Research Program

Theory of Mind & Mindreading

A central thread of my research concerns how minds represent other minds. I work on the attribution of knowledge, belief, and desire across species, including the logical problem of mindreading, the question of whether non-human animals genuinely attribute mental states, and factive accounts of knowledge attribution in monkeys and great apes.

My MA thesis developed a "multiple soft-indicators" model designed to dissolve the logical problem, and my recent work with Evan Westra examines the role of metarepresentation in desire-attribution. This research also bears on the status of folk psychology itself: I argue that evidence from animal and infant mindreading poses serious empirical challenges for fictionalist and interpretivist accounts of the mental.

Comparative & Developmental Cognition

I combine philosophical analysis with empirical research on animal minds. As a visiting scholar in Christopher Krupenye's Social and Cognitive Origins Group at Johns Hopkins, I helped launch a canine cognition lab and design theory-of-mind experiments with dogs, including published work on whether dogs rationally infer the causes of failed actions.

I am interested in what comparative and developmental evidence, from monkeys and great apes to dogs and human infants, can tell us about the structure and origins of social cognition.

Norm Psychology

A common argument holds that humans are the only "truly" normative creatures because only we engage in third-party punishment, in which a disinterested party punishes someone for violating a social norm. I argue against this: the apparent absence of third-party punishment among non-human primates is no good reason to deny that they possess a norm psychology. Getting the question right first requires care with terminology, so I distinguish traditions, culture, and social norms, and argue that "primate culture" is the relevant background against which the debate should be run, rather than narrow domains like tool use.

I then develop a parity argument. Drawing on evidence from children, WEIRD adults, and smaller-scale hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, I show that even among humans who plainly possess a norm psychology, third-party punishment is rare or absent. If it is not the foundational mechanism of norm maintenance even for us, it is unfair to make it the evidential bar for primates. The constructive upshot is methodological: we should look to the relevant domains of primate culture, to alternative forms of social maintenance, and to longitudinal measures of how norms are acquired and enforced early in life.

Bounded Rationality

A growing body of work defends a Kantian approach to epistemology, but it is almost entirely ideal: it abstracts away from the finitude, or boundedness, of actual human cognition. In current work I develop the groundwork for a bounded, non-consequentialist epistemology that is Kantian in spirit, extending Kantian ideas into the philosophy of inquiry. The aim is to offer genuinely Kantian answers to problems that have so far been the near-exclusive province of epistemic consequentialism, while meeting a basic adequacy condition: an inquiry epistemology should be able to say something about how an ordinary agent ought to go about an everyday task, like choosing a balsamic vinegar for tonight's salad.

The positive view, which I call Bounded Epistemic Kantianism, holds that it is epistemically rational to adopt a policy just in case, in doing so, one respects one's own capacity for reason. Epistemic policies here are standing rules and procedures within our cognitive control, such as fast-and-frugal heuristics, strategies of attention management, and rules for when to halt inquiry. Rather than ranking individual doxastic states, the view constrains which policies are available to an agent given their ends, and so is exclusionary rather than maximizing.

Kant on Moral Psychology & Education

Kant holds that the capacity to be educated is the most essential feature of being human, yet his scattered remarks on the moral lives of children look flatly contradictory: he insists that human beings are "by nature not a moral being at all," while also crediting children with an innate sensitivity to "a law of duty," and he speaks both of natural "germs for the good" and of a radical propensity to evil. My work in this area asks how these claims can be reconciled, both as textual interpretation and in light of our best science.

I pursue this through what I call synthetic Kantianism: reconstructing parts of the Kantian system so as to make them as consonant as possible with the relevant empirical evidence, on the grounds that this is Kant's own method applied to his impure ethics. On the resulting picture, children are neither born fully moral nor born evil, but neither are they blank slates; they arrive with a pre-conceptual sensitivity to morally significant features of their environment, which becomes conceptualized as their rational capacities develop. Culture then plays a double role, both corrupting (as reason brings comparison, rivalry, and the subordination of the moral law to self-love) and moralizing (as education cultivates those initial germs into an autonomous good will).

Funded Projects