My current research focuses on philosophical intuitions: intuitions which are used as evidence for philosophical theories or engender philosophical paradoxes and problems. In collaboration with colleagues from psychology, I am pursuing an interdisciplinary research programme currently emerging from experimental philosophy: The ‘sources project’ (aka 'cognitive epistemology', or the 'underwater part' of 'iceberg epistemology') seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophical intuitions that help us assess their evidentiary value. I study intuitions at the root of classical paradoxes about the mind and perception. I am particularly…
My current research focuses on philosophical intuitions: intuitions which are used as evidence for philosophical theories or engender philosophical paradoxes and problems. In collaboration with colleagues from psychology, I am pursuing an interdisciplinary research programme currently emerging from experimental philosophy: The ‘sources project’ (aka 'cognitive epistemology', or the 'underwater part' of 'iceberg epistemology') seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophical intuitions that help us assess their evidentiary value. I study intuitions at the root of classical paradoxes about the mind and perception. I am particularly interested in the role of analogy and metaphor in automatic cognition as well as in the role of verb-related stereotypes.
The second, subtly related, focus of my work is on therapeutic aims and methods in philosophy, and on when and why they need to complement familiar forms of philosophical argument and analysis. In particular, I have used findings from cognitive psychology and concepts from cognitive psychotherapy (CBT) to develop some meta-philosophical and methodological ideas first mooted by Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. This line of research has redeveloped the notions of ‘philosophical problem-dissolution’ and ‘therapeutic philosophy’ within a post-linguistic paradigm.
