My research interests are most naturally classified as philosophy of thought. How should we understand de se thought? Could there be forms of conceptual thought that look more like maps than like language? Is there a temporal dimension to de se thought? Does de nunc thought have proprietary features that risk slipping under the radar if we approach it with theoretical tools built to deal with de se thought? I'm also interested in bodies - in particular, the special ways we epistemically interact with our own bodies, and how that affects how we think of ourselves. And for better or worse, I seem to think about immunity to error through misidentification quite a bit.
Papers
'Conscious Experience: What's In It For Me?' (coauthored with Alexander Geddes), in The Sense of Mineness, OUP (forthcoming)
'The Essential non-Indexical', in Philosophers' Imprint, 19:20, 2019
'The Inside-Out Binding Problem', in Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science, Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy, Charles Spence (eds.) Routledge, 2019
'Talking our way to Systematicity', Philosophical Studies, published online 2018
'Crossed Wires About Crossed Wires: somatosensation and immunity to error through misidentification', Dialectica, 71:1, 2017
'Thinking About You', Mind, 126:53, 2017
'The Subjective Perspective in Introspection', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23: 3-4, 2016
Book reviews
About Oneself: de se thought and communication, Manuel García-Carpintero and Stephan Torre (eds), OUP: 2016; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Projects
Persons as Animals
In 2015-16 I worked with Helen Steward on her AHRC-funded Persons as Animals project. The guiding idea of the project was to consider how taking seriously our animal natures will bear on philosophical questions not normally approached through the lens of our animality – specifically, questions about the nature of human perception, agency and cognition. My work on the project gravitated around the third strand; as one species among others, what reasons do we have for thinking that our thought is signficantly unlike that of other animals?
Here's a blog post I wrote about some of the work we did on the project.
First person thought
My doctoral project took as its starting point two prima facie plausible features of first person thought: its pure reflexivity on the one hand, and on the other its special relationship to a limited cluster of ways of knowing about ourselves in which we are seemingly given to ourselves in a distinctively first personal way. I proposed a new model of first person thought that brings together these two features by casting our special first personal forms of self-knowledge in a role associated with comprehension rather than one of reference-determination.
Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the papers coming out of that project.
Papers
'Conscious Experience: What's In It For Me?' (coauthored with Alexander Geddes), in The Sense of Mineness, OUP (forthcoming)
'The Essential non-Indexical', in Philosophers' Imprint, 19:20, 2019
'The Inside-Out Binding Problem', in Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science, Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy, Charles Spence (eds.) Routledge, 2019
'Talking our way to Systematicity', Philosophical Studies, published online 2018
'Crossed Wires About Crossed Wires: somatosensation and immunity to error through misidentification', Dialectica, 71:1, 2017
'Thinking About You', Mind, 126:53, 2017
'The Subjective Perspective in Introspection', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23: 3-4, 2016
Book reviews
About Oneself: de se thought and communication, Manuel García-Carpintero and Stephan Torre (eds), OUP: 2016; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Projects
Persons as Animals
In 2015-16 I worked with Helen Steward on her AHRC-funded Persons as Animals project. The guiding idea of the project was to consider how taking seriously our animal natures will bear on philosophical questions not normally approached through the lens of our animality – specifically, questions about the nature of human perception, agency and cognition. My work on the project gravitated around the third strand; as one species among others, what reasons do we have for thinking that our thought is signficantly unlike that of other animals?
Here's a blog post I wrote about some of the work we did on the project.
First person thought
My doctoral project took as its starting point two prima facie plausible features of first person thought: its pure reflexivity on the one hand, and on the other its special relationship to a limited cluster of ways of knowing about ourselves in which we are seemingly given to ourselves in a distinctively first personal way. I proposed a new model of first person thought that brings together these two features by casting our special first personal forms of self-knowledge in a role associated with comprehension rather than one of reference-determination.
Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the papers coming out of that project.
