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, 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 (2022) What we talk about when we talk about mental states. In Tamas Demeter, Adam Toon, and T Parent (eds.) Mental Fictionalism, Routledge

• Drayson, Zoe (2021) Naturalism and the metaphysics of perception. In Heather Logue and Louise Richardson (eds.) Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press

• Drayson, Zoe. (2020) Why I am not a literalist. Mind and Language 35, 661-670

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:

• varieties of realism and antirealism about mental representation

• realist and instrumentalist interpretations of Bayesian cognitive science

• the philosophy and science of implicit cognition

• the metaphysical commitments of naive realism about perception

My CV can be downloaded here.