- For my work in Computer Science, please go here:
Projects in Computer Science
I am working on the following projects. For more information contact me.
- The Normative Connection between Belief and Truth
William James told us to "Believe Truth! Shun Error!", but what is the role and source of the norm underlying this popular imperative? I'm working on answering this question, both in the realm of full belief and in a (Bayesian) partial belief framework.
- Is Believing the Truth the Only Norm of Epistemology?
A Quinian naturalistic picture of epistemology might have you believe that the normative content of the correct epistemology can be captured by the norm mentioned above (i.e. believing the truth). I wonder this is the all of the normative story. In particular, I working on deciding if there is an overlooked normative epistemological notion that plays a important role in the correct account of epistemic normativity.
- The Is-Ought Gap
Hume supposedly taught us that 'oughts' don't follow from 'is's - that's the Autonomy of Ethics. It has been known for a while that the simple way to
make sense of this fails. In this work, I consider the counterexamples to it
and some responses to them. I argue that the way philosophers have tried to
save the Autonomy of Ethics is misguided. I then provide a radically reformulated
way to think about the Autonomy of Ethics in terms of descriptive
and normative possibilities.
- Agent-Based Modeling of Belief, Infection, and Genetics
Beliefs and genetics across populations affect how diseases spread. I assist in Prof. Patrick Grim's agent-based modeling investigation of the connections between doxastic states, genetics and infection. For some of our work on this, see our publications on my CV.
- Sleeping Beauty Should be Imprecise
I propose a new answer to Elga's Sleeping Beauty problem. Following standard Imprecise Bayesian reasoning, I propose that Beauty ought to adopt a properly imprecise credence upon waking. Surprisingly, the imprecise credence that she ought to adopt is very much unlike the standard precise answers to the question.
- Some Problems for Imprecise Bayesianism
- Epistemic Conservatism for Imprecise Partial Belief
- I occasionally write for the Michigan Grad Student Blog:
I am no longer actively working on these projects:- Coherence, Consistency, and Expressivism: A Few Worries Involving Consistency and Expressivist Semantics
- The Problem of
Scientific Modeling for Structural Realism and the Semantic View
- The No No-Miracles-Argument Argument
Presented to the GPPC
on February 24, 2007
Published in Stanford's The Dualist, vol. 14
