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