My research is about how vagueness and indeterminacy interact with the realms of the evaluative, the normative and the social.
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In previous work ('Superhard choices', Australasian Journal of Philosophy), I focused especially on the interaction between vagueness and the all-things-considered better-than relation. In my main current project, I explore the interaction of vagueness and indeterminacy with the normative, especially the moral (but also the prudential and the epistemic). For more about it, see here.
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In another, nascent project, I explore the interaction of vagueness and indeterminacy with the social. A paper coming out of this project is published in Thought and another is forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly (see below).
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(In the more distant past, as part of my MPhil coursework at St. Andrews, I wrote a paper on the relationship between fiction and emotion that was later published in the leading American journal in aesthetics—see further below.)
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Duchamp's paradox
I argue that, despite the vast philosophical and art-historical literature on Duchamp’s Fountain, close attention to historical evidence reveals that at heart of the practice of art around the 1910s lay an overlooked paradox—an apparently valid argument, with apparently true but overlooked premises, to the then apparently absurd conclusion that Fountain is a work of art. In response to it, I identify solutions that can be inferred from leading theories of art. Then I show that such solutions rely on the widespread and never disputed assumption that there is, and has always been since the 1910s, a fact of the matter about whether Fountain is a work of art. If this assumption is false, I argue, a new kind of solution emerges and with it new possibilities about the extent to which a revolution can change the practice of art.
Julian Wasser, Duchamp smoking in front of Fountain, 1963
How (not) to be a buck-passer about art
According to buck-passers about art, such as Dominic Lopes, every work of art belongs to some art. I distinguish two versions of the buck-passing theory of art—what I call the double-buck-passers’ (DBP) view and the single-buck-passers’ (SBP) view—and point out that Lopes’s view is an instance of the latter. Then I argue the SBP view faces a dilemma, each horn of which leads to trouble. In doing so, I explore uncharted territory: the implications of vagueness for theories of art. I conclude that buck-passers should not be single-buck-passers.
David Teniers the Younger, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm at his Gallery in Brussels, c. 1651
Superhard choices
Sometimes, when comparing a pair of items, it appears that neither is better than the other, nor that they are equally good, relative to a certain value that they bear. Cases of this kind have come to be referred to as superhard comparisons. What grounds superhard comparisons? On the dominant views, held by Joseph Raz and Ruth Chang, they are grounded, at least partially, in the failure of the three classic value relations—‘better than’, ‘worse than’ and ‘equally good’. On an alternative view, which might be called the vagueness view, first developed by John Broome, they are grounded in vagueness about which of the classic value relations holds between the items. In this paper, I pay special attention to superhard comparisons in the context of choice and develop a novel argument against the dominant views on the basis of an account of decision-making under vagueness in ‘better than’. The upshot is that a new vagueness view emerges.
Walton's quasi-emotions do not go away
The debate about how to solve the paradox of fiction has largely been a debate between Kendall Walton and the so-called thought theorists. In recent years, however, Jenefer Robinson has argued, based on her affective appraisal theory of emotion, for a noncognitivist solution to the paradox as an alternative to the thought theorists’ solution and especially to Walton's controversial solution. In this article, I argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, Robinson's affective appraisal theory is compatible with Walton's solution, at the core of which lies the thesis that there are quasi-emotions. Moreover, since Robinson's theory is compatible with Walton's solution, I show how it can be used as a model to empirically test whether quasi-emotions exist.
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining, 1980