about me
Currently based in Hong Kong, I am a philosophy instructor and postdoctoral fellow at Lingnan University. I received my PhD in Philosophy in Summer 2025 from University of Southern California, where I studied under the supervision of Mark Schroeder.
My research 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 conflict. It 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.
Last term, I had the privilege of exploring many of these topics in my teaching as well! In my course "Information, Misinformation, and the Media", we took on questions about fake news, deepfakes, and other kinds of epistemic pollution from the perspective of social virtue epistemology and epistemic environmentalism. (Currently, I am teaching Critical Thinking and Argumentation.)
Additionally, 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.
recent publications
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.”
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 | 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.
Me and Jonathan Ichikawa at Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress 2025, talking about inference tickets (probably).
(Photo courtesy of Benjamin Hale.)
public philosophy features
YOUTUBE | Philosophy Tube
Doxastic Anxiety and Doxastic Courage
in "Innocence and Censorship", May 21, 2021
BLOG POST | Blog of the APA
Jumping to conclusions? The hidden shortcuts in 'he-said–she-said' and 'sexual harassment' with Jonathan Ichikawa
PODCAST | Embrace The Void Podcast
on Cogtweeto Philosophy Workshop with Jennifer Foster and Cassie Finley January 21, 2021
