The Measure of Knowledge | draft available via email
Abstract: What is it to know more? By what metric should the quantity of one's knowledge be measured? Such questions are important, for we are deeply committed to the idea that knowledge comes in amounts, that it is possible to know more or less than one does. They are also central to our understanding of the value of knowledge, since knowledge is, traditionally at least, a good of which more is better. As important as these questions are, however, it is very hard to see how they could be answered.


Dissertation: The World in Mind
defended August 2008.
Abstract: Belief has a many/one, or part/whole, structure that is poorly understood. It is expressed largely as metaphor: Beliefs are said to be bound together, or to form a web, or to fit together to form a total view, or to construct, form, or build up a picture of the world. My dissertation focuses on clarifying this conception of belief and on understanding in what sense, if any, a subject's beliefs are both many and one. I develop and refine the problematic, examine several possible accounts of the unity of belief, and explore an original theory that takes unity to consist in a subject's taking there to be differences between the states of affairs her beliefs represent.

Papers on Consciousness

The Cogito and the Metaphysics of Mind | download .pdf
Philosophical Studies, 130:2 August 2006, pp. 247-271
Abstract: This paper demonstrates that there is a cogito-style argument for substance dualism that has nothing to do with a failure of entailment between the physical and the phenomenological. The argument is therefore distinct both from Descarates's argument for dualism in the Sixth Meditation and from the conceivability arguments pressed by contemporary anti-physicalists. The upshot of the paper is that we face two bad options: we can either give up Descartes's epistemological claim, that introspection affords us absolute certainty of our existence, or accept his metaphysical claim, that subjects are thinking things logically distinct from bodies.

Since writing this paper, I have come to realize that the problem the paper generates arises only if we take the temporal character of experience at face value. That is, if conscious experience is instantiated as it seems to be, and as is seldom questioned, then we face the uncomfortable dilemma the "Cogito" paper argues we do. However, there is an alternative way to conceive of how experience is instantiated, which blocks the argument. This way I develop in a second paper, "The Ontology of Experience".

The Ontology of Experience | download .pdf
(in progress)
Abstract: On the face of it, phenomenological properties are instantiated throughout periods of time. If we feel a pain, or see a colour, or hear a sound, the pain, colour or sound seem to be present throughout the period for which we are feeling, seeing or hearing it. Few have thought to question, or seen the need to defend, this conception of conscious experience. In my view, this conception is a mistake - an illusion - and the consequences for the philosophy of mind are significant. I defend an alternative account of the ontology of experience according to which conscious experiences are representational processes that bear contents over times, where the contents of the representations are that certain properties (colours, sounds, shapes, and so on) are instantiated throughout times.

Representational accounts of consciousness are not new, nor is the claim that some temporal aspects of experience are properties of the representational content rather than of the representational vehicle. However, the representational theory I defend is novel in claiming (i) that the 'throughout time' character of experience is part of the representational content of the experience, and (ii) that the representational vehicle must be instantiated over rather than throughout time. Moreover, the arguments in favour of the representationalism I advocate are novel and thus may appeal to those who are unmoved by standard arguments for representationalism..