About
I’m a philosopher thinking about belief in its most basic sense — what philosophers have traditionally called ‘judgment’.
Belief settles the question of how things are, coming down on one side of an issue against the other. I argue that this exclusion belongs to the act of judging itself — not inherited from a prior incompatibility among contents — and that the act is self-conscious in and through the thinker’s performance of it. In judging, the thinker knowingly excludes: to grasp their acceptance as correct — as in agreement with how things stand — is already to grasp the contradictory thought as ruled out. To accept a thought and to reject its contradictory are accordingly not two separate performances, but two articulations of a single self-conscious act. ‘Acceptance’ names the act from the side of what is taken to be so, ‘rejection’ names it from the side of what is ruled out, and ‘negation’ names the exclusionary form in virtue of which the act is determinate.
I develop this account of judgment alongside a corresponding account of propositional content, on which contents are not self-standing objects awaiting our grasp, but forms of the capacity to judge. Each thought is a way in which a shared rational power can be exercised. The larger aim is to explain what logic is and how its necessity is grounded in the nature of thought as such. On this account, the principle of non-contradiction is not an external rule imposed upon thought, but an articulation of what it is to think determinately at all. It follows that contradictory contents do not, strictly speaking, exist: a sentence of the form ‘p & ¬p’ does not describe a way things cannot be, but fails to express a thought at all. My work thus sits at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of logic, and metaphysics.
I’m a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Before moving to Pittsburgh, I completed a B.S. in physics at Yale and the BPhil in philosophy at Oxford. Outside of my studies, I am academic philosophy’s foremost fan of the New York Mets.