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about me

I'm a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at University of Southern California, dissertating under the supervision of Mark Schroeder and Robin Jeshion.
 

My dissertation explores the concepts of doxastic courage and cowardice – that is, how forming (or omitting to form) beliefs can be a kind of moral virtue or vice – and their relationship to doxastic anxiety and political conflictIt is a project in epistemology, social and political philosophy, virtue theory, and the ethics of belief. But whereas most recent work on the ethics of belief focuses on the wrongs of positive belief, my virtue-theoretic approach highlights how lack of belief can be vicious. Contrary to many moral and political exhortations, there is such a thing as being too open-minded. Cultivating too general a disposition to epistemic humility, rather than being politically virtuous, can make us us doxastic cowards.   

Aside from my dissertation, I have projects in philosophy language, metaethics, and aesthetics. I am particularly interested in how social and evaluative language works – semantically, pragmatically, politically. In this vein, I also work on the meanings of slurs and their relationship to other derogatory and nonderogatory evaluative expressions, as well as aesthetic terms and the prospects for aesthetic expressivism.

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recent publications
+ features

2023 | Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy

Slurs have been standardly assumed to bear a very direct, very distinctive semantic relationship to what philosophers have called “neutral counterpart” terms. I argue that this is mistaken: the general relationship between paradigmatic slurs and their “neutral counterparts” should be assumed to be the same one that obtains between ‘chick flick’ and ‘romantic comedy’, as well a huge number of other more prosaic pairs of derogatory and “less derogatory” expressions. The most plausible general relationship between these latter expressions — and thus, I argue, between paradigmatic slurs and “neutral counterpart” terms — is one of overlap in presumed extension, grounded in overlap in associated stereotypes. The resulting framework has the advantages of being simple, unified, and, unlike its orthodox rivals, neatly accommodating of a much wider range of data than has previously been considered. More importantly, it positions us to better understand, identify, and confront the insidious mechanisms of ordinary bigotry.

2023 | Episteme

We argue that stereotypes associated with concepts like he-said–she-said, conspiracy theory, sexual harassment, and those expressed by paradigmatic slurs provide “normative inference tickets”: conceptual permissions to automatic, largely unreflective normative conclusions. These “mental shortcuts” are underwritten by associated stereotypes. Because stereotypes admit of exceptions, normative inference tickets are highly flexible and productive, but also liable to create serious epistemic and moral harms. Epistemically, many are unreliable, yielding false beliefs which resist counterexample; morally, many perpetuate bigotry and oppression. Still, some normative inference tickets, like some activated by sexual harassment, constitute genuine moral and hermeneutical advances. For example, our framework helps explain Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical lacunae”: what early victims of “sexual harassment” — as well as their harassers — lacked before the term was coined was a communal normative inference ticket — one that could take us, collectively, from “this is happening” to “this is wrong.”

2023 | The Oxford Handbook on Moral Realism

Wherever philosophers disagree, one of the things at issue is likely to be what they disagree about, itself. So also with moral realism, or metanormative realism more broadly. In addition to asking whether moral realism is true, and which forms of moral realism are more likely to be true than others, we can also ask what it would mean for some form of moral realism to be true—we can try to de6ne “moral realism” and each of its standard variants “naturalism,” “non-naturalism,” and so on. The usual aspiration of such inquiry is to find definitions that all can agree on, so that we can use terms in an unambiguous and uniform way. But we doubt that this aspiration is always possible, or even necessarily desirable. It will be our goal in this essay to sketch out some of our reasons for such skepticism, and to lay out a picture of what philosophical inquiry can look like in metaethics and beyond, even when it is impossible to reach uniform agreement on the terms of the debate.

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FEATURED | Philosophy Tube

Doxastic Anxiety and Doxastic Courage
in "Innocence and Censorship", May 21, 2021

FEATURED | Blog of the APA

Jumping to conclusions? The hidden shortcuts in 'he-said–she-said' and 'sexual harassment' with Jonathan Ichikawa

FEATURED | Embrace The Void Podcast

on Cogtweeto Philosophy Workshop with Jennifer Foster and Cassie Finley January 21, 2021

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recent
presentations

Cogtweeto's Radical Accessibility

with Cassie Finley, A.G. Holdier, and Johnathan Flowers

Public Philosophy Network 2023 Conference
Santa Cruz, CA

PANEL

13

SEP

2023

Get more students at "Office Hours" with this one weird trick!

CogTeacho: A Special Edition Workshop with AAPT
Cogtweeto Workshop Series

PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY

6

AUG

2023

Doxastic Courage and Doxastic Courage: When It's Scary (Not) To Believe

Lingnan University 

Hong Kong

WORK-IN-PROGRESS

13

FEB

2023

Doxastic Courage vs. Epistemic Humility: Too Much of a Good Thing

Epistemic Courage Workshop 

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, Canada

INVITED SESSION

3

DEC

2022

Shmuel Gomes’s “Moral Standing Beyond Consciousness” 

Vancouver Summer Philosophy Conference

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, Canada

INVITED COMMENTARY

27

JULY

2022

Normative Inference Tickets
with Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC)

American Philosophical Association
Central Division

Chicago, Illinois

APA SYMPOSIUM

22

FEB

2022

Normative Inference Tickets
with Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC)

UCONN Philosophy Colloquium Series

University of Connecticut

DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM

28

JAN

2022

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"Get more students at 'Office Hours' with this one weird trick!"[video]

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As presented at CogTeacho: A Special Edition Cogtweeto Workshop with The American Association of Philosophy Teachers

 August 6, 2023

Jen Foster
Last Updated: July 2023

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