Published Work

Wu, J. Y.-C. (2024). A Defense of Impurist Permissivism. Episteme, 21(4), 1138–1158. doi:10.1017/epi.2023.22

One famous debate in contemporary epistemology considers whether there is always one unique, epistemically rational way to respond to a given body of evidence. Generally speaking, answering “yes” to this question makes one a proponent of the Uniqueness thesis, while those who answer “no” are called “permissivists”. Another influential recent debate concerns whether non-truth-related factors can be the basis of epistemic justification, knowledge, or rational belief. Traditional theories answer “no”, and are therefore considered “purists”. However, more recently many theorists have argued to the contrary, claiming that impurist factors, such as practical stakes, can sometimes encroach or even override truth-related considerations. This paper bridges the two debates by presenting and defending what I call “Impurist Permissivism”. I support Impurist Permissivism by showing how it can resist Roger White's famous Argument from Arbitrariness (2005).

[Name redacted for review purposes]

A puzzling asymmetry exists in our evidential standards for assertions about the future versus the past. The day before an election, one can assert, “Smith is going to win the election”, based on polling data and expert analysis. However, upon waking the next morning without further information, asserting, “Smith won the election”, would be infelicitous — suggesting that claims about the past require stronger evidential justification than analogous claims about the future. This past-future asymmetry, first noted by Ninan (2022), raises the question of why such a discrepancy in justification arises. Existing solutions fall into two camps. Epistemic accounts (Harman 1973, Ninan 2022) focus on justificatory standards but overlook morpho-syntactic evidentiary signaling in natural language. Semantic accounts (Cariani 2021, Cumming 2024) emphasize modality, tense, and evidentiality but underestimate the role of epistemic and psychological factors. I argue that aspect marking and proximate future constructions influence evidentiality, shaping assertability conditions cross-linguistically. Additionally, so-called “exception cases” (e.g., planned future events) do not truly undermine the asymmetry but reveal a graded felicity contrast. The asymmetry is mediated through linguistic structure but also interacts with epistemic considerations, revealing a deeper conceptual puzzle that calls for an integrated account.

[Name redacted for review purposes]

Survivor guilt appears to challenge standard philosophical accounts of guilt. According to traditional accounts, guilt is fitting only when an agent has committed a blameworthy moral wrong. Yet many paradigmatic cases of survivor guilt, such as surviving a plane crash or cancer, seem to involve neither wrongdoing nor blameworthiness. MacKenzie and Zhao (2023) therefore propose a relational account, according to which guilt can be fitting whenever an agent stands in a morally troubling asymmetry with others that she cannot justify, even in the absence of wrongdoing. I challenge the relational account’s assumption that survivorship always involves no moral wrong. Consequently, it too hastily calls for a radical revision of the traditional account of guilt. I argue that survival is a morally heterogeneous phenomenon that can be constitutively entangled with moral wrongs in complex and graded ways. For instance, survivorship may result from structural privilege in the distribution of risk and vulnerability; it may involve morally problematic choices in oppressive double binds; or it may involve what I call epistemic erasure, where one’s survival obscures the experiences of those who did not survive.

I therefore propose an entanglement account of survivor guilt. The view relaxes the fittingness condition of guilt compared to traditional accounts and holds that survivor guilt is fitting whenever survivorship falls short of full moral innocence. Finally, against the relational account, I argue that in genuinely non-wrongful arbitrary survival cases, survivor guilt is intelligible but unfitting. Such guilt often arises from counterfactual self-assessment against heroic or supererogatory standards.

[Name redacted for review purposes]

Some truths haunt us not because they are enlightening, but because they are too intrusive to ignore and too disturbing to bear. I argue that in many interpersonal contexts, individuals are protected from such epistemic intrusions by a default right not to know—an implicit entitlement to remain undisturbed by violent, disgusting, or distressing content. This right can be defended both by appeal to the vulnerability of epistemic agency under conditions of manipulation and as derivative of a more general right not to be harmed. At the same time, as Lackey (2022) emphasizes, victims and survivors of injustice plausibly possess a right to epistemic acknowledgment: a right to tell their story and a corresponding duty for others to bear witness. This paper examines a tension at the heart of epistemic reparations: when the right to turn away conflicts with the right to be known, which claim should prevail, and on what grounds? I argue that, in a significant range of cases, this is not a straightforward case of rights-balancing or priority, but a genuine dilemma that resists simple resolution.