Research

Under Review

“On Pictorial Negation”

Against the commonsense view that pictures cannot represent negation, I argue that they can by challenging three common arguments to this conclusion. I label these arguments ‘Lack of truth evaluability’ ‘Lack of syntactic structure’ and ‘Only express positive information’.

Works in progress 

"The Need For a Logic of Images: Some Positive Arguments and Misguided Objections"

We use images in our everyday reasoning. We use diagrams to reason about complex sets of data and maps to help us navigate our world. Regrettably, mainstream logics and research programs about rational decision-making focus exclusively on the implication relations between sentences and are unable to model the work we do when we reason imagistically. Since it is apparent that imagistic beliefs play a substantial role in reasoning, this means that there is a significant gap in the research in these areas. This work is a defense of the need for a logic of images. 

“How A Causalist Theory of Action can Account of Intentional Omissions”

If non-events cannot be a part of a causal chain, then intentional omissions pose a problem for causalist accounts of action. I try to solve this problem by showing that omissions pose no special worry for causalist accounts if intentional omissions are identical to an agent's positive acts.

“Structuring Student Reflection: Opinion Polls and Reflection Papers” 

This paper outlines an assignment structure that uses opinion polls and reflection papers. One noticeable benefit of this assignment structure is that it gets students to do philosophy. These assignments together require students to reflect on the beliefs and their reasons for those beliefs by making them outline those reasons. After the relevant material has been covered, students retake the opinion poll to see how their beliefs have changed. Depending on their post-unit opinion poll result, they are then required to write one of four paper assignments.

“Another Stoic Inconsistency: Propositions and Predicationals”

Argues that the Stoics are inconsistent in their treatment of the notions of propositions and predicationals. I demonstrate this by showing that the context of the utterance when expressing predicationals is important to the Stoics, but the context of an utterance of a general proposition is not.