Current Projects

Some of my current projects are as follows.  Don’t hesitate to contact me about any of these if you would like more information.

1. Introspection:  I am interested in the relation between consciousness, introspection and rationality and am preparing a book on this subject for Oxford University Press.  The basic idea is to say that there is a requirement of rationality according to which, other things being equal, if you are in a conscious state you will believe that you are modulo various background conditions.  If you abide by this requirement, you will have a rational disposition to believe that you are in a conscious state if you are in one.  I think this idea forms the basis of a plausible approach to many puzzles and problems of introspection and is superior to various other proposals, e.g., reliabilist, acquaintance-based, transparency, and constitutivist views.  

2. Non-standard Materialism and Epistemic Views of the Consciousness Problem. I just published a co-authored book with Amy Kind of Claremont McKenna College (USA) for Routledge in which we set out our contrasting views of consciousness. For many years now I have been interested in defending what is sometimes called an epistemic or incomplete knowledge view of the problem, according to which the most reasonable thing to say overall is that we are ignorant of a type of physical truth that is relevant to the nature of consciousness.  In my contribution to this volume I briefly set out this view, and then discuss what consciousness studies (both in philosophy and the sciences) looks like if we accept it.   It is often thought that saying that we are ignorant of something is not a productive view of the issue.  I think this is the wrong way to look at things.  I am also working on several related papers about Russellian monism, and other varieties of non-standard physicalism.

3. Meta-philosophy:  I am extremely interested in questions about the nature of philosophy, about the notion of progress in philosophy, and about the differences and similarities between philosophy and the social and natural sciences.   I published a book about this in 2017 and have various follow-up papers, both out and on the go.  One is on the relation between philosophy of history and philosophy of philosophy.  One is on the institutional setting of philosophy and its impact on images of the discipline;  I am particuarly interested here in what Timothy Williamson has recently called 'exceptionalism' about philosophy, i.e., the idea that philosophy is in some hard to define way, an epistemologically fundamental discipline from other disciplines in the humanities and sciences.  I am also interested in several anti-realist views about philosophy, according to which the goal of philosophy is not knowledge or truth but is rather to develop a certain sort of coherence or equilibrium in one's views.  I think these views are mistaken, but it is challenging to say what is wrong with them.

4. Language and Consciousness:  I am currently a CI on an ARC discovery grant on the language of consciousness.  Some of this work is focused on the language that we use to describe conscious states, including expressions like ‘what it is like’, ‘aware’, ‘attention’, ‘perceive' and 'imagine’.  I have also become interested recently in the idea that language enhances consciousness, and the way in which mental states are rendered consciousness by language.