Research

Current Research

I will soon be a postdoctoral fellow at the Stockholm University, where I will be investigating issues concerning the epistemic role of emotions in the phenomenon of knowledge resistance.

Recent Papers

“Value Promotion and the Explanation of Evidential Standards” forthcoming in Erkenntnis.

While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and that support comes in degrees, the question of how much evidential support one needs in order to have a justified belief remains. In this paper, I consider how the question about degrees of evidential support connects with recent debates between consequentialist and deontological explanations of epistemic norms. I argue that explaining why strong, but not conclusive, evidential support is required for justification should be one explanandum that such theories seek to explain. Furthermore, I argue that foundational theories that appeal to the promotion of epistemic value (especially consequentialism, but perhaps also some versions of epistemic deontology) are better suited to provide such an explanation.

(with Uriah Kriegel) “Emotion, Epistemic Assessability, and Double Intentionality.” Topoi (2021).

We address the question: why are emotions epistemically assessable even though their formal object is not truth? We show that cognitivist and perceptualist views of emotion don’t provide a good answer, and argue instead that it’s because (i) emotions are reason-responsive and (ii) reason-responsiveness is sufficient for epistemic assessability.

PhD Research (Institut Jean Nicod)

Thesis Supervisor: Uriah Kriegel
Thesis Title: The Epistemic Justification of Emotions (defended December 2019)
Jury Members: Michael Brady, Juan Comesaña, Julien Deonna, Frédérique de Vignemont, and Pascal Engel

My thesis concerns the epistemic rationality of emotions. Many think that emotions are representations of value (e.g., fear represents dangerousness). I endorse this picture and argue further that emotions, like beliefs, are assessable for epistemic justification. However, there is a puzzle that arises in the form of three independently plausible but mutually inconsistent theses. My thesis presents an account of the epistemology of emotion that resolves this apparent tension. In order to do this, I develop a consequentialist account of epistemic justification that is applicable to a wider range of mental state types than traditional theories of epistemic justification, which are often limited to beliefs and/or credences. I then apply the account in order to answer certain questions about the epistemic justification of emotions in particular.