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PRIMARY RESEARCH

My primary research stream focuses on the connections between the phenomenal character and the representational contents of perceptual experience as well as the bearing of various empirical results on these issues.  More specific projects focus on:

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  • The Grammar of Consciousness: the claim that perceptual experiences have an argument structure akin to the grammar of a language or the rules of composition for the representational elements in maps, models, and diagrams

  • Phenomenal schematics: the claim that the phenomenal structure of a perceptual experience constrains without fully determining the possible representational contents of that experience

  • How the information processing architecture of the perceptual systems implement the structure of perceptual consciousness

  • The varieties of spatial representation within and across sensory modalities 

  • The twofold nature of our experiences of space in picture perception

  • The role of mental imagery in category perception

  • The claim that liquids and solids are different categories in visual ontology

 

SECONDARY AREAS OF RESEARCH

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

  • the relevance of work on complexity and modeling in the philosophy of science for realism about the propositional attitudes

  • pluralism about the mechanisms of causal judgement

MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

  • Biases influencing non-disabled subjects' judgements of the value or disvalue of having a disability

  • The relationship between social perception (such as perceiving the emotional expressions of others) and in-group/out-group categorization

  • The cognitive mechanisms by which subjects learn prejudicial norms

MEDICAL ETHICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHIATRY

  • the role of implicit bias in the diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain and psychiatric illness

  • the bearing of delusions on our understanding of the systematicity and compositionality of thought

OTHER PROJECTS

  • the use of schematic generality in understanding our commitments to logical truths across possible expansions of our languages

  • the role of mental imagery in different genres of film