About Me
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of Philosophy, where I work in the philosophy of cognitive science. In 2024, I will be pursing an NEH fellowship titled, “The Spontaneity Deficit: Good Minds in the Age of Distraction.”
Much of my work develops a nascent field of study: the philosophy of mind-wandering. Mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts and has emerged as a leading topic in cognitive science. Yet this flurry of progress was not tethered to philosophical foundations. My work fills that gap, providing theoretical, empirical, and normative foundations for the study of mind-wandering, attention, and distraction.
I therefore propose a new theory of mind-wandering as unguided attention. I then examine more general philosophical topics – including mental action, attention, and introspection – through the lens of mind-wandering.
My empirical work extends this project, proposing philosophical foundations for the cognitive science of mind-wandering and overcoming challenges that arise when we use introspection to measure the stream of consciousness. Using these philosophically-inspired methods, I am working with Sheisha Kulkarni to investigate whether bankruptcy changes the stream of consciousness by relieving financial stress. Caitlin Mills, Sam Murray, and I also have a Templeton Grant to develop machine learning classifiers that automatically distinguish mind-wandering from other streams of consciousness in a virtual reality setting.
My normative work develops a theory of the norms of attention. We regularly evaluate people on the basis of their attention. Creatures like us face a problem of attention. Every moment, we have a vast amount of information at our disposal; yet our attention is small. How we attend therefore matters for our ethical, epistemic, and practical success. This is true now, more than ever, as we struggle against technologies designed to place historically unprecedented demands on attention. This is more important now than ever, given the prevalence of digital distractions in modern life. My work on the norms of attention is funded by an NEH Fellowship, which I’ll use to defend an overarching norm of attention (the Balancing Norm) and show how this norm reorients how we should theorize – and solve – the problem of digital distraction.
My other current work is in empirically informed––and often experimental––moral psychology. One series of papers with Sam Murray defends a “Two Channel” view of how character influences responsibility judgements. Our results from this project motivate a new model of the function of blame in social regulation. Another paper argues that willpower is the difference maker for the ordinary concept of self-control.