carolina flores

I've starred (✰) my personal favorites. I've linked the official versions. Pre-prints are available on PhilPapers.

✰ Beyond Misinformation: Social media and the sculpting of epistemic agency Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

• Social media harms our thinking not only by spreading false claims but by reshaping how we handle information in the first place. This points to a new way environments can be epistemically hostile: not just by exploiting our existing weaknesses, but by producing new ones.

Why think that belief is evidence-responsive? In Eric Schwitzgebel and Jonathan Jong (eds.), The Nature of Belief. Oxford University Press.

• I argue that responsiveness to evidence is part of what it is to believe something, given what the concept of belief is for. I also show that this view has further theoretical and ethical payoffs.

✰ Calling trauma, elite capture, and hermeneutical injustice. The Philosophical Quarterly, 75(4):1294–1320.

• Looking at the aftermath of Portuguese colonialism, I show how appeals to trauma can sustain ignorance and wrong people by limiting their ability to make sense of their own experience (hermeneutical injustice). The case also shows that such injustice need not involve a gap in available concepts, or even bad ones.

✰ Resistant beliefs, responsive believers. The Journal of Philosophy, 122(4):133–159.

• Findings that people cling to beliefs despite the evidence are often taken to show that belief isn't responsive to evidence. I argue the opposite: properly understood, these findings support the view that belief is evidence-responsive.

Identity-protective reasoning: An epistemic and political defense. Episteme, 22(3):707-730.

• Digging in when evidence threatens beliefs tied to cherished identities can serve positive epistemic roles. Collectively, it can support a healthy division of cognitive labor. Individually, in hostile environments, it can counter ideological ignorance.

Delusions and epistemic style: A neurodiversity approach to reasoning in schizophrenia. Synthese, 205, 173.

• I make the reasoning behind delusions in schizophrenia intelligible by showing how a set of distinctive cognitive biases fit together into a coherent epistemic style. That style makes sense in light of anomalous experiences and social exclusion.

✰ Playing with labels: Identity terms as tools for building agency (with Elisabeth Camp). The Philosophical Quarterly, 74(4): 1103–1136.

• We offer an account of how identity labels work, and show how, used playfully, they can become resources for agency, solidarity, and self-construction rather than confining boxes.

Epistemic norms on evidence-gathering (with Elise Woodard). Philosophical Studies, 180(9): 2547–2571.

• We argue that there are norms governing how we gather evidence, not just how we respond to it. Our case is that what's “in the head” is not what matters most, and that everyday practices of holding each other accountable already presuppose such norms. We explore what this means for epistemic norms and inquiry. Here is a tongue-in-cheek summary.

Epistemic styles, Philosophical Topics, 49(2):35–55. (Translated into Portuguese in this volume).

• Why do people respond differently to the same evidence? Sometimes it's not because they believe different things but because they have different epistemic styles, that is, different ways of weighing and responding to evidence. I develop an account of what these are and explore its implications. Here is a short general-audience explainer.

Delusional evidence-responsiveness, Synthese 199 (3-4):6299–6330.

• I argue that delusions do respond to evidence, so their relationship to evidence is no obstacle to counting them as beliefs.

Review of Mona Simion’s Resistance to Evidence, Mind.

• I review Simion's book and compare her view of belief with my own. I also ask whether epistemic normativity can be grounded in the social.

Delusion and evidence, in Ema Sullivan-Bissett (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Delusion. Routledge, pp. 189–201.

• I survey work on how clinical delusions relate to evidence. Once we are careful about what counts as evidence and what evidence people with delusions have, delusions look less irrational and more continuous with ordinary beliefs.

Epistemic style in OCD, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 30(2): 147-150.

• I respond to Pablo Hubacher Haerle's excellent paper “Is OCD epistemically irrational?” and explore the role of epistemic style in OCD.

Essays for general audiences. See my CV for a full list.

• Jacobin: The left can't abandon nostalgia to the right
• Autostraddle: What we can learn from lesbian nuns
• Tech Policy Press: Grokipedia won't destroy knowledge, but it might divide us more
• Liberal Currents: When words are stolen (with Nico Orlandi)
• Big Think: Groupthink is for mindless pawns, but group thinking will push humanity further

earlier

• Philosophers' Magazine: Keeping better company
• Blog of the APA: Are they all stupid and irrational?
• 1,000-Word Philosophy: Critical thinking: What is it to be a critical thinker?

in Portuguese

• Shifter: Corpos espumosos e o confronto com a vulnerabilidade
• Shifter: Entrevista com Susan Stryker
• Público: A Igreja de Francisco não é para “todos, todos, todos”, por muito que o repitam

In 2025-2026, I edited the APA Studies on LGBTQ Philosophy. Check out the 2025 edition, "Make philosophy queer again!", for delectable essays on queering philosophy, as well as The Queer Agenda, a rubric with reading suggestions and open questions. The 2026 issue will be on resistance and solidarity. This work followed upon my organizing the Queer Analytic Philosophy Conference at UC Santa Cruz (with Nico Orlandi and Lauren Lyons) in 2025 - the first conference of its kind!

I am also currently guest editing (with Gloria Andrada) a special issue of Hypatia on feminist philosophy of mind. This followed our workshop on the topic at NOVA University in Lisbon in 2023. Check out our post for the Blog of the APA about the project.

In 2019-20, I was Director of MAP (Minorities and Philosophy). In 2018, I co-organized a large MAP conference on oppression and resistance.

I have taught introduction to philosophy (semester and quarter versions), social and political epistemology (semester and quarter versions), feminist philosophy (semester and quarter versions), critical thinking (for which I currently use, and recommend, David Manley's Reason Better), and philosophy of cognitive science. I have also taught advanced seminars on bias, the attention crisis, and misinformation and propaganda. Syllabi are linked.

I have also designed materials on skills in philosophy: reading philosophy, coming up with questions for papers, selecting a bibliography, thinking of objections, outlining, writing a paper, and networking and presenting at conferences, as well as materials for in-class outline and draft workshops (following Thi Nguyen's workshop sequence). Feel free to use or adapt any of these!

You can download my CV here.

You can email me at c.flores at edu.ulisboa.pt. You can find me on Mastodon and Bluesky as @floresophize.

I'm happy to talk with journalists, and to speak to general audiences, about misinformation and how social media shapes the way we think, why people resist evidence, and identity and memory after colonialism. English or Portuguese.