Research

My current and planned research is in the philosophy of language and mind, including aesthetics. Methodologically, my research program brings the study of historical philosophy together with a critical assessment of contemporary linguistics and empirical psychology to explain some of the philosophical puzzles concerning human cognition.

For more, see the papers below:

Mary Shepherd on the Role of Proofs in Our Knowledge of First Principles.Noûs 56(2) (2022): 473-493 (penultimate draft) (published version)

This paper examines the role of reason in Shepherd's account of acquiring knowledge of the external world. I argue that reason plays an important, but not foundational role. Certain principles enable us to make the required inferences for acquiring knowledge of the external world. These principles are basic, foundational and, more importantly, self-evident and thus justified in other ways than by demonstration. Justificatory demonstrations of these principles are neither required, nor possible. Given the tradition Shepherd is working in, I call these principles first principles. Shepherd should have said that we know the first principles of any science, in general, and that everything which begins to exist must have a cause (the causal maxim henceforth), in particular, via intuition, not via reason. Reasoning about such principles can help their self-evidence shine through in certain cases; their justification, and our being justified in believing them, does not come from this reasoning, however.

Perception As A Multi-Stage Process: A Reidian Account.Journal of Scottish Philosophy 19(1) (2021): 57-74 (penultimate draft) (published version)

The starting point of this paper is Thomas Reid's brand of anti-skepticism: he believed that our knowledge of the external world is justified. The ground zero of this knowledge is the information we acquire about our environment via perception. Reid argues that perception grounds our knowledge of the external world, even though perception is merely reliable, and not infallible. There are two main features that make perception a weapon of choice in Reid's battle against skepticism: (i) perception (proper) is epistemically immediate; relatedly, (ii) the knowledge acquired via perception(proper)is not the result of learning, experience, or reasoning. Given these normative parameters, this paper argues that, for Reid, the mechanism of perception proper (aka original perception) is a multi-stage process, with sequential and independent stages of acquiring and processing information, which must occur, for a subject to perceive a body with its qualities.

Relinquishing Control: What Romanian De Se Attitude Reports Teach Us About Immunity To Error Through Misidentification. In Alessandro Capone, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, and Alessandra Falzone (eds.), Indirect Reports and Pragmatics in the World Languages (p. 299-313). Springer International Publishing, 2019. (penultimate draft) (published version)

Higginbotham (2003) argued that certain linguistic items of English necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates. For languages where PRO does not play the syntactical role it does in English, one could investigate whether there are obligatory control elements akin to PRO, which force a de se interpretation of the relevant reports, and thus indicate that those reports are immune to error through misidentification (IEM henceforth). Folescu & Higginbotham (2012) argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn't allow for PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood of certain verbs. However, that paper did not account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display IEM in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Moreover, in Romanian, there are reports that do not look as if they're expressing de se attitudes (since they do not have the usual de se triggers) that are, nonetheless, expressing thoughts that have IEM. Their IEM, moreover, is not even lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given these data from Romanian, I argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be explained starting either from the syntactical or lexical structure of a language.

Using Benevolent Affections To Learn Our Duty. Mind 127(506) (2018): 467-489 (published version)

The puzzle is this: I argue that for Reid, moral sense needs benevolent affections — i.e. some of our animal, non-cognitive principles of action — to apply rules of duty, since the moral sense alone doesn't always tell us whether the rules apply. But duty can conflict with benevolent affections. In this paper, I argue that Reid takes moral psychology seriously and that he believes that our natural benevolent affections can be used as indicators of duty. Although creative, his account has a major problem, because he does not resolve certain conflicts that arise between what action a duty prescribes and what action a natural affection, associated to that duty, inclines us to do.

Remembering Events: A Reidean Account of (Episodic) Memory. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97(2) (2018): 304-321 (penultimate draft) (published version)

Memory is essential to our functioning as fully developed, social individuals. Without memory to help us retain new information, our lives would be devoid of continuity, so that questions about our identity as persons and our place in the world would be impossible to answer. According to psychologists, there are several types of memory, and one type in particular, the so-called episodic memory, is essential for keeping track of our relationships with things in our environment. One project here is to determine exactly what type of things we are related to via episodic memory. Intuitively, physical objects, broadly construed, and their properties should be on the list. In addition, events seem like good candidates. But it is difficult to understand how we can have direct access to past events, given their essentially ephemeral character. Thomas Reid offers an explanation of how memory of events is possible. This paper presents, criticizes, and amends his view that memory not only preserves our knowledge of the external world, but also contributes to such knowledge, by being essential for the perception of events.

Thomas Reid's View of Memorial Conception. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 16(3) (2018): 211-226 (penultimate draft) (published version)

Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons, and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. It is thought that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid's notion of perceptual conception (i.e. of the conception employed in perception). The present paper argues that the same is true of memory, and it offers an answer to the question: what type of conception does it employ?

