I employ concepts and tools from statistics and adjacent fields.

My paper “Trust Issues: Reliability, Reference Classes, and the Underdetermination of Trust,” published in Episteme earlier this year, is the first paper within this larger project. Roughly, this paper argues for a kind of epistemic permissivism in trust, owing to the fact that responding to testimony requires making substantive judgments—encoded in what I call models—of a speaker’s trustworthiness, which are often underdetermined by our evidence.

In my work in progress, I expand on this in a few ways.

  • One paper generalizes the notion of models in the Episteme paper, draws on the concept of model misspecification from statistics to argue that flawless, repeated Bayesian updating in perfectly ordinary conditions can lead one to become certain of falsehoods, and concludes that Bayesian epistemology should be supplemented with additional norms concerning what I call model management: norms governing when and how agents should revise their models rather than exploit them in updating. [Draft available upon request.]

  • A second paper investigates the normative foundations of accuracy-first defenses of Bayesianism in recent epistemology. In it, I argue that even if we grant accuracy-firsters’ claims about epistemic axiology and acknowledge that their mathematical results proving connections between satisfying Bayesian norms and accuracy are sound, we need a further normative bridge principle to conclude that rational agents must be Bayesians. After walking through a number of proposed accounts of this rationality-accuracy bridge, I conclude that none of them suffices. Consequently, we do not yet have a vindication of Bayesianism on grounds of accuracy. [Draft available upon request.]

  • A third paper investigates the relationship between trust and inquiry. Trust shapes not only what we believe but also what evidence we choose to gather, occasionally leading to tragic path dependencies when we over-consult unreliable sources and under-consult reliable sources who could correct our errors. A recent approach to the epistemology of inquiry in the “Value of Information” tradition, however, advises us that we ought to consult sources and structure our inquiries in ways that maximize expected epistemic value by our own lights. But this is risky: I might have a faulty model of which sources are worth consulting, and the Value of Information framework tells me to exploit that model in ways that might lead to tragic outcomes. Drawing on recent epistemological work on “epistemic insurance policies,” alongside work in statistics and machine learning on the explore-exploit tradeoffs, I develop a formal account of open-minded inquiry, arguing that we ought sometimes explore rather than exploit, deliberately consulting sources we antecedently expect to be less reliable than available alternatives in order to hedge our bets against serious errors in our models of source reliability.

  • Finally, in a fourth paper, I articulate and defend a general account of epistemic virtue in terms of the concept of robustness from statistical learning theory (SLT): very roughly, an epistemic virtue is a stable disposition to reason in ways that partially constitute epistemic flourishing in virtue of tending to produce true beliefs across a wide range of realistic environments. But SLT provides more than terminological inspiration: I draw on non-Bayesian accounts of learning in SLT to argue that epistemic virtue, understood as above, can require violation of Bayesian norms.

Outside of this main strand of my research, I am also working on a paper arguing for an imperfect duty to inquire, grounded in collective-action considerations, and a paper in the philosophy of cognitive science and psychology, arguing that the problem of observational equivalence in empirical work of motivated reasoning is not, in the end, a pressing problem: we can get the good out of experimental data about the extent to which individuals’ beliefs align with their interests and identities without resolving the question of whether so-called directional motives drive and distort our reasoning.

Publications

Presentations

Invited Talks

  • “Stewarding the Epistemic Commons: Collective Action and the Ethics of Belief,” Wake Forest University (April 2026)

  • “Rational Trust and Virtuous Trust,” Auburn University (March 2026)

Upcoming Conferences

  • “Motivated Reasoning and Political Cognition: Sidestepping the Problem of Observational Equivalence,” PPE Society Annual Meeting (November 2026)

Past Conferences

  • “Stewarding the Epistemic Commons: Collective Action and the Ethics of Belief,” North Carolina Philosophical Society Annual Meeting (March 2026)

  • “Negligent Belief and the Degradation of the Epistemic Commons,” PPE Society Annual Meeting (November 2025)

  • “Right-Kind Reasons Constitutivism and Moderate Moral Encroachment,” Eastern Meeting of the APA (January 2024)

  • “Perceptual Experience Cannot Be Rational,” Central Meeting of the APA (February 2023)

  • “Moral Progress and Radical (Meta)epistemology,” AGENT Conference, University of Texas at Austin (November 2022)

Workshops

  • “Motivated Reasoning and Political Cognition: Sidestepping the Problem of Observational Equivalence,” PPE Faculty Workshop, UNC—Chapel Hill (August 2026)

  • “Motivated Bayesians? Observational Equivalence and the Problem of Motivated Reasoning Research,” Applied Epistemology Project Works in Progress Series, UNC—Chapel Hill (June 2026)

  • “Stewarding the Epistemic Commons: Collective Action and the Ethics of Belief,” PPE Faculty Workshop, UNC—Chapel Hill (February 2026)

  • “Trust Issues: Taking the Complexity of Testimony Seriously,” PPE Faculty Workshop, UNC—Chapel Hill (August 2025)

  • “Prejudiced Testimony and Dynamic Epistemic Vigilance,” Applied Epistemology Project Works in Progress Series, December 2024

  • “Testimony, Rigid Trust, and Prejudiced Belief,” PPE Faculty Workshop, UNC—Chapel Hill (August 2024)