About
I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz. I came to UC Santa Cruz in 2002 after receiving my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. My research focuses on topics in social philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of psychology, and public philosophy.
In 2015, I founded UCSC’s Center for Public Philosophy, which I continue to direct. Information about the Center’s programs, my teaching, and other research projects can be found on the pages of this site.
The following items give a sense of the focus of my research:
Motivated reasoning and the ethics of belief
In recent years, research on motivated reasoning (rationalization, denial, self-deception, etc.) has exploded across political science, psychology, and philosophy, especially since the U.S. election in 2016. In this article in Philosophy Compass (April 2022), I discuss the normative status of motivated reasoning: What are the norms that it violates? In the paper, I introduce two central themes my current book project: (1) what I call motivated micro-processes, whereby a goal to draw a predetermined conclusions impacts one’s reasoning but only slightly (via attributions of gradable properties, for instance); and (2) the grounds of attributions of motivated reasoning to other people, and the subsequent epistemic and moral judgments made on their basis.
Rewarding one-sided reasoning
In this OpEd in the New York Times, Francesca Hovagimian and I call for alternative forms of school debate, ones that unlike traditional formats do not reward tendencies of one-sided reasoning. A winner of the American Philosophical Association’s Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest.
Rationalization in ethics and philosophy
In this two-part post at Imperfect Cognitions, Eric Schwitzgebel and I summarize the themes of our recent paper on rationalization (in Moral Inferences, eds. J.F. Bonnefon & B. Trémoliére, Psychology Press).
Part 1: Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don’t protect you
Part 2: Why moral and philosophical disagreements are especially fertile grounds for rationalization.
Are you sure? Truth, certainty, and politics
In this animation at Aeon, I show how a hypothetical example about a rope tied around the Earth’s equator raises critical questions about our political thinking, our philosophical reasoning, and our interpretations of other people.
Misunderstanding: the Ethics and Epistemology of Motivated Reasoning
For the last decade, I’ve been working on a large book on motivated reasoning. Its central focus is reasoning about motivated reasoning. I focus most of all on our social practices whereby we interpret other people to be enacting motivated reasoning and, in turn, form moral and epistemic judgments about them. Social practices around motivated reasoning play an impactful role in many areas of our lives. The book consists in a sustained investigation into them. Drawing from recent work in both the social sciences and recent philosophy (especially epistemology), I argue that they are on shaky ground. The book lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of our epistemic, social, and moral responsibilities. It initiates an enterprise which is essential for politics and social justice, and perhaps most of all, for what it means to be a responsible thinker.