Publications
Understanding Biology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2024). Lawrence, E., El-Shazly, A., Seal, S., Joshi, C. K., Liò, P., Singh, S., ... & Greenig, M. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04106.
Overview
The desire for understanding lies at the centre of our lives. We don't want to merely know things, but we desire to have deep and systematic familiarity with them. My past and emerging research center around what it means to understand something. I am particularly interested in the nature of understanding, the various roles it plays, how it can be acquired, whether it can be taught, and its special value.
Since understanding comes in different forms, I am also interested in the various domains in which we strive to achieve it. So, for example, I am interested in questions surrounding scientific and moral understanding.
Outside the primary focus of my research, I like tracing historical conceptions of understanding and grasping, specifically in medieval Islamic (esp. Al-Ghazali) and early modern European (esp. Descartes) philosophy, and I like to think about understanding's relationship to wisdom, imagination, virtue, and love.
Understanding
In my PhD project I am developing an account of understanding according to which understanding is matter of cognitively structuring and organizing information. Drawing on cognitive science literature I develop this in terms of mental 'conceptions'. The primary motivation behind the project is the need to move beyond doxastic and propostional frameworks of understanding the mind.
Here's a handout with an overview of the project.
I develop this account through five papers addressing (1) the nature of understanding, (2) how we go about getting it, (3-4) how we communicate it, (5) how certain forms of it underpin moral virtue:
[Under review]
A paper developing an account of understanding in terms of how we structure and organize information. (Handout)
Inquiring to Understand
A paper exploring how understanding interacts differently with inquiry than knowledge. I argue that inquiring to understand generates interesting non-propositional & non-evidential epistemic norms. (Slides)
[Under review]
A paper arguing for the limits of transmitting understanding through testimony and exploring the way it is communicated beyond testimony. The paper especially focuses on the different kind of epistemic dependence involved in communicating understanding. (Slides)
Trust for Understanding
A paper developing a model of epistemic perspectival dependence & trust, and sketches of how it facilitates acquiring understanding from others. (Handout)
Moral Understanding & Humility
A paper developing an account of the moral virtue of humlity in terms of the epistemic achievement of moral understanding. Specififcally, I argue that humility is a an inquisitive/recognitional virtue. The account sheds light not only on humility, but how we should go about developing an account of moral understanding relevant to understanding virtue. (Handout)
I talk about my research with Helene Scott-Fordsmand in this video:
Clarity
A second project I'm working on is on the epistemic and moral significance of cognitive phenomenology. In my MA thesis, The Clarity of Understanding (click for draft), I argue that grasping some content, as opposed to merely knowing it, is grounded in a distinct kind of conscious experience: Clear perception. Clarity is a subjective, phenomenal quality, a quality of how you consciously experience things. So, on my view, grasping is a phenomenal state.
I think that clarity sheds light on a range of concerns surrounding the phenomenology of understanding, including its relation to abilities and know-how, whether it can be transmitted through testimony, and its special value. But I also think that clarity sheds light on broad issues such as epistemic justification and moral action. Here is some work-in-progress on this project:
'Clarity, Understanding, and Testimony'
A paper about how clarity limits testimonial understanding. (Draft available.)
'The Clarity of Understanding'
A paper in explicating grasping in terms of clear knowledge, and explaining the relationship between clarity and the abilities associated with grasping.