My primary research interest is the problem of perceptual objects: what the objects of perceptual experience are and how they can be directly present to us. I also work in the philosophy of emotion, especially on institutional formal objects and fittingness, and in the philosophy of language, especially on reference and temporal externalism.
What are the objects of perception, and what makes our awareness of them direct? I am developing a broader account of perceptual objects and direct awareness. I want to understand how ordinary worldly objects figure in perceptual experience across different sensory modalities and perceptual contexts, and how a form of direct realism can accommodate illusion, hallucination, and other difficult cases while preserving the idea that perception genuinely puts us in touch with the world.
I develop a screening-off problem for naïve realism that begins with ordinary tactile perception rather than hallucination. Using cases involving touch and realistic haptic simulation, I argue that the particular external object can become explanatorily redundant with respect to phenomenal character, putting pressure on the constitutive role assigned to worldly objects.
I examine whether naïve realism can explain cases in which the same object is perceived through different sensory modalities but the resulting experiences seem phenomenally very different. I argue that appeals to abstract spatial commonality do not provide the relevant phenomenal overlap, leaving a significant problem for strong forms of naïve realism.
I develop the central positive account of this research project and use it to clarify what it takes for perceptual awareness of ordinary objects to count as genuinely direct. The manuscript brings together several of the questions about perceptual objects that motivate my work in philosophy of perception.
I examine the direction of the argument from hallucination and ask what justifies moving from a bad case to conclusions about veridical perception. I compare several ways of motivating that move and consider what the debate reveals about the pressure hallucination places on naïve realism.
I examine how judgments of perceptual error in color depend on the background conditions used to assess correctness. I use these cases to ask whether familiar arguments from illusion rely on assumptions about perceptual correctness that need to be made explicit before they can support conclusions about the objects of perception.
How can socially constituted standings enter the evaluative structure of emotion? I am interested in how institutions and social practices shape the evaluative objects of our emotions. My aim is to understand when socially constituted standings such as prestige and stigma become part of what emotions respond to, and how the reality of such standings should be distinguished from the further question of whether they make admiration, contempt, or related emotions fitting.
I introduce the idea of institutional formal objects and argue that socially constituted evaluative properties such as prestige and stigma can themselves enter the evaluative content of emotion, rather than merely serving as evidence of personal excellence or defect. I then develop a two-level account of fittingness for emotions directed at such institutional standings.
I examine how an emotion can respond to a social standing that varies across different social settings. I use these cases to ask how social context bears on which institutional standing an emotion attributes to its target, and how this in turn affects questions about emotional accuracy and fittingness.
How can reference depend on linguistic practice across time? I am interested in how reference is fixed and maintained across time, particularly when a community's present linguistic practice appears compatible with more than one candidate interpretation. I want to understand how much work can be done by present public practice before future use enters the metasemantic story, and what this tells us about semantic continuity, indeterminacy, and change.
I examine cases in which the applications of a public term are compatible with more than one candidate extension and ask what fixes its reference before later separating cases appear. I compare the role of present public practice with appeals to future linguistic use, with particular attention to semantic continuity and change across time.
I wrote the paper below during my master's studies. I remain interested in questions about consciousness, attention, and phenomenal richness, but this is no longer one of the main directions of my current research.
I revisit the debate between rich and fragmented views of phenomenal consciousness using evidence from the Sperling paradigm and related work on attention. I argue that data often taken to favour the Fragment View can also be accommodated by the Rich View, and that the latter retains important theoretical advantages.
