​Published Works

Forthcoming. "Is Justification Easy or Impossible?: Getting Acquainted with a Way Out." Synthese.
(This is a late draft of the paper)

• Can a belief source confer justification when we lack antecedent justification for believing it’s reliable? A negative answer quickly leads to skepticism. A positive answer, however, seems to commit one to allowing pernicious reasoning known as “epistemic bootstrapping.” In this paper I argue that puzzles surrounding bootstrapping arise because we illicitly assume that either justification requires doxastic awareness of a source’s epistemic credentials or there is no requirement that a subject be aware of a source's credentials. I illustrate how we can resolve the puzzle by splitting the horns and requiring a non-conceptual awareness of, or direct acquaintance with, a source’s legitimacy. 

2015. "What Seeming Seem to Be." Episteme 12 (3): 363-384
(This is a late draft of the paper)

• According to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), if it seems to a subject S that P, S thereby has some degree of (defeasible) justification for believing P. But what is it for P to seem true? Answering this question is vital to assessing what role (if any) such states can play. Many  appear to adopt a kind of non-reductionism that construes seemings as intentional states which cannot be reduced to more familiar mental states like beliefs or sensations. In this paper I aim to show that reductive accounts need to be taken more seriously by illustrating the plausibility of identifying seemings and conscious inclinations to form a belief. I briefly close the paper by considering the implications such an analysis might have for views such as PC.