The Epistemology of Attention (forthcoming)
The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.) Wiley Blackwell

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is 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 article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology. Here's a draft!

Epistemic Virtue Signaling and the Double Bind of Testimonial Injustice (forthcoming)
Philosophers' Imprint

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.

Here's a draft!

(What) is feminist logic? (What) do we want it to be? (forthcoming)
History and Philosophy of Logic, Special Issue: Logic and Politics, with Roy T Cook

"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 (LPlum). Plumwood’s work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways that 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.

Email for a draft.

Evidence in a Non-Ideal World: How Social Distortion Creates Skeptical Potholes (forthcoming)
Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Philosophy

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, I argue, 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. I offer a characterization of one such norm: the internalist practice of self-stewardship.

Email for a draft.

Activist Epistemology (forthcoming)
Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Feminist Philosophy and Formal Logic Workshop

What does it mean, epistemically, to be an activist? For activists, their causes—climate change, animal rights, of perhaps their own survival—becomes the unshakeable core of their personal commitments. But, activism involves epistemic commitments as well: beliefs held, to use the Quinean turn of phrase, "come what may". Often, these epistemic commitments involve not only individual propositions, but also entire worldviews—ways of interpreting the evidence we encounter. I refer to these commitments as epistemic frameworks.

Even those of us who are not activists are generally responsive to multiple frameworks, some of them more compatible than others. This article argues that one of the hallmarks of activist epistemology is the prioritization of certain frameworks— frameworks associated with the activist cause. This article uses neighborhood semantics for modal logic to develop a model on which epistemic frameworks themselves are explicitly represented and prioritized. This prioritization allows us to capture the idea that these epistemic frameworks are “held come what may” with nuance and complexity.

Email for a draft.

Rumination and Wronging: The Role of Attention in Epistemic Morality (2022)
Episteme, 19 (4):491-514

The idea that our epistemic practices—from the ways we regard others’ credibility, to our evidence-gathering practices, to the beliefs we harbor—can be harmful 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.

While the topic of attention has been a mainstay of empirical literature in psychology and neuroscience, it has only recently become commonplace in philosophy of mind and related fields. The goal of this paper 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 will 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.

Privilege and Position: Formal Tools for Standpoint Epistemology (2020)
Res Philosophica, Volume 97 No. 4, p. 489-524

In this paper, I develop a formal account of standpoint epistemology, one of the earliest efforts to grapple with the ways that social structures affect our epistemic lives. If we interpret standpoint epistemologists’ claims as hypotheses about the ways that our social positions affect access to evidence, I argue, we can fruitfully employ recent developments in evidence logic to study the consequences. Adapting this framework to standpoint epistemology helps to clarify the meaning of terms like “epistemic privilege” and “superior knowledge” while evading longstanding criticisms of standpoint epistemology.

Presented at the Feminist Philosophy and Formal Logic workshop.

"Yep, I'm Gay": Understanding Agential Identity (2019)
Ergo, Volume 6, No. 20, p. 571-599, with Robin Dembroff

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.

Presented at NY SWIPShop, the Princeton Program in Cognitive Science, Midwest SWIP, and others.