Research

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

'Lit From Within', in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming

'Conscious Experience: What's In It For Me?' (coauthored with Alexander Geddes), in The Sense of Mineness, OUP (forthcoming)

'First Person Thought' (coauthored with Daniel Morgan), Analysis, 80:1, 2020

'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

About Oneself: de se thought and communication, Manuel García-Carpintero and Stephan Torre (eds), OUP: 2016; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Projects

About Time

Discussion of indexical thought in contemporary philosophy of mind is dominated by de se thought. It is sometimes observed — though typically as something of an afterthought — that de nunc thought displays some analogous behavioural features, and that it correspondingly occupies a privileged cognitive role parallel to the one associated with de se thought. But the particulars are often left gestural, with readers left to fill in the details from the case of the de se. This project, co-run with Dr Daniel Morgan (York), considers the methodological worry that by prioritising de se thought as the central platform for discussion of indexical thought in general, we risk systematically under-recognising some of the most important and unusual features of de nunc thought. The prediction is that by considering the de nunc on its own terms we will find important epistemic goods that are lacking from de se states, and that have fallen under the radar by the lights of the standard approach. This brings a revisionary idea in its train: that a properly worked out philosophy of mind for indexical temporal thought will show de nunc thought to play a more fundamental role in our cognitive economies than the historically privileged de se thought.

Here are the abstracts from our first conference attached to this project, in June 2019.

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.