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Future Blog Post

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Published: January 01, 2199

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Blog Post number 4

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2015

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 3

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2014

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 2

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2013

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 1

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2012

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

portfolio

Scientific Metaphor and the Space Between Words

Metaphors are central to scientific explanation, yet philosophers of science lack scalable methods for studying their use. This paper introduces an approach to the study of scientific metaphor that is informed by methods in natural language processing and the digital humanities. It argues that these methods can be repurposed as a philosophical tool for analyzing scientific language at scale. Using a corpus of reproductive biology articles spanning several decades and thousands of texts, the analysis draws on familiar claims from feminist philosophy of biology about gendered metaphors in descriptions of sperm and egg cells as a case study, and operationalizes these claims to track shifting patterns of linguistic association over time. The results suggest that metaphors previously identified in the literature are recoverable within this framework and that their associated patterns change in measurable ways—often through restructuring rather than disappearance. Overall, this shows how new computational methods can extend qualitative work by making large-scale patterns in metaphor use empirically tractable.

Digital Dirty Laundry: Conversational AI and the Value of Unguarded Data

Conversational AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude combine large language models with conversational interfaces. These systems are trained on massive datasets that include formal writing, indexed webpages, and spontaneous personal disclosures, which are later fine-tuned through user interaction. While recent philosophical work has focused extensively on whether chatbot outputs are trustworthy, less attention has been paid to the epistemic significance of the data these systems access. Drawing on standpoint epistemology, I argue that these systems occupy an epistemic position structurally analogous to that of insider-outsiders: because they are treated as socially inconsequential, users often disclose information that would otherwise be filtered out in ordinary conversations. I refer to this class of unguarded disclosures as digital dirty laundry. This analogy does not imply that chatbots possess standpoints or enjoy epistemic agency, but it highlights how social irrelevance can generate privileged access to certain forms of evidence. Ultimately, I argue that, at scale, chatbots’ exposure to unguarded disclosures may generate a novel evidential resource for studying patterns of human behavior, bias, and self-disclosure, but that the epistemic benefits of this position accrue primarily to the organizations that control access to their training and interaction data. This creates an asymmetry in who can access, interpret, and use this novel evidence about human behavior.

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The Problem With Who I Know: What Contextualism Can Tell Us About Interpersonal Knowledge Claims

‘I know his name.’ ‘I know something about him.’ ‘I know him.’ Consider how these uses of ‘know’ differ. The first two instances of know, seem to point to knowledge about something. Yet in the latter claim, the subject of the assertion is not a singular fact, but another person. I call these knowledge claims interpersonal knowledge. In the following paper, I provide an account for these interpersonal knowledge claims which employs the Conversational Contextualist view of language by synthesizing Allan Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivist account for ‘good’ with an account of knowledge based in social epistemology. Under my theory ‘knowing someone claims’ amount to endorsements of our beliefs; as such, there is no truth-apt interpersonal knowledge. What is occurring is a self-assessment of our relationship to another person, based on our non-cognitive attitude towards the fact that we should know them. Therefore interpersonal knowledge claims are self-affirmations that assert we are doing what we believe we should, in an attempt to embody our perceived relationship with another person.

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Defending the Hypothesis of Indifference

The problem of evil is the philosophical question regarding how to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God with the pain and suffering in the world. The Hypothesis of Indifference is Paul Draper’s proposal considering that question. His claim is that the pain and pleasure we experience in our lifetimes has nothing to do with God or some other supernatural force acting as an agent of good or evil. In this paper, I argue that Draper’s Hypothesis of Indifference is a better explanation for why we experience pain and pleasure than theism is and that it survives major contemporary criticisms posed by Peter van Inwagen and William Alston.

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