I give a brief overview of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford 2024), to introduce the author-meets-critics symposium to follow.

According to the legal-grammatical picture of constitutivism, the constitutive standards of a kind x carry an existential threat: abiding by them is necessary for being an x at all. But this seems to leave no room for defective x’s—the bad-x problem. A functional model escapes this problem, yet it fits structural rational agency poorly. I argue that a suitably complex legal-grammatical model—one attentive to how legal enterprises are materially realized—makes room for genuinely internal violations: intelligible fouls, correctable from a dynamic kernel of perfect compliance. The existential threat survives, yet genuine defect finds a place within it.

In this paper, I argue that the literature on victims’ duties to resist their own oppression has not paid enough attention to the heterogeneity of victims and how this affects their duties. The main aim of the paper is to introduce considerations and complications—informed by an intersectional analysis, and particularly the concept of privilege—that must be taken into account when determining how to assign duties to resist. I argue that failure to recognize these nuances results in an overcautiousness when it comes to assigning duties of resistance, and that a blanket reluctance to assign such duties is of most detriment to the most marginalized.

This paper reevaluates Walton’s and Radford’s claims about fiction-directed emotions by proposing to interpret their arguments through a motivational theory of emotion, rather than the cognitive framework typically employed. I first demonstrate that no cognitive theory justifies their conclusions. I then argue that a motivational account can alternatively support either Radford’s or Walton’s position, depending on whether we accept that emotions toward fiction involve action tendencies, as ordinary emotions do. If they do, the motivational theory justifies Radford’s claim about the irrationality of fiction-directed emotions. If, by contrast, we deny that emotions for fiction involve readiness for action, the motivational account favors Walton’s view of quasi-emotions. After developing this line of argument, I revisit textual evidence from Radford’s and Walton’s works that aligns with my interpretation.

This article offers critique of Pascoe and Stripling’s The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, which frames environmental disasters as a site of ethical and epistemic openness that enable social transformation. Although sympathetic to their justice-oriented framework, I argue that it implicitly relies on the continued epistemic labor of the most structurally marginalized. Drawing centrally on the work of Maria Lugones and Sara Ahmed, I argue that there is potentially catastrophic loses in the wake of environmental crisis that justify refusing epistemic solidarity with more privileged members of society. I contend that the ambiguity about refusal highlights a potential for Pascoe and Stripling’s framework to unintentionally be epistemically exploitative.

In “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Donald Davidson argues against the view that conventions fix the meanings of our words and for the position that a speaker’s intentions play a fundamental role in fixing what she means by her words. However, he is clear that he still holds to the externalism, holism, and literalism argued for earlier in his career. Lepore and Stone (Philosophical Perspectives, 31, 245–265, 2017) and Camp (Inquiry, 59, 113–138, 2016) suggest that the resulting picture is contradictory. In this article, I take up Lepore, Stone, and Camp’s arguments to clarify Davidson’s position and motivate an anti-conventional literalism about meaning.

In Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle offers a Sartrean account of prereflective self-awareness to explain the essential link between self-consciousness and rationality, moving away from standard Kantian interpretations that he claims presuppose rather than explain this connection. I argue that Boyle’s account provides useful tools for re-interpreting Kant’s claim that the “I think” must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. I also aim to show that Boyle’s model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant’s account (construed as a kind of prereflective consciousness) has the resources to address this challenge.

I argue that Waheed Hussain’s critique of advanced market economies would be strengthened if, rather than emphasizing how markets draw us into particular patterns of activity in a “judgment-bypassing” way, through changes in prices and wages, he focused more on an idea that he explores in the first two chapters of Living with the Invisible Hand: the need to justify the specific institutional powers that an advanced market economy creates. I examine how this suggestion relates to two of Hussain’s central claims: that markets are mechanisms of decentralized social governance, and that they pose a distinct threat to our freedom.

I argue that attempts to integrate marginalized epistemic standpoints into dominant frameworks risk treating them as resources for mainstream appropriation. Using a queer activist slogan from the AIDS crisis as a representative example, I warn that because knowledge forged in resistance is often oppositional and always situated, incorporating it into dominant frameworks can dilute its meaning or harm its creators. This points to a deeper tension within standpoint theory: emancipatory projects that seek to engage marginalized imaginaries can reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to dismantle when they fail to recognize these standpoints’ own priorities, limits, and forms of gatekeeping.

Constitutivists say authoritative practical norms are grounded in the nature of action. But how are they so grounded? I argue that there is a deep, under-appreciated division among constitutivists on this point. “Transcendental” constitutivism says all rational agents are committed to practical norms on pain of inconsistency. “Functional” constitutivism says that complying with practical norms is necessary to realize the function of action. These views come apart, and the distinction between them has important implications for both how constitutivists should defend their view and how they should respond to the most popular objections to it: the “shmagency” and “bad action” problems.

