About Me

 

I’m a lecturer in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. I work primarily in the theory of thought, i.e., roughly speaking, in that part of the metaphysics of mind that treats of propositionally contentful mental states and acts. At the moment, I’m working out a theory of belief that’s both knowledge-first and act-first, in the sense that it explains belief in terms of what I call epistemic acts: acts like perceiving and inferring: acts in which, when all goes well, you come to know something you didn’t already know. I develop the core of the theory in three papers: “Inferring as a Way of Knowing,” “Belief as the Power to Judge,” and “Belief as an Act of Reason.” I also discuss some of these ideas more informally in this podcast interview.