Research Fellow
Josh.Kelsall@warwick.ac.uk

Dr Joshua Kelsall is a post-doctoral research fellow and member of the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group. His research interests are in epistemology and moral philosophy, with a particular focus on the philosophy of trust, expertise, and technology. Before coming to Warwick, he completed his thesis - Trust, Audit, and Public Engagement - at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling. This project explored the relationship between audit and public trust in public institutions.

Since joining Warwick, he has worked on multiple research projects. These include Moral Obligation and Epistemology: The Case of Vaccine Hesitancy; GEMS: Gaming Ecosystem as a Multi-Layered Security Threat; and AdSoLve: Addressing Socio-technical Limitations of LLMs for Medical and Social Computing.

The first project explores moral and epistemological concerning vaccine hesitancy, taking the recent COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. GEMS explores research ethics questions pertaining to the use of AI systems to research and combat terrorism and radicalisation in online video-gaming platforms. AdSoLve explores the limitations, ethical and legal implications of using Large Language Models in legal and medical diagnostic settings, and to develop a framework for trustworthy AI use in such cases.

Publications

(2024) "Towards a Non-Reliance Commitment Account of Trust"Link opens in a new window Journal of Value Inquiry

(2024) with Tom Sorell "Two Kinds of Vaccine Hesitancy"Link opens in a new window Social Epistemology

(2024) "COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy as Unfair Free-riding"Link opens in a new window Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy

(2023) "The Rationality of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy"Link opens in a new window Episteme​

(2022) "‘Trusting-to’ and ‘Trusting-as’: A qualitative account of trustworthiness"Link opens in a new window Inquiry

(2021) "The Trust-Based Communicative Obligations of Expert Authorities"Link opens in a new window The Journal of Applied Philosophy

(2017) "Is intuition best treated as a sui generis mental state, or as a belief?"Link opens in a new window Aporia

​