Epistemology

• My research concerns the epistemic significance of other minds. The epistemology of disagreement has mostly worked within an intrapersonal frame: a solitary subject, her evidence, and the coherence of her attitudes, with the disagreeing peer serving as little more than a delivery mechanism for higher-order evidence. But disagreement is ordinarily encountered between persons. We learn that someone disagrees by comprehending her conflicting assertion, and we respond within a norm-governed practice of asserting, challenging, and objecting. I am interested in two questions that arise once we take that practice seriously. The first concerns the state of comprehending a peer's conflicting assertion: when is it epistemically significant, and why? The second concerns the act of responding: when does a hearer have warrant to object? The first arises in the epistemology of testimony, the second in the normativity of assertion. I argue that answering both requires the same thesis, that assertion is governed by a robustly epistemic norm, and that this is bad news for conciliationism: the view depends on a thesis it is also incompatible with.

Applied Ethics

• A lot of research on the nursing profession focuses on nursing in connection to burnout and compassion fatigue. This literature has exploded since COVID-19. However, not much has been done on the positive effects of nursing. I am currently working together with Mark Lazenby (Dean of the School of Nursing, UC Irvine) on a project which aims to do just that. Our goal is to put forth a new theory and, hopefully, establish a new area of inquiry, one focused on how nursing, insofar as it involves the cultivation of virtues associated with altruism and service, is conducive to an individual’s flourishing.