Research

Overview

I have ongoing research projects in social and individual epistemology, philosophy of cognitive science, and social metaphysics. I am especially interested in the possibility for groups and other non-individual entities to realize cognitive states and processes, and in the implications of this possibility for epistemology.

Book project

My current research priority is a monograph tentatively titled Thought in Space: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Hybrid Cognitive Subjects. The project, which expands on work initially developed in several of the publications listed below, has two main aims. The first is to defend a form of vehicle externalism that can be understood as a middle group between the extended cognition and embedded cognition approaches. The second is to unify that form of vehicle externalism with a virtue reliabilist approach to epistemic normativity. The result is an approach to the epistemic states of hybrid subjects that offers a response to an important existing line of objection to virtue reliabilism and serves as the foundation for an account of the epistemic states of group agents.

Additional research projects

Alongside my current book project, I am working to develop the applications of the approach to group doxastic and epistemic states defended therein. In particular, I defend the view that scientific progress can be understood in terms of the growth of group knowledge.

I am also working to expand on my existing work on the epistemology of conspiracy theories, knowledge-how, and the structures of group agents. Drafts of my recent work in these areas are available below, and I welcome feedback.