For my papers, see my PhilPeople page, https://philpeople.org/profiles/spencer-paulson
Research Overview: Somehow minds do things that make it appropriate to assess them normatively. I’m interested in what it is about them that makes this the case. My thought is that it is somehow our ability to self-monitor or, as it is sometimes put, “step back”. To better understand the norms, their place in nature, and how they get their grip on us, I try to give an account of the self-monitoring faculty that is simultaneously empirical and philosophical. I draw on work done in developmental and evolutionary psychology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. I think self-monitoring takes different forms in different creatures and different forms ground different epistemic norms and consequently different ways of knowing. I think we self-monitor largely by simulating interpersonal argumentation, toggling between our own perspective and that of a potential critic, modifying our beliefs and intentions upon simulating counterarguments to which we can’t respond. This helps make sense of topics of interest to epistemologists such as knowledge, justification, and defeasibility. Defeaters are the materials out of which counterarguments are made. We make ourselves answerable to them (as opposed to merely evaluable in terms of them) by holding ourselves answerable to them self-monitoring in our characteristic way. Knowledge is the standing we have when our beliefs are immune to defeat and, consequently, counterargument. It is like a winning hand in interpersonal argumentation. Justification is like a winning hand in the solitaire version of it.
I am working on extending the account to inquiry, suspended judgment, assertion, and knowledge-how. I am also working on filling in the sketch of the self-monitoring faculty provided in previous work by integrating it into a broader account of mental architecture. In previous work, I extended it to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule (here). The article is largely framed in terms of the consequences for rule consequentialism, but my hope is eventually to follow it up with work on implications for other ethical positions that involve rule internalization (e.g., Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen-style egalitarianism, Viehoff-style relational egalitariansism, etc.).
I am also interested in whether a silicon-based computer could ever self-monitor in the way we do. If programmed correctly, it could resemble us at an abstract, functional level. Is that enough to make it appropriate for us to take the participant’s stance toward it? Part of what makes the self-monitoring faculty normatively significant is that it enables us to toggle between our own perspective and that of an interlocutor. The extent to which a digital computer to do the same is not immediately clear.
I have a (somewhat separate) interest in political philosophy. The topics that interest me most are political justification, authority and legitimacy. I am interested in how these things bear on our ability to reflectively endorse our forms of government and feel at home in our institutions. I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about the extent to which democratic legitimacy depends on knowledgeable political participation and the achievement of substantively good outcomes. I did some work on this in graduate school (here) and I'm getting back into it at the moment.