Despite the centrality of the achievement thesis within standpoint epistemology, thereare gaps in the literature on the epistemic significance of consciousness-raising and itsrole in providing access to knowledge that was previously inaccessible. To addressthese gaps, I argue that consciousness-raising is a transformative experience, one thatmakes us a different person. If, as the standpoint epistemologist suggests, what weknow is sensitive to facts about who we are, then to change what we know we mustchange who we are.

After presenting Boyle’s appeal to the Sartrean notion of nonpositional self-awareness in explaining Evans’ “transparency fact” concerning self-knowledge, I argue that his explanation suffers a certain instability. To the extent that nonpositional self-awareness is taken to be a matter of first-order ‘transparent’ orientation to the world, Boyle’s suggestion concerning the character of explicit positional self-knowledge is compromised. On the other hand, to the extent that nonpositional awareness is regarded as a form of genuine self-awareness, his explanation overintellectualizes first-order mental states. I conclude by raising questions regarding Boyle’s success in providing a viable alternative to epistemic accounts of basic self-knowledge.

Non-naturalists claim that normative properties are sui generis, attitude-independent, and irreducible to natural properties. A common objection is that although we shape our lives around normative properties, non-naturalism rules out any plausible explanation of how this is possible. Non-naturalism seems to imply that we are hopelessly alienated from the normative. Our goal here is to better understand this worry and use constitutivist resources to develop a novel response. The basic thought is that we are constituted—as deeply social agents—to be gripped by normative properties. So while our constitution does not ground normativity, it grounds our non-alienation from it.

Collective agents can be praiseworthy without any of their members being praiseworthy. To support this “discontinuity thesis,” we consider the role that motivation plays in the attribution of moral responsibility. An agent who is praiseworthy must have had the appropriate moral motivation. We argue that it is possible that the collective agent was appropriately motivated, while its members were not. Subsequently, we develop an account of corporate moral concern, which gives substance to this second discontinuity thesis, about the moral motivation of collective agents.

Neopragmatism is what local expressivism becomes when it is fully generalized and globalized. One of its attractions is its promise to demystify long-standing metaphysical puzzles by shifting the focus from ontology to language. Among current neopragmatists, there is an important divide. Members of one group hold that we cannot explain language without making use of normative notions such as reasons or entitlements. Members of the other group deny this. In this paper, I defend the naturalistic version of neopragmatism from arguments coming from proponents of the normative version.

Waheed Hussain’s Living with the Invisible Hand argues that, although the market economy is valuable for efficiently coordinating production and consumption, it is morally problematic because it draws us into patterns of activity that bypass our own judgment as rational beings. This makes the market potentially “authoritarian.” But what exactly does it mean to say that the market “bypasses our judgment”? In this article, I seek to clarify this idea and suggest that Hussain has actually identified a few separable senses in which it might be true. These different senses are important to distinguish because they call for different remedies.

In The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change (2024)—an energetic dovetail of disaster sociology and feminist epistemology—Pascoe and Stirling claim there is no such thing as a natural disaster, as all disasters are the product/result of human construction. They use Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival” to anchor their project and focus on Lorde’s understanding of the relationship between poetry, knowledge, and survival to critique dominant the disaster imaginaries. I suggest that a more accurate use of “A Litany for Survival” leans toward a phenomenological epistemology of surviving, rather than a focus on the survivor.

Conciliationism holds that it is rational to modify one’s beliefs in the face of disagreement. But extant conciliatory norms yield incorrect results in cases involving excessive confidence—cases in which one’s interlocutors are sure, or almost sure, that their opinions are correct. After explaining the problem of excessive confidence, I show that a Bayesian approach to Conciliationism handles the problem elegantly and effectively. Further, it has desirable—indeed essential—features, including the ability to (i) contend with multiple interlocutors, (ii) deal with gradations in competence, (iii) incorporate ubiquitous interdependence, and (iv) account for critical contextual features of cases of disagreement.

This response addresses critical engagements with The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, defending and expanding its core argument: that disasters generate epistemic opportunities capable of reshaping societies, for better or worse. Drawing from feminist and standpoint epistemologies, the authors develop a heuristic of the epistemic watershed to map how positionality, rupture, and solidarity produce or inhibit liberatory change. They confront critiques of epistemic uptake, emphasizing the ethical costs of appropriating marginalized knowledge while asserting its centrality to just disaster response. Case studies from the Altadena wildfires and post-Maria Puerto Rico illustrate how queer and Black feminist practices of survival, refusal, and community-building challenge dominant imaginaries and enable democratic transformation. Acknowledging the real harms of epistemic extraction and backlash, the authors argue for coalitional knowledge practices as essential in moments of crisis. Ultimately, they insist that disaster must be reimagined not as a neutral rupture but as a battleground for justice-oriented futures.