I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy & Artificial Intelligence Research (PAIR) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany. I will join the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh as postdoctoral associate in Fall 2024 and then I will join the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) as assistant professor in Fall 2025. In Spring 2023, I completed my doctorate in philosophy with doctoral minors in neuroscience and cognitive science at the University of Arizona under the co-supervision of Sara Aronowitz and Mark Timmons.
I specialise in the philosophy of cognitive science (neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence) and the philosophy of biology from the perspective of general philosophy of science and metanormative theory. My research focuses on mechanistic explanation, functional analysis, task analysis, and experimental design. In particular, I draw on detailed, technical case studies from neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning to explore (a) how artificial intelligence can facilitate task analysis, (b) how task analysis can scaffold functional analysis, (c) how functional analysis can scaffold mechanistic explanation, and (c) how experimental design can facilitate this scaffolding process through the strategic provision of relevant empirical information.
A recurring theme in my work is that objective and irreducible normative standards are indispensable to scientific inquiry because they direct us to explain success and failure in different ways. However, I am critical of rational analysis and other computational approaches to cognitive modelling on several grounds, including that they are committed to implausible assumptions about rationality. Persistent disagreements about normative standards and their role in the sciences of reasoning are responsible for the so-called Great Rationality Debate, so I draw many of my case studies from this literature.