Dissertation
PSYCHOLOGISM, SEMANTICS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF LOGIC:
Despite a pronounced rejection of psychologism at the turn of the previous century, contemporary epistemology has witnessed its pervasive return. ...
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Funded Research
Post-Doc Grant Proposal
Ph.D. Grant Proposal
Featured Research
My paper Psychologism in the Logic of J.S. Mill, in History and Philosophy of Logic (2005) is featured in Martin Kusch's (2007) entry for psychologism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Research
Ongoing Research Interests
My current scholarly interests are focussed on the intersection of theories of justification and accounts of rationality and doxastic change.
My dissertation research was a historical and conceptual study of psychologism, which addressed the theoretical question of the foundation of logical principles by considering their subject matter and semantics. My thesis concluded with the working hypothesis that ideas such as logical necessity can properly be explained in terms of the local semantic relationships obtaining between the concepts of our language. That is, the source of logical necessity is conceptual rather than metaphysical or empirical, and as such logic need not be understood as treating of any subject matter in the usual sense.
My interests in foundational questions extends to the theory of reasoning and argument approached from an epistemological perspective. Here, I am not only interested in the foundational issues surrounding evaluative properties of reasoning and argument, but also in how normative theories of justification connect with the processes of human reasoning and belief acceptance, perseverance, and change. My post-doctoral project specifically addressed the question of the relevance of psychological considerations to normative standards of rational argument. At the empirical level, I am interested in the extent to which principles of good reasoning are actually taken up or practised by everyday reasoners, and in the actual factors which influence individuals to adopt, hold, or change a view, especially in cases where there is an apparent break-down in the rational structure of those beliefs. This thread of research is interdisciplinary with fields such as the psychology of reasoning and communication studies.
As my research program develops, I find my interests increasingly concern theories of rationality especially as they relate not only to foundational issues in logic and epistemology but also to the actual practices of reasoning and knowledge acquisition both at the individual and disciplinary level.