Zoe Drayson

I am Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. 

I previously held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Stirling and the Australian National University, and I have also been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

My research is in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, focusing on the relationship between different levels of explanation in philosophy and the mind-sciences. My current work explores the naturalistic metaphysics of cognitive science, asking what we can and cannot learn about the nature of the mind from scientific theory and methodology.

Recent publications include:

• Drayson, Zoe. (forthcoming) The psychology of implicit knowledge, in Kurt Sylvan, Jonathan Dancy, Matthias Steup, and Ernest Sosa (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology (3rd edition). Wiley-Blackwell. 

• Drayson, Zoe (2024) Personal/subpersonal distinction, in Michael C. Frank and Asifa Majïd (eds.) Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT. 

• Williams, Danielle and Drayson, Zoe. (2023) Realism and instrumentalism in Bayesian cognitive science, in Tony Cheng, Ryoji Sato, and Jakob Hohwy (eds.) Expected Experiences: The Predictive Mind in an Uncertain World. Routledge. 

• Drayson, Z. (2023) Truth, success, and epistemology: a response to Stokes’s Thinking and Perceiving, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 4.

• Drayson, Zoe (2023) The fragmented mind: personal and subpersonal theories of implicit cognition, in J Robert Thompson (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition. Routledge. 

Final drafts of these and all my publications are available to download here and on PhilPapers.

I have work in progress on the following topics:

• the medium-independence of computation

• the relationship between analogue computation and analogue representation

• the explanatory role of abstraction in cognitive science

• the status of cognitive representations as theoretical posits

• the role of internal linguistic structure in arguments for and against extended cognition

My CV can be downloaded here.