Research & Publications

Publications 

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Published and Forthcoming

• Ma, Winnie and Vincent Valton. 2024. "Toward an Ethics of AI Belief.” Philosophy and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00762-8 (Also available on Arxiv: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.14577.)

• Ma, Winnie. 2022. “Bounded Emotionality and Our Doxastic Norms.” Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2124540.

• Ma, Winnie. 2022. “Profiling in Public Health.” In the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Public Health. Edited by Sridhar Venkatapuram and Alex Broadbent. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315675411.

• Salcedo R., Worschech A., Cardone M., Jones Y., Gyulai Z., Dai R.M., Wang E, Ma W, Haines D, O'Huigin C, Marincola FM, Trinchieri G. (2010) “MyD88-mediated signaling prevents development of adenocarcinomas of the colon: role of interleukin 18”. Journal of Experimental Medicine. 207.8: 1625-36. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20624890/

In Progress 

• “Doxastic Self-Confidence, Epistemic Injustice, and Epistemic Colonization”

There has been much discussion of epistemic injustice, defined by Fricker (2007) as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower as a result of negative identity-prejudicial stereotypes. In this paper, I introduce the notion of “doxastic self-confidence”, defined as one’s confidence in one’s doxastic competence, where one is more doxastically competent the more one believes as one ought to believe. And I suggest that philosophers of epistemic injustice ought to pay attention to the ways in which the experience of epistemic injustice can unjustly diminish the doxastic self-confidence of marginalized agents, where this unjust diminution of doxastic self-confidence itself constitutes a kind of secondary epistemic injustice. I also identify further, knock-on epistemic injustices caused by this secondary epistemic injustice, such as a tendency to show undue deference to others’ testimony, reduced doxastic ambition, and knock-on epistemic injustices resulting from the self-fulfilling nature of doxastic self-confidence. My second aim in this paper is then to present a particular notion of “epistemic colonization”, which I define as the domination and subjugation, respectively, of colonizing and colonized epistemic communities’ epistemic norms; and to identify ways in which epistemic colonization, via epistemic injustice, has led to the unjust diminution of the doxastic self-confidence of marginalized agents. I conclude with some discussion of the implications of the foregoing for our doxastic norms.

• “Doxastic Wronging (By Failing to Believe and Failing to Believing In) & Doxastic Right-Doing”

Basu and Schroeder (2019) claim that we can doxastically wrong others, that is, morally wrong them in virtue of what we believe about them. We could understand this claim narrowly as the claim that we can morally wrong others in virtue of beliefs we actually hold, or more broadly as the claim that we can morally wrong others in virtue of not holding the right kinds of doxastic attitudes towards them.  In this paper I develop and argue for this latter, broader claim: that we can morally wrong others in virtue of failing to hold the right kinds of doxastic attitudes toward them. And I argue for the complementary claim that just as we can morally wrong others in virtue of the doxastic attitudes we hold towards them, so we can doxastically do-right by others, in the sense of doing a morally good thing for them in virtue of holding the right kinds of doxastic attitudes towards them.