p a t h
Before coming to ann arbor (“the deuce”, as the kids say), I was a faculty member at Harvard and before that at The University of Texas at Austin. I was a graduate student at Arizona (bear down). John Pollock directed my dissertation.
My Erdős number ≤ 6 and my philosophical lineage goes like this:
gillies --> pollock --> adams -->
suppes
--> nagel --> cohen --> royce --> morris
--> trendelenburg --> reinhold --> kant
--> knutzen --> wolff --> leibniz
r e s e a r c h
I work on problems that live at the border between the information-theoretic aspects of cognitive science (How do cognitive agents process, use, and exchange information in a complex world full of other agents?) and questions of rational belief, rational decision, and meaning.
So I end up worrying about parts of philosophy of language, epistemology, logic, decision/game theory, and (sometimes) theoretical work in AI and computer science. But that’s a lot to write down, so I prefer to do it the Dutch way: Logic, Language, and Information. That about covers it.
In epistemology, I work mainly on issues related to belief revision and defeasible reasons. In formal semantics, I have been working on the semantics of modal constructions, including epistemic modals and counterfactuals. But — here’s the shocking bit — I don’t really think these projects are different.
h o b b i e s
My biggest hobby is the interdisciplinary approach to — what psychology, cognitive (and neuro) science, and economics can tell us about — decision making. This helps me figure out what Mary is up to. That’s good since I want to dupe her into talking to me.