My main research project centres on the unity of belief, and involves issues at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.

The Unity of Belief: Belief has a many/one, or part/whole, structure that is poorly understood. It is natural to say, for instance, that I have many distinct beliefs about Toronto, or about wolverines, or about set theory. This is a conception of belief on which a subject's beliefs are many. But we also think of our beliefs as in some sense 'fitting together' to compose something like a picture or overall representation, where this is singular rather than plural. This may be in an unrestricted way - all of your beliefs fit together to present you with something like a picture of the way things are. Or it may be restricted to a narrower domain - my many beliefs about Toronto, for instance, fit together such that I have something like a representation or picture of Toronto. This conception of belief figures prominently in contemporary philosophy, but it remains largely as metaphor: Beliefs are said to be bound or tied together, 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 the problematic for belief, explore whether we have any good theories that explain the many/one structure of belief, and defend an account on which a subject's beliefs at a time are 'bound together', or subsumed into one overall doxastic state, by virtue of her grasping non-identities between the states of affairs her beliefs represent.

The problem of understanding the unity of belief is connected to a number of important issues in the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology, and I expect this to be my main research area in the years to come. For a preview of some of these connections, see the brief paper "The Measure of Knowledge".

I have also done some work on consciousness. See "The Cogito and the Metaphysics of Mind" and "The Ontology of Experience" in papers.