BA (Hons) UQ, LLB (Hons) UQ, PhD (ANU).

Lecturer

Research Interests

1. Methodological differences between analytic and European philosophy

My main interest here is in critiques of what one might call local coherence-building methods in analytic philosophy (appeals to reflective equilibrium, inference to the best explanation and judgment based on appeal to theoretical virtues), and the implications they have for the study of normative systems (particularly moral theory and epistemology). I’m writing a book on this with Jack Reynolds of Latrobe University, and have a series of upcoming workshops and conferences (funded by an ARC Discovery grant held by myself, Jack, Ed Mares of Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), and James Williams of the University of Dundee (United Kingdom)).


2. Epistemic normativity
I have previously argued for a non-standard understanding of epistemic justification, on the basis that justification is an ‘indicator concept’, albeit an externalist one (something like a Wittgensteinian criterion). I’m now looking at the role of constitutive norms of language-use in founding the epistemic norms of truth-seeking and falsity-avoiding, and considering the plausibility of a functionalist account of the meanings of many epistemic evaluative terms.


3. Mixed modalities in epistemology

Epistemologists are wont to make all sorts of claims in which epistemic and alethic notions interact, and it’s clear that some debates in epistemology come down to questions about the way we should treat such fusions. My particular interests here include knowability claims (the coherence of Dummettian anti-realism in the face of Fitchian concerns), and revisability claims in the Quinean tradition (and their alleged incoherence or self-contradiction).


4. Implications of psychology for philosophical study of action-guiding concepts

There has been surprisingly little consideration of the implications for philosophy of a non-descriptivist analysis of normative concepts, such as the concepts of a justified belief, a morally right act/institution, or a principled (not ad hoc) theory revision. My main interest here is in the way non-descriptive normative concepts might be subject to an ‘actualist’ bias, inducing error or confusion in the face of unusual situations, bizarre thought experiments, etc.


5. Paraconsistent analyses of vagueness

My interests here are in sorites arguments arising essentially in continuous rather than discrete domains (where mathematical induction, chains of conditionals, the least number principle and other standard soritical generators are not available), and in the use of content externalism and social choice theory to improve the standard motivations for subvaluationism. (Through 2007 I was employed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney to work on this topic with Professor Mark Colyvan (Sydney) and Dr Dominic Hyde (University of Queensland).)

Units

• HPA207 - Philosophy of Mind
  
• HPA216 - Knowledge & Belief
  
• HPA291 - Introduction to Logic