Thinking About Different Nonexistents Of The Same Kind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 93 (2016): 627-649 (penultimate draft) (published version)

How is it that, as fiction readers, we are nonplussed by J. K Rowling's prescription to imagine Ronan, Bane, and Magorian, three different centaurs of the Forbidden Forrest at Hogwarts? It is usually held in the philosophical literature on fictional discourse that singular imaginings of fictional objects are impossible, given the blatant nonexistent of such objects. In this paper, I have a dual purpose: (i) on the one hand, to show that, without being committed to Meinongeanism, we can explain the phenomenon of singular imaginings of different nonexistents of the same (fictional) kind; (ii) while, at the same time, to attribute this position to Thomas Reid, thus correcting some misunderstandings of his view on imagination.

Perceiving Bodies Immediately: Thomas Reid's Insight. History of Philosophy Quarterly 32 (2015): 19-36 (penultimate draft) (published version)

In An Inquiry into the Human Mind and in Essays on Intellectual Powers, Thomas Reid discusses what kinds of things perceivers are related to in perception. Are these things qualities of bodies, the bodies themselves, or both? This question places him in a long tradition of philosophers concerned with understanding how human perception works in connecting us with the external world. It is still an open question in the philosophy of perception whether the human perceptual system is providing us with representations as of bodies, or only as of their properties. My project in this article is to explain how, on Reid's view, we can have perceptual representations as of bodies. This, in turn, enables him to argue that we have a robust understanding of the world around us, an understanding that would be missing if our perceptual system only supplied us with representations as of free-floating properties of bodies.

Perceptual and Imaginative Conception: The Distinction Reid Missed. In Todd Buras and Rebecca Copenhaver (eds.), Mind, Knowledge, and Value: Essays in Honor of Reid's Tercentenary. Mind Occasional Series (p. 52-74). Oxford: University Press, 2015 (penultimate draft)

This paper is concerned with Thomas Reid's explanation of conception, understood as playing a key role in perception and as being essentially employed by imagination. I argue that there is a deep-rooted tension in Reid's understanding of conception, and that he conflates two different things when he describes the power of conception as being unitary.

Two Takes on the De Se. (with James Higginbotham). In Simon Prosser and François Recanati (eds.), Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: New Essays. Cambridge: University Press, 2012 (penultimate draft)

In this article we consider, relying in part upon comparative semantic evidence from English and Romanian, two contrasting dimensions of the sense in which our thoughts, including the contents of imagination and memory, and extending to objects of fear, enjoyment, and other emotions directed toward worldly happenings, may be distinctively first-personal, or "de se," to use the terminology introduced in Lewis (1979), and exhibit the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (hereafter: IEM) in the sense of Shoemaker (1968) and elsewhere.

Work in progress:

Reid and Shepherd on Beauty and the Subjectivity of Taste with Tieying Zhou (under review)

This paper first discusses Reid's views regarding beauty and the internal taste, explaining how we are supposed to make rational judgments of taste, when presented with artifacts. Beauty is considered by him to be a real excellence of an object (while deformity is the lack of such excellence) of which our internal taste informs us, when in its presence. Several circumstances may corrupt our taste, and their influence prohibits us from making a fully rational judgment. If things were to work properly, we would probably all make the same judgments, when presented with the same artifacts. We argue that this is problematic, since it requires an ideal level of education and familiarity with art to actually appreciate both ancient European art and contemporary American art correctly. To solve this problem, we turn our attention to explicating Shepherd's understanding of beauty along the lines of regular secondary qualities, like color. We will argue that for Shepherd, the key to understanding our relationship with the external world is a certain kind of inter-subjective objectivity. This applies to everything, from figure to color and beauty. Like Reid, Shepherd also believes that many things can influence our interaction with the external world; however, she sees this as an advantage, rather than a bug of the system. What emerges is a picture on which we have actual, not ideal, correct judgements of taste that allow for all sorts of artifacts to be appreciated as beautiful.

On Two Kinds of Photographs: Distinguishing between Documentaries and Photographic Works of Fiction. (draft available upon request)

Documentary photographs show us what the world is like, while photographic works of fiction invite us to imagine ways our world could be, or show us what other worlds, which may have almost nothing in common with ours, are like. In this paper, I argue that the result of watching a documentary should be the acquisition of true beliefs, based on the evidence constructed by its subject matter. The normatively of this claim is determined by the conventions associated with the interpretation of documentary photographs, as opposed t the interpretation of photographs of fiction. I believe that the best way to understand these conventions is by drawing a parallel with the norms governing assertion. The rules and goals of assertive conversations are importantly different from those of story-telling. This paper provides a way of drawing the distinction between documentaries and photographic world of fiction by arguing that it is the same as the distinction between fact and fiction.

Thinking Through The Past: Reid On The Epistemic Value Of Memory (book manuscript, in preparation). For an abstract and a descriptive table of contents, please click here.