Publications

Internet Trolling: Social Exploration and the Epistemic Norms of Assertion
Philosophers' Imprint (forthcoming)
I give an account of some of the epistemic and psychological dimensions of internet trolling, with the goal of better understanding why certain kinds of trolling can be dangerous.

Conspiracy Theories and the Epistemic Power of Narrative
Philosophical Psychology (forthcoming)
Conspiracy theories are often packaged as part of narratives that offer emotionally comforting distractions from ugly truths. This helps to explain why people believe them, while demonstrating the epistemic power of narratives more generally.

Conspiracy Theories, Epistemic Self-Identity, and Epistemic Territory
Synthese (2024)
I carve out a distinctive category of conspiracy theorist: those who claim their beliefs trace back to simply trusting their own, firsthand experiences. I explore how these conspiracy theorists differ epistemically from others, as well as the processes that might be involved in becoming one.

Remembering Religious Experience: Reconstruction, Reflection, and Reliability Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (2024)
This paper explores the relationship between religious experience and religious belief. It brings out a central role for episodic memory in religious belief formation.

Capturing the Conspiracist's Imagination
Philosophical Studies (2023)
Conspiracy theorists often cite evidence that seems incredibly weak and far-fetched. This paper explores a role for the imagination in how conspiracists process such evidence.

Cults, Conspiracies, and Fantasies of Knowledge
Episteme (2023)
There’s pleasure in fantasizing about possessing secret knowledge. I argue that fantasies of secret knowledge can become epistemically dangerous, because they can generate illusions of genuine knowledge. This helps us better understand communities such as extreme cults and online conspiracy theory groups.

Mental Imagery and the Epistemology of Testimony
Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2022)
Mental imagery often occurs during testimonial belief transmission: a testifier often episodically remembers or imagines a scene while describing it, and a listener imagines that scene as it’s described to her. I argue that understanding imagery’s psychological roles in testimonial belief transmission has implications for the epistemology of testimony.

Perceiving as Knowing in the Predictive Mind
Philosophical Studies (2022)
I argue that the "predictive processing" framework for scientific study of the mind supports a knowledge first picture of perception, according to which perceiving is a way of knowing. This contrasts with the "internalist" picture on which knowledge has no relevance for understanding the nature of perceiving.

Imagining the Actual
Philosophers' Imprint (2021)
This paper investigates our capacity to use sensory imagination to represent parts of the actual world. I argue that this kind of imagining is distinct from other, similar mental states, in virtue of its distinctive content determination and success conditions.

Remembering the Past and Imagining the Actual
Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2021)
I first argue, on epistemological grounds, against the view that episodic remembering is the same kind of cognitive process as imagining the future and the counterfactual. I then argue that episodic memory is the same kind of process as a capacity I call "actuality-oriented imagination."

Are We Free to Imagine What We Choose? (with Margot Strohminger)
Synthese (2021)
We raise counterexamples to a widely held thesis in philosophy of imagination: "intentionalism," which says that one's intentions about what to imagine always determine what one ends up imagining. We then sketch an alternative account of how sensory imaginings get their contents.

Visual and Bodily Sensational Perception: An Epistemic Asymmetry
Synthese (2021)
I argue for a distinction between low-level and high-level properties of bodily sensations, one which parallels the low-level/high-level distinction in vision. I leverage this distinction to argue that there's an epistemic asymmetry between visual and bodily sensational perception.