I am a sixth year Ph.D student in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

​​My research focuses on representation, consciousness, and their intersection. One theme that runs through my work concerns the differences between conscious experience and propositional attitudes (especially on the assumption that conscious experience is an intentional attitude). I am also interested in representation generally as well as in philosophy of language and epistemology.
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Papers ​[drafts available upon request]

Under Review ​

  • [Title redacted for blind review] I articulate and defend the view that experience is sometimes irreducibly temporally extended (that sometimes, undergoing experience over a period is more fundamental than than undergoing experience over parts of that period) and show how such a view resolves a longstanding puzzle about the nature of temporal experience and clarifies certain important but hard to pin down distinctions in the philosophy of mind.

In Progress

  • How to be Naive about the Mind I defend from familiar Frege puzzle objections the view that propositional attitudes are relations to Russellian propositions while avoiding the commitments of standard responses that invoke modes of presentation.
  • Frege Puzzles and Phenomenal Inversion I show that the central objections to two externalist views of mental content - Frege puzzles for austere Russellianism about the propositional attitudes and inversion scenarios for externalist physicalism about phenomenal content - are essentially the same. I explore the plausibility of applying the most popular responses for each to the other and argue that the denial of a strong form of mental content transparency is the best response to both arguments.
  • How to be a Bayesian Externalist  I defend the conjunction of two views that are often taken to be incompatible: Bayesianism about rationality on the one hand and mental and justification externalism (in particular, an austere externalist Russellian view of the propositional attitudes on which there are no mediating modes of presentation) on the other.
  • ​Two-Factor Intentionalism (with Brad Saad) We defend externalist versions of Intentionalism about phenomenal experience from inversions arguments by proposing specific substantive constraints on the content-fixing relation, analogous to views which distinguish the content of water-thoughts from H2O-thoughts on the basis of different internal roles those states play. (This paper takes a somewhat different approach to inversion scenarios than the paper above.)
  • Degrees of Intention I articulate and defend the view that there are degrees of intention (which stand to intentions as degrees of belief stand to beliefs) and explore various descriptive and normative constraints on such states, including the probability axioms and claims governing the relation between degrees of intention and beliefs\slash degrees of belief.

Teaching

Courses

Handouts