Research Interests.
I am interested in a broad range of topics in Philosophy of Language, Moral Philosophy, and Epistemology.Â
Currently, I focus on two strands of research. The first concerns the role moral perspectives play in the acquisition and transmission of moral knowledge. I explore how a change in moral perspectives can bring about a corresponding shift in beliefs, some of which will qualify as instances of moral knowledge. I also investigate how moral perspectives can be shared in order to bring about such a change.
The second is about speakers changing the topic of conversation to avoid uncomfortable topics or accountability. My aim is to investigate what makes such attempts at strategic topic change succesful, what rationales speakers might have to going with them, and how they can be blocked.
Published.
[This section is currently empty. I am working very hard on changing that.]
Work in progress.
If you are interested in reading drafts, feel free to email me!
[Under review.]
I explore how jokes can transmit moral knowledge. I argue that some jokes can lead hearers to adopt new moral perspectives, which in turn lead them to form new moral beliefs. I also show that these moral beliefs can be justified, insofar as the perspective is better attuned to morally relevant features of the situation.
Strategic topic-change.
I explore how and why speakers change conversation topics to avoid uncomfortable topics and accountability. I argue that, while topic-change can generally be blocked easily (much more so than other strategic speech acts), this drawback matters less in many political contexts, making strategic topic-change a tactically smart maneuver in such contexts. Along the way, I give reasons why conversation topics cannot be modeled as questions under discussion.
A paper on how perspective-change can lead to moral belief-change.