Research
Peer-Reviewed Articles
I argue that there is an underappreciated respect in which artificial intelligence poses a threat to human connection. My central contention is that human creativity is especially capable of helping us connect to others in a valuable way, but the widespread availability of generative AI models reduces our incentives to engage in various sorts of creative work in the arts and sciences. I argue that creative endeavors must be motivated by curiosity, and so they must disclose the creative agent’s inquisitive self. It is through self-disclosure, including the disclosure of the inquisitive self, that we put ourselves in a position to be seen by and connect with others in our creative pursuits. Because relying on AI for certain generative tasks is less self-disclosive than the creative work such technologies supplant, this reliance threatens to weaken our connections to one another.
"What is Creativity?" The Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming)
I argue for an account of creativity that unifies creative achievements in the arts, sciences, and other domains and identifies its characteristic value. This account draws upon case studies of creative work in both the arts and sciences to identify creativity as a kind of successful exploration. I argue that if creativity is properly understood in this way, then it is fundamentally a property of processes, something only agents can achieve, something that comes in degrees, subjectively novel, and non-formulaic. As I develop the account, I show how it avoids challenges faced by other accounts of creativity, especially concerning creativity’s value. Hills and Bird (2018, 2019) have together argued that creativity is not necessarily valuable. My account challenges this view. If I am right that creativity is a kind of successful exploration, then creativity does have a characteristic value, specifically epistemic value.
"The Curious Case of Uncurious Creation," Inquiry (forthcoming)
This paper seeks to answer the question: Can contemporary forms of artificial intelligence be creative? To answer this question, I consider three conditions that are commonly taken to be necessary for creativity. These are novelty, value, and agency. I argue that while contemporary AI models may have a claim to novelty and value, they cannot satisfy the kind of agency condition required for creativity. From this discussion, a new condition for creativity emerges. Creativity requires curiosity, a motivation to pursue epistemic goods. I argue that contemporary AI models do not satisfy this new condition. Because they lack both agency and curiosity, it is a mistake to attribute the same sort of creativity to AI that we prize in humans. Finally, I consider the question of whether these AI models stand to make human creativity in the arts and sciences obsolete, despite not being creative themselves. I argue, optimistically, that this is unlikely.
"How to Explain How-Possibly," Philosophers' Imprint 20 (13):1-23 (2020)
Explaining how something is possible is a familiar and epistemically important achievement in both science and ordinary life. But a satisfactory general account of how-possibly explanation has not yet been given. A crucial desideratum for a successful account is that it must differentiate a demonstration that something is possible from an explanation of how it is possible. In this paper, I offer an account of how-possibly explanation that fully captures this distinction. I motivate my account using two cases, one from ordinary life and one from ornithology. On my account, a how-possibly explanation is a greater achievement than a mere description of how a state of affairs might possibly obtain. In addition to being a potential explanation of why some state of affairs actually obtains, a how-possibly explanation must involve the relief of an imaginative frustration on the part of its recipient. When a recipient’s imaginative frustration is relieved, she does not just know that the state of affairs in question is possible, but is also able to imagine how it could possibly obtain.
I currently have several other articles under review. You can see some of their titles listed on my CV. Please feel free to email me for drafts.
Edited Volume
The Philosophy of Taylor Swift: Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin (co-edited with Ryan Davis and Jessica Flanigan)
Oxford University Press (Under Contract)
Chapters
(Drafts by Request)
"Do Champagne Problems have Rational Solutions?" forthcoming in The Philosophy of Taylor Swift (OUP)
In Taylor Swift’s melancholic ballad “Champagne Problems,” the narrator repeatedly questions her own sanity. She apparently accepts the charge that she has acted irrationality in turning down a marriage proposal from a respectable man because she is unable to articulate a reason for her choice. I argue that the narrator is being far too hard on herself. To show this, I draw upon insights from Ruth Chang, Nomy Arpaly, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Kenneth Walden, and Jordan MacKenzie to offer three possible explanations of the narrator’s choice. These possible explanations are (1) that the narrator is generating and acting on a will-based reason, (2) that she is responding appropriately to an inarticulable reason, and (3) that her choice is justified by her mode of aesthetic engagement with her own life. Each potential explanation is a Champagne Solution. Each is consistent with the story we are told in the song, and each, if true, would absolve the narrator of the charge of irrationality.
"How Could it Possibly End?" forthcoming in The Philosophy of Taylor Swift (OUP)
In Taylor Swift’s “How Did it End?,” the narrator offers a series of explanations for how her relationship met its untimely demise. I argue that they fall into three categories of explanation that have been identified by philosophers of science: covering law explanations, probabilistic explanations, and causal explanations. Though the narrator knows enough about the breakup to offer explanations in all three categories, she laments at the close of the song that she still doesn’t understand how the relationship ended. This chapter diagnoses her affliction as a fascinating epistemic phenomenon: Someone can know everything about why something happened without being able to see how the outcome was possible. As the song shows, this puzzlement can be maddening, giving rise to a distinctively epistemic sort of agony. But, as I argue, this is a malady with a cure. The needed resolution is for the narrator to seek out what philosophers have called a how-possibly explanation.