I am a philosopher working at the intersection of philosophy of mind and epistemology. Most of my research is on the imagination and imagistic representation.

I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the LOGOS Research Group in Analytic Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.

I earned my PhD in philosophy from New York University in 2023, supervised by Paul Boghossian, David Chalmers, and Jane Friedman. Before that, I did my undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology at the University of Miami.

When I'm not doing philosophy, I like to noodle around on my guitar, listen to (mostly scary) music, cook lots of delicious food, play videogames, and walk all over the place.

The primary strand of my research is on the epistemology of imagination. In this work, I am developing a theory of how imagination justifies empirical belief. This has given me the opportunity to think about a lot of interesting questions like: Can we reconcile the justificatory force of the imagination with its voluntariness? Is imagination reducible to inference? Can the imagination generate new justification or does it merely preserve existing justification? Are there epistemic norms governing what you ought to imagine? Does the vividness of an imagining determine its justificatory force? How can the epistemic role of the imagination inform theorizing about its nature? In future work, I plan to investigate the epistemic role of the imagination in generating hypotheses, grounding understanding, engaging with fiction, and knowing other minds. I am the editor for the PhilPapers categories on Epistemology of Imagination and Mental Imagery.

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I also have an ongoing research project on iconic representation. Consider the difference between a painting of a brown dog and the sentence 'there is a brown dog.' They both repesent a brown dog. But they do so in very different ways. The painting is iconic while the sentence is not. My research investigates the nature of this difference. Along the way, I've thought about the metaphysical grounds of representational format, the semantics of iconic representation, whether there are iconic representations in the mind, and the epistemic and practical advantages and disadvantages of iconic representation. I am the editor for the PhilPapers category on Varieties of Representation.

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Publications

The Epistemic Role of Vividness (forthcoming)

Analysis

Intuitively, the vividness of mental imagery is epistemically relevant. But how is vividness epistemically relevant? I argue that vividness is higher-order evidence about a subject’s epistemic state, rather than first-order evidence about the world. More specifically, the vividness of a mental image is higher-order evidence about the amount of first-order information one has about its subject matter. (PDF)

 

Imagination as a Source of Empirical Justification (2024)

Philosophy Compass

This paper provides a critical overview of the recent literature on the epistemology of imagination and points to avenues for future research. Topics covered include arguments for and against imaginative empirical justification, the constraints-based approach to the epistemology of imagination, and whether imagination generates or merely preserves justification. (PDF)

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Imaginative Beliefs (2024)

Inquiry

I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. This view best explains the functional and epistemic roles of the imagination, and it is preferable to alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the same phenomena. Along the way, I explore the philosophical significance of imaginative beliefs. (PDF)

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How Imagination Informs (2023)

The Philosophical Quarterly

I argue, against the received view, that the imagination is robustly informative—it can contain more information than is put into it and can thereby generate justification that is not conferred by a subject's antecedent evidence. Moreover, I defend a novel account of how the imagination informs according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. (PDF)

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The Structure of Analog Representation (2023)

Noûs (co-authored with Andrew Lee and Gabriel Rabin)

We explicate and defend the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog representation is a matter of interpretive rules mapping syntactic structure to semantic structure. First, we argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the rules of a system's interpretation function. We go on to develop measures that capture three different dimensions of analogicity. (PDF)

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The Epistemic Status of the Imagination (2021)

Philosophical Studies

The imagination is typically thought to fall outside of the scope of epistemic evaluation. Against this, I argue that imaginings are justified justifiers. Imaginings can manifest an epistemic status, this epistemic status grounds their ability to justify beliefs, and they acquire this status by being epistemically based on evidence. I show how this view best explains the structure of imaginative justification. (PDF)

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Reasoning with Imagination (2021)

Epistemic Uses of Imagination, Routledge

I argue that epistemic uses of the imagination are a sui generis form of reasoning. First, I argue that the imagination instantiates an epistemic structure that is distinctive of reasoning. Then, I argue that reasoning with imagination is not reducible to reasoning with beliefs. This provides a useful framework for theorizing about the epistemology of imagination. (PDF)

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In Progress

A paper on the nature and epistemology of aphantasia

A paper on iconic representation (co-authored with Andrew Lee and Gabriel Rabin)​

A paper on the epistemic relevance of voluntary imagining​

A paper on the nature of understanding (co-authored with Alfredo Vernazzani)

A paper on understanding and mental imagery

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