Research

Publications:

Kraepelin's Psychiatry in the Pragmatic Age. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 2022.

Works In Progress:

[A paper on reasons and why they are constitutive of actions, not causes.](Under Review.)

The Capacity to Represent. (Email for a draft.)

What is the relationship between purposive behaviour and subdoxastic representational content, if content plays the explanatory role envisaged by the cognitive and biological sciences? According to a venerable tradition, content is prior to any kind of action: to act, an organism must first be capable of forming and trading on representational states. My aim, in this paper, is to motivate and articulate an opposing, 'purpose-first' view: representing environmental features is a species of action. For an organism to represent is for it to encounter the world in the pursuit of its goals. I argue that this proposal dovetails with recent advances in the biological and cognitive sciences, and promises to answer traditional questions about the determinacy and normativity of representation.

Representational Function and Flexibility. (Email for a draft.)

According to the 'selected effects' approach to mental function, the function of a representational state is determined by its causal history. I argue that the selected effects view is insufficient to explain the flexibility of representationally-mediated behaviour. I support this claim by discussing recent evidence about phenotypic plasticity, and its importance for adaptiveness. The takeaway is that the selective history of a trait cannot be the full story about mental function.

Purposes and Structured Thought. (Email for a draft.)

What marks an advance from perception to singular demonstrative thought, if perceptual processing is goal-directed? This paper presents two possible extensions, and offers preliminary reason to prefer the latter. The first articulates the difference between perceptual content and demonstrative thought in terms of different vehicles of representation. An upgrade from perception to demonstrative thought involves a process of “re-formatting”. The upshot of this strategy, I argue, is that it locates an explanatory role for consciousness in thought. The second articulates the difference between perception and demonstrative thought in terms of the sophistication of our rational capacities. On this view, demonstrative thought is also purposive. The upshot is that it deflects some problems with the vehicle-based strategy, but the price of entry is that it may blur traditional lines between perception and cognition.