Publications



"Objective Similarity and Mental Representation," forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy


"Modeling without Representation," forthcoming in Synthese


"Quantifying the Subjective: Psychophysics and the Geometry of Color," forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology


"Recognizing Deception: A Model of Dynamic Belief Attribution" (2011) Advances in Cognitive Systems: Papers from the 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium (with Will Bridewell)


"Taking Mistakes Seriously: Equivalence Notions for Game Scenarios with Off Equilibrium Play" (2011) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction (with Tomohiro Hoshi)


"Synchronizing Diachronic Uncertainty" (2011) Journal of Logic, Language, and Information (with Tomohiro Hoshi)


"The Strategic Equivalence of Games with Unawareness" (2010) Logic and Interactive Rationality (with Tomohiro Hoshi)


"Logic in Cognitive Science: Bridging the Gap between Symbolic and Connectionist Paradigms" (2010) Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (with Jakub Szymanik)


"Prospects for Naturalizing Color" (2009) Philosophy of Science


"The Informational Content of Perceptual Experience" (dissertation)


Working Papers


Structural Realism for Secondary Qualities

What is the relationship between the world as experienced and the world as it is? I argue that the answer to this question in the case of color is structural realism. This analysis is inspired by color science, but it differs from other science-inspired approaches in the color realism literature in that, rather than being motivated by the current state of color science (as are, arguably, physicalist positions), it is motivated by the presuppositions of the research program itself. Furthermore, I demonstrate this analysis extends to other sensory modalities; since psychological research on the perception of all secondary qualities shares the same set of presuppositions, the epistemic status of all experience of such qualities is adequately analyzed in terms of structural realism. pdf.


Physicalist vs. Ecological Accounts of Perceptual Content: Lessons from Timbre

This paper outlines the current state of the debate on the perceptual content of timbre experience and draws some lessons for the investigation of perceptual content in general. Timbre is that feature of a sound which distinguishes it other than its pitch or volume. The two most prominent theories of timbre analyze it in terms of (i) physical properties of the sound wave, or (ii) ecological properties of the sound producing mechanism. These theories are closely analogous to physicalist and ecological accounts of color content. I argue that musical practice provides a valuable source of evidence for the correct theory of timbre, which currently favors the ecological account. This result also has consequences for aesthetics, as it contradicts the acousmatic thesis about music experience. pdf.


Diachronic Dutch Books for Bounded Rationality

This project extends the Brian Skyrms Dutch book technique for defending Jeffrey Conditionalization to a variety of problems involving bounded rationality, i.e. agents who are forgetful or otherwise imperfect in their access to information (including Sleeping Beauty, the Absentminded Driver, and Talbot's Spaghetti Dinner example). The idea is to explore a general strategy for tackling all such problems, without getting bogged down in considerations particular only to one. An interesting consequence is that some assumptions of the literature no longer appear to hold—for example, the common assumption that the basic epistemic features of the Sleeping Beauty problem are left unchanged by adding the stipulation that Beauty is told what day it is Monday morning is shown to be incorrect. These detailed slides are from a presentation of this material given June 29, 2011 at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. pdf.