Research Interests
My research lies at the intersection of the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of cognitive science with an emphasis on conceptual and methodological problems in animal cognition science. My current work falls into three primary research streams. The first of these, which began with my dissertation and has thus far generated five publications, concerns the role of simplicity judgments in the scientific study of the animal mind. In this project, I show how a preference for simpler explanations can bias scientific methodology, yielding not only a less reliable science of animal minds, but one that is less likely to identify morally significant properties of mind in animals, and I suggest strategies for shoring up scientific inference without adverting to simplicity.
The second research stream turns to animals who have long been regarded as too ‘simple’ to merit serious philosophical or policy consideration: invertebrate animals such as insects, spiders, and mollusks. In a series of papers and a co-authored book (currently in progress), my co-authors and I argue that the emerging scientific evidence of the complex cognitive and affective worlds of these beings not only challenges their wholesale exclusion from animal welfare protections, but also presses us to reconsider traditional approaches to the study of mind and moral value.
The third research stream shifts the focus away from the scientific study of animal minds and toward scientific practice itself. Here, I advance a novel view of scientific experimentation on which studies that do not involve interventions on the system of interest may be epistemically on a par with traditional experiments and should therefore count as experiments proper.
In addition to these core topics, I also have an active interest in moral and political philosophy and social epistemology, including considerations of fairness in illicit cooperative schemes, the nature of propaganda, and, more recently, the question of how moral risk should be factored into the development and regulation of user-engagement algorithms on social and entertainment media platforms.
The second research stream turns to animals who have long been regarded as too ‘simple’ to merit serious philosophical or policy consideration: invertebrate animals such as insects, spiders, and mollusks. In a series of papers and a co-authored book (currently in progress), my co-authors and I argue that the emerging scientific evidence of the complex cognitive and affective worlds of these beings not only challenges their wholesale exclusion from animal welfare protections, but also presses us to reconsider traditional approaches to the study of mind and moral value.
The third research stream shifts the focus away from the scientific study of animal minds and toward scientific practice itself. Here, I advance a novel view of scientific experimentation on which studies that do not involve interventions on the system of interest may be epistemically on a par with traditional experiments and should therefore count as experiments proper.
In addition to these core topics, I also have an active interest in moral and political philosophy and social epistemology, including considerations of fairness in illicit cooperative schemes, the nature of propaganda, and, more recently, the question of how moral risk should be factored into the development and regulation of user-engagement algorithms on social and entertainment media platforms.
