Research Projects

• Fundamentals of Cognition

  Seeking a comprehensive, scientific model of the mind and its functions.

  Understanding the most outstanding features of the mind – its representing the world, the flow of conscious experience, etc. – remains a serious challenge. Despite rapid advances in the cognitive sciences, we are still a long way from a comprehensive understanding of the human mind. This project includes work on information theoretic psychosemantics, the architecture of cognitive systems, and the role of prediction systems in cognition.

   

• Science of Values

  Empirically engaged explorations of moral, political, and epistemic norms.

  This program focuses on improving our understanding of normativity – both facts about how we understand and apply normative claims and in what those facts tell us about norms and normativity more broadly. Related projects explore attitudes towards various emerging technologies (e.g., AI, blockchain), aspects that influence our normative assessments (e.g., the impact of truth on assessments of justification, etc.), assessments of tools to improve normative performance (e.g., moral/epistemic education), recommendations to protect social systems from harm (e.g, preventing misinformation from overtaking social networks),  etc.

   

• Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Global Health

  Improving global health outcomes through improved policy and practices.

  Increasing international interconnectivity, global wealth disparity, and a changing global climate undermine efforts to improve health outcomes on the global scale. My work in this area engages with the complex mishmash of economics, law, and epidemiology involved in creating a functional global health system. Related projects address questions philosophical and methodological challenges in the evaluation of health conditions, ways to improve the global health policy framework, and policies to improve specific health related outcomes.

   

• Knowing and Science

  Expanding the limits of the ways we can know.

  Tools for generating knowledge advance over time, and so must our understanding of the importance of those tools. Work related to this program explores understandings of scientific explanation, the interactions of scientific and non-scientific modes of knowing, epistemic issues inherent in scientific practices, and issues in the sociology of knowledge.

   

• Miscellaneous Programs

  Other questions of interest.

  One-off or fledgling projects that don’t fit neatly into other categories are included here.