Welcome

“‘So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.’ ‘They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.’ ‘That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.’” - They’re Made out of Meat (Terry Bisson, 1991)

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I am a PhD student in the department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced and an Adolph Sutro Fellow at Vassar College. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Psi Chi from Vassar College in Cognitive Science and Philosophy (cum laude generali et cum laude in materia subiecta).

I am interested most broadly in developing computational models of cognitive alignment and using these models as a springboard for examining the emergence and evolution of shared conceptual schemes among cognitive agents. In my work, I ultimately aim to critically transform the ways in which we think about language, thought, and meaning. These topics underpin key issues in artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction.

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In addition to my primary research, I entertain a variety of secondary projects and interests, namely:

• Meta-modeling. How do the formal models posited by scientists function differently from the “models” of the world we naively adopt when we speak a certain language or participate in a certain scientific tradition? What hermeneutic problems illuminated by metaphilosophy and philosophy of science arise too in our efforts to develop computational models of natural phenomena? In what ways do different types of models provide us with unique conceptual analyses of the world around us?

• Issues in metaphilosophy and philosophy of science concerning rationality, dialectics, and the hermeneutic circle. What mechanisms have guided human inquiry across times and cultures? How do belief systems warp and transform through the introduction of new traditions and discoveries? How do humans overcome paradoxes of learning (e.g., Meno’s Paradox) and the problem of ostension (i.e., that ostension is always ambiguous; see also: the underdetermination of theory by evidence and the indeterminacy of translation) to arrive at new (and shared) knowledge? Towards all of these questions, I assume a historical, comparative, and hermeneutic outlook.

• The philosophy of translation and the notion of incommensurability. My thinking on these topics has been most heavily influenced by W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson. I am especially interested in the ramifications of these issues across multiple scales of analysis (from linguistic to epistemic, from individual to intersubjective, from native language acquisition to foreign language acquisition, and so on).

I spent much of my college years admiring The Cornaro Window, featured in Vassar’s Thompson Memorial Library.