I work in philosophy of mind and value theory.

In philosophy of mind, I have written mostly about consciousness, perception, and emotion. Most of my research there focuses on various aspects of representation in conscious experience, particularly in perceptual and emotional experience. In general, I am interested in understanding the interactions among three interdependent factors: first, what it is like to have a particular conscious experience; second, what that experience represents to you, or alternatively, what you can learn from it; and third, your attitudes towards the object of that experience. One dominant theme of my research is that each one of these factors shapes the other two: none of the factors are independent of the others. Often, I explore this interdependence in the context of attending to some particular qualitative aspect of experience. This includes unique and unusual perceptual experiences such as illusions, or synesthesia, and also various kinds of conscious emotional experiences such as esteem, love, and grief.

On the topic of perception, my work focuses on determining the scope of influence of cognitive and emotional states on perceptual experiences, the implications this has for what properties can be contents of conscious perceptual experiences, and on what determines or grounds the content of perceptual experiences. I have advanced the view that perceptual experiences can be penetrated by information from outside of the visual stream, specifically by both higher-level cognitive states and also by emotions. For example, in my paper “Good Looking”, I draw on empirical work concerning the relation between the assessment of a person’s moral character, visual experiences that are evaluative (perceiving someone as attractive), and the perceptual representation of value. Studies show that people we judge to have good character we also evaluate to be more attractive. I argue that the best explanation for that experience is that feelings of esteem infect perceptual content, adding an aesthetic dimension, and leading them to represent people as having value.

In “Can Blue Mean Four”, I develop the case for the representation of high-level properties in visual experience from synesthesia. There, I draw on a special variety of number– color synesthesia to argue that we can visually experience graphemes (like ‘4’) to have numerical values (or to represent numbers). A small subset of number-color synesthetes seem to have a heightened ability to perform mental arithmetic in virtue of their synesthesia. I argue that the apparently facilitative effect of synesthesia on mental arithmetic can be explained by the view that synesthete savants visually experience graphemes as having numerical values. In “You Can See What ‘I’ Means”, I argue that the case from synesthetes generalizes to make the case about the possible perceptual contents of typical perceivers’ visual experiences.

My writings on emotional experience explore issues in both value theory and philosophy of mind. I start from the intentionalist position, assuming that emotional experiences represent their object as having some evaluative property. For instance, fear may evaluate what it is felt toward as being dangerous. I am interested in which evaluative properties of objects specific emotions represent, the role of emotions in facilitating knowledge about those properties, and in the influence of emotions on other perceptual modalities. For example, in “The Perception of Virtue”, I argue that emotional responses of esteem to perceived demonstrations of good character represent the perceived character traits as valuable, and hence, as virtues. These esteeming experiences, I argue, are analogous to perceptual representations in other modalities in their epistemic role as causing, providing content for, and justifying beliefs regarding the value of the traits they represent. I also discuss the role that the perceiver’s own character plays in their ability to recognize and respond appropriately to virtue in others, showing that moral virtues are also epistemic virtues when it comes to facilitating knowledge about the character of people we encounter. In “Meaningfulness and Grief”, I argue that the experience of grief can provide retrospective access to facts about the meaningfulness and value that even the most seemingly mundane aspects of our day-to-day lives have had, something that can go unrecognized until the source of that meaning is lost.

I have also written on the topic of sexual consent. Despite the recent acknowledgement of the moral significance of consent, there is still much work to be done in determining when an act is unproblematically consensual. In two papers, I discuss the impact of deception vis-à-vis consent. “Sexual Consent and Deception about One’s Self”, takes up the specific case of deception about one’s self. It may seem obvious that one ought not to lie to a sexual partner about who one is, but determining which features of oneself are most relevant to the consent of one’s partner, as well as the lies which it follows would be impermissible to tell, is not obvious. Drawing from empirical research, I argue that deception about one’s morally valanced character traits, those we think of as virtues and vices, is particularly problematic. This is true regardless of whether knowing the truth would have made a difference to one’s partner’s consent.

In another paper on consent, I start with the relatively uncontroversial assumption that at least some cases of deception can have an invalidating impact on consent. But other cases are less clear. How should we navigate between our rights and duties in the unclear cases? The standard approach would be to first get the theoretical facts clear concerning when a lie will interfere with consent, and then make use of that information in guiding one’s behavior in intimate contexts. I argue that this approach won’t work in the case of deception and consent, because there are epistemic barriers to knowing when exactly deception undermines consent. There are problems developing a precise theoretical account of the conditions under which consent would be undermined by deception. And even if that information were to become available, there are factors that would make the practical application of that knowledge, at best, unreliable. I propose that the correct action guiding principle to use in the context of sex-by-deception ends up being one centered on precautionary considerations.