My research 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, The World in Mind, 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 central issues in the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. 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.