Research
Research
My work investigates the nature and significance of identity. I am developing a systematic treatment of problems pertaining to the metaphysics of identity and distinctness, including Black's two-sphere world, the statue and the clay, and the problem of the many. I am also developing theories about the nature of persons and the grounds of the distinctive and first-personal significance that survival (at least sometimes) has.
My goal is to discover the worldly and representational importance of identity -- that is, the determining role that identity plays in what's going on in the world, and the role that truth involving identity play in thinking about and navigating the world. You'll find my findings presented below.
The Identity of Necessary Indiscernibles
(Forthcoming, Philosophers' Imprint)
Abstract: I propose a novel metaphysical explanation of identity and distinctness facts called the Modal Proposal. According to the Modal Proposal, for each identity fact – that is, each fact of the form a=b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is necessary that the entities involved are indiscernible; and for each distinctness fact – each fact of the form a≠b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is possible for the entities involved to be discernible. I argue that the Modal Proposal has greater payoffs at less cost than any of its competitors. It gives simple, uniform, and intuitive explanations of identity and distinctness that conserve longstanding philosophical insights about identity that go back to Leibniz. It does this while making our fundamental base more parsimonious, determining whether controversial cases of identity or distinctness are possible, and expanding our understanding of these central philosophical relations.
Making Little of Abundance
Permissive ontological theories, such as Mereological Universalism and Ontological Plenitude, entail that there is an abundance of extraordinary entities. These theories seems to falsify our ordinary judgments about how many things there are in any given situation. But if anything is a Moorean fact, then the fact that I'm holding just one thing when I'm holding my mug is. Call this the counting problem for abundant ontologies.
In this paper, I develop and defend a general subjectivist theory of counting that resolves these counting problems for permissive ontologies. I argue that when we count, we do not do so by counting every distinct object in a domain, but rather that we count the number of discriminable objects in a domain, where some object x is discriminable from object y iff it is (instrumentally) permissible for you to employ knowledge that x and y are distinct. In ordinary contexts, it is not permissible to employ one’s knowledge of the existence of the extraordinary entities posited permissive ontologies. For this reason, these objects are indiscriminable and we do not count them separately from the ordinary objects they overlap with. In ordinary contexts, the objects we count are just those that we ordinarily acknowledge. So, on my view of counting, our ordinary counting judgments come out true, even if we accept a permissive ontology.
What Matters in Personal Transformations (Under Review)
Abstract: Survival is acknowledged to be significant in a distinctive and first-personal way. But not all instances of survival have this significance. Ordinary survival does, but this case does not:
Crash: Suppose you learn that, later today, you will be in a severe car crash. It may first come as a relief to learn that you will (at least biologically) survive. But suppose you learn that you will be in a permanent vegetative state. The crash will destroy the parts of your brain responsible for experience and action.
It seems that there is no first-personal difference between dying in the crash and being in a permanent vegetative state. Whatever is distinctively and first-personally significant about survival isn’t present.
Too little attention has been given to precisely stating what is distinctively and first-personally significant about survival. Even less attention has been given to whether undergoing certain personal transformations, experiences that change your core beliefs and values, has this significance. Consider:
Misanthrope: You are a humanitarian aid worker demolishing rock to make way for railroad tracks. You use a tampering rod to fill a blast hole with sand when the blasting powder inside explodes and sends the rod through your skull. It passes through and destroys much of your left frontal lobe. Miraculously, you survive. After your recovery, your personality is radically different from what it was before. Before your injury, your life revolved around helping others. However, after the injury, you became cruel. You quit your job because you no longer value its mission. You become a misanthrope with no care for humanity.
There seems to be a first-personal difference between surviving in Misanthrope and ordinary survival. I argue cases like Misanthrope give us reason to countenance two dimensions to the practical significance of survival: one associated with our being agents and another associated with our being subjects of experiences. In doing so, I give a precise characterization of these dimensions of distinctive first-personal significance to survival.
Covert Counterspeech
Abstract: We ought to speak up when we can. However, speaking up can sometimes be dangerous and counterproductive. Sometimes speaking up risks being met with violence. And even when there are no physical risks, speaking up can risk social, economic, or political harms. Moreover, speaking up is sometimes counterproductive. It may bring more attention to the speech one aims to counter, or incite backlash that ultimately helps the cause one is opposing. Effectively speaking up requires one to navigate these risks.
In this paper, I argue that we can avoid many of these issues using a kind of speaking up that I call covert counter-speech which works by activating latent positive attitudes in one’s audience without their awareness. I will argue that covert counter-speech is particularly effective against certain kinds of harmful speech, namely, covert dogwhistles. To make this argument, I will present two problems that Langton’s (2018) overt counter-speech faces when used against covert dogwhistles that covert counter-speech avoids.