Research projects
At the moment I am running, or involved in running, two research projects. I am Principal Investigator of a project funded by the European Research Council, which seeks to defend a new approach in epistemology, and to apply it to a range of problems in epistemology, the study of rationality, and meta-ethics. I am also co-PI of a project funded by the Academy of Finland, which explores a range of issue at the intersection of epistemology and ethics regarding the evaluation of belief.
European Research Council Project:
Competence and Success in Epistemology and Beyond
Competence is neither necessary nor sufficient for most of the successes we care about. Good outcomes can come about as a result of good luck, and the best, most expert efforts can be thwarted by bad luck. But what about successes like knowledge, rational belief, understanding, and morally right action? Could one, for instance, believe competently, while failing to believe rationally? Or, is there such a thing as incompetent knowing? A core hypothesis of this project is that there is: cases of both competent failure and incompetent success arise for any success we might care about.
The project demonstrates how this recognition can solve a cluster of key problems in epistemology relating to so-called higher-order evidence, and how it allows accommodating internalist evaluations in more externalist frameworks. The project generalizes some of the lessons learnt to the study of structural requirements of rationality. The approach is also deployed to investigate the relationship between morally right and morally worthy action.
You can read more about the project on its website: https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/competence-and-success-in-epistemology-and-beyond
Academy of Finland Project:
Responsible Beliefs: Why Ethics and Epistemology Need Each Other
It is natural to say that we are responsible for what we think as well as for what we do, and sometimes even subject to blame of some sort for our beliefs. But this is puzzling, for it seems we can’t control our beliefs in the way we can perhaps control our actions. So in what way can we be responsible for our beliefs, and on what basis? There’s a growing realization in the literature that there are many dimensions to the evaluation of belief (e.g. epistemic, practical, and moral), but a lot of unclarity about how they relate to each other, and what the conditions of individually and socially responsible belief are. Here epistemology and ethics have much to learn from each other. This project aims to systematically explore these issues.
The project website is here: https://responsiblebeliefs.weebly.com/who-we-are.html