I work on epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of logic, all broadly construed. I’m especially interesting in reasoning and rationality, both in foundational issues (like what reasoning is, or what is it to do something on the basis of a reason) and applied ones (like how our epistemic environments affect what it is rational for us to do and believe).
At the moment, my main research project is on the basing relation, which is crucial to many exercises of rational agency. The basing relation obtains between an action or a state and reason for which it is done. I’m currently pursuing three lines of inquiry related to the basing relation. First, how unified are different exercises of rational agency, such as believing on the basis of a reason and acting on the basis of a reason? Second, how can we solve the problem of deviant causal chains, which is an issue for the causal account of basing that I favor? Third, how can lessons from the basing literature help us give an account of good reasoning?
I’m also working on some miscellaneous papers on, among other things: the singular “they”; epistemic ascent; and the possibility of basic action.
Publications
You can find preprints of all of my articles at Philpapers.
Forthcoming. “Neopragmatism about Logical Necessity: Towards a Metasemantics for Possible Worlds”. Topoi.
Neopragmatist treatments of a domain of discourse eschew inflationary semantic notions, such as heavyweight representation relations, in favor of functional explanations. Neopragmatists often do this by providing an alternative, non-truth-conditional semantics for the discourse in question. This paper develops a neopragmatist treatment of logical necessity that pursues a different approach. It accepts a truth-conditional possible-worlds semantics, but provides a metasemantic account that appeals only to neopragmatist-friendly notions. The success of possible-worlds semantics is explained not by its correctly capturing representational structure, but by a functional explanation: a crucial function of logical modals is to express commitments to rules that govern all language games. I provide a formal explication that highlights the isomorphism between the semantic quantification over possible worlds and the metasemantic quantification over language games. The resulting account also explains what logical necessity has in common with other flavors of modality and secures the hardness of the logical “must”.
Forthcoming. “Please Mind the Gap: Two Problems for the Constitutive Theory of Inference”. Analysis.
The Constitutive Theory of inference holds that an agent’s drawing the conclusion of an inference just is her believing the premises and taking them to support the conclusion in the right way. The Constitutive Theory promises several advantages over causal construals of inference, including avoiding the problem of deviant causal chains. Here I argue that the Constitutive Theory faces two serious problems, and diagnose their common source. The first problem is that some versions of the Constitutive Theory face a structurally similar challenge to the problem of deviant causal chains. The second problem is that the Constitutive Theory doesn’t generalize well beyond deduction. The problems stem from the Constitutive Theory’s struggle to respect the gap between taking believed premises to support a conclusion, on the one hand, and drawing that very conclusion, on the other.
2026. “The Causal Unity of Basing“. Synthese.
There are different things we can do, and states we can be in, on the basis of reasons. Among other things, we can act, believe, and get angry, all on the basis of reasons. While important work has been done on these topics, it tends to have been done in separate philosophical subfields. By contrast, this paper concerns basing across these disparate domains. I argue that there is shared causal structure, no matter the kind of basing. The argument generalizes an influential Davidsonian thought in the practical domain: positing causal structure is the best way to distinguish between those reasons that comprise an agent’s basis and those that are idle with respect to the agent’s acting. I conclude by addressing an objection due to Setiya, who explicitly defends the causal disunity of acting and believing on the basis of reasons. Setiya offers a doxastic account of epistemic basing, which is noncausal. I argue that such accounts fail because they cannot distinguish between two distinct ways of failing to respond to one’s evidence.
2025. “By the Devil’s Own Lights”. Ethics.
Citing the basis on which an agent acts explains her acting in a distinctive way: it brings the action within the purview of rational agency. Many have appealed to the guise of the good thesis to secure the distinctiveness of basing explanation, by showing that the agent’s action is rationally intelligible. But the thesis threatens to artificially sanitize rational agency. Some, notably Setiya, deny both the guise of the good and the claim that basing explanation involves rational intelligibility. Here I pursue a middle path, which rejects the guise of the good but retains the rational intelligibility underpinning of basing explanation.
2025. “Fake News, Relevant Alternatives, and the Degradation of Our Epistemic Environment”. Inquiry. You can see an interview of me talking about the ideas in this paper here.
This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms.
2025. “Coastlines, Consequence, and Collapse”. Asian Journal of Philosophy.
Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. Stei assumes that the correctness of a logic is a matter of the relation between the formal validity of a logical theory and extra-theoretic validity. I reject the assumption, on the grounds that it’s not clear that extratheoretic validity can be determined independently of formal validity. I formulate instead quietist logical pluralism, which is quietist with respect to the nature of extra-theoretic validity and its relation to formal validity. Because of this, quietist logic pluralism needs a different correctness criterion for logic: correctness is a matter of a logic’s having normative upshot for deductive reasoning. I argue that this approach has the advantage of resisting the collapse of logical pluralism into monism. In particular, I suggest that deductive reasoning has two distinct roles, one with respect to the coherence of our attitudes and another with respect to how our attitudes are based on one another. I give two different normative principles that correspond to these roles; doing so requires abandoning the idea that normative bridge principles are universally quantified over all logics. That idea has been inherited from MacFarlane, but it’s not clear why the pluralist should accept it, as long as she can avoid giving principles that are ad hoc. By tying the principles to crucial roles of deductive reasoning, I aim to avoid both ad hockery and collapse.
2023. “Logical Pluralism”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Coauthored with Gillian Russell.
We cover various topics regarding logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one correct logic. These include: prominent ways of understanding the view; objections to logical pluralism; logical nihilism, the view that there are no correct logics; and what’s at stake in the debate about logical pluralism.
2022. “The Hereby-Commit Account of Inference”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
An influential way of distinguishing inferential from non-inferential processes appeals to representational states: an agent infers a conclusion from some premises only if she represents those premises as supporting that conclusion. By contrast, when some premises merely cause an agent to believe the conclusion, there is no relevant representational state. While promising, the appeal to representational states invites a regress problem, first famously articulated by Lewis Carroll. This paper develops a novel account of inference that invokes representational states without succumbing to regress. The key move is to reject the tempting idea that the relevant representational states are causally prior to inferences. I argue, instead, that an inference constitutes the relevant representational state. To infer is thus—in the very drawing of the conclusion—to represent the premises as supporting the conclusion, and thereby to commit to that support relation.
2022. “Acting and Believing on the Basis of Reasons”. Philosophy Compass.
This paper provides an opinionated guide to discussions of acting and believing on the basis of reasons. I aim to bring closer together largely separate literatures in practical reason and in epistemology. I focus on three questions. First, is basing causing? Causal theories of basing remain popular despite the notorious Problem of Deviant Causal Chains. Causal theorists in both the epistemic and practical domains have begun to appeal to dispositions to try and solve the problem. Second, how unified are acting and believing on the basis of reasons? I consider an important challenge to their unity due to Setiya. I sketch a response, which posits unity of causal structure across acting and believing on the basis of reasons. Third, how does acting or believing on the basis of a good reason relate to acting or believing on the basis of a reason simpliciter? I generalize a recent argument of Lord and Sylvan’s to include acting as well as believing. The conclusion is that, for both believing and acting, φing on the basis of a good reason does not amount to φing on the basis of a reason that just so happens to be good.
2021. “Reasons, Basing, and the Normative Collapse of Logical Pluralism”. Philosophical Studies.
Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. A key objection to logical pluralism is that it collapses into monism. The core of the Collapse Objection is that only the pluralist’s strongest logic does any genuine normative work; since a logic must do genuine normative work, this means that the pluralist is really a monist, who is committed to her strongest logic being the one true logic. This paper considers a neglected question in the collapse debate: what is it for a logic to do genuine normative work? As well as having wider upshot for the connection between logic and normativity, grappling with this question provides a new response to the Collapse Objection on behalf of the pluralist. I suggest that we should allow logics to generate pro tanto reasons in a way that bears not just on combinations of attitudes but on how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another. This motivates adopting normative principles that allow the pluralist’s weaker logics to earn their normative keep. Rather than being ad hoc, these principles capture a sense in which good reasoning goes beyond the consistency of an agent’s attitudes. Good reasoning is also concerned with how an agent’s attitudes are based on one another.
2021. “Logical Pluralism without the Normativity”. Synthese. Coauthored with Gillian Russell.
Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one logic. Logical normativism is the view that logic is normative. These positions have often been assumed to go hand-in-hand, but we show that one can be a logical pluralist without being a logical normativist. We begin by arguing directly against logical normativism. Then we reformulate one popular version of pluralism—due to Beall and Restall—to avoid a normativist commitment. We give three non-normativist pluralist views, the most promising of which depends not on logic’s normativity but on epistemic goals.
2020. “Deflationism about Logic”. Journal of Philosophical Logic.
Logical consequence is typically construed as a metalinguistic relation between (sets of) sentences. Deflationism is an account of logic that challenges this orthodoxy. In Williamson’s recent presentation of deflationism, logic’s primary concern is with universal generalizations over absolutely everything. As well as an interesting account of logic in its own right, deflationism has also been recruited to decide between competing logics in resolving semantic paradoxes. This paper defends deflationism from its most important challenge to date, due to Ole Hjortland. It then presents two new problems for the view. Hjortland’s objection is that deflationism cannot discriminate between distinct logics. I show that his example of classical logic and supervaluationism depends on equivocating about whether the language includes a “definitely” operator. Moreover, I prove a result that blocks this line of objection no matter the choice of logics. I end by criticizing deflationism on two fronts. First, it cannot do the work it has been recruited to perform. That is, it cannot help adjudicate between competing logics. This is because a theory of logic cannot be as easily separated from a theory of truth as its proponents claim. Second, deflationism currently has no adequate answer to the following challenge: what does a sentence’s universal generalization have to do with its logical truth? I argue that the most promising, stipulative response on behalf of the deflationist amounts to an unwarranted change of subject.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Forthcoming. “Graduate Supervision: A Manifesto for Backward Design”. AAPT Studies in Pedagogy. Coauthored with Joanna Lawson.
Graduate supervision has the potential for great pedagogical creativity, but in practice it often looks the same. What we call the Standard Model involves the supervisor and supervisee meeting semi-regularly to discuss parts of a thesis or dissertation. Here we suggest that backward design can unleash the pedagogical potential of graduate supervision. We offer a six-part manifesto for doing so: 1. We can backward design graduate supervision. 2. We should backward design graduate supervision. 3. We should attend to our graduate students’ goals. 4. We should attend to our graduate students’ skills. 5. We should attend to graduate students’ identities. 6. We should recalibrate, and recalibrate again.
2026. “Learning to Fail“. Innovations in Teaching Philosophy, edited by Brynn F. Welch. Coauthored with Joanna Lawson.
A dialogue about failure and its pedagogy.
2024. “Deadlines, Learner-Centeredness, and Nonideal Pedagogy”. The Art of Teaching Philosophy, edited by Brynn F. Welch.
This chapter does two things. First, it gives some guidance on how to think about deadlines in a philosophy course. It considers two dimensions: the rigidity and the frequency of deadlines. The rigidity of deadlines is about how flexible they should be. The frequency of deadlines is about how often they occur during a course. I suggest approaching deadlines by having a high frequency but low rigidity, to balance the scaffolding of executive function with the recognition that your course is not the only, or even the most important, thing in learners’ lives. Second, I use the discussion about deadlines to consider learner-centeredness under conditions of non-ideal pedagogy. Learner-centered ideals are much discussed, but rarely are they contextualized within the non-ideal material conditions that many instructors find ourselves. I recommend an approach that is both learner-centered and instructor-sensitive.
2024. “Discussion, Self-Assessment and the Discussion Moves Framework”. The Art of Teaching Philosophy, edited by Brynn F. Welch.
This chapter does four things. First, I argue that the default pedagogy for discussion—participation grading—sucks. It’s overly demanding for instructors and is influenced by various kinds of bias. To do better, we need to address both the Guidance Problem (how do we help learners improve discussion skills?) and the Assessment Problem (how do we measure their discussion skills?). Second, I introduce the Discussion Moves Framework to make progress on the Guidance Problem. This provides learners with concrete moves, like “offer an objection”, to try out in discussions. Third, I argue that we should address the Assessment Problem by moving towards self-assessment. This emphasizes discussants’ reflecting on their discussions, rather than obsessing about the perceived quality of their contributions. Finally, I put the Discussion Moves Framework and self-assessment into a single pedagogy, which I’ve deployed to good effect in a variety of courses, from large intro classes, to upper level electives aimed at majors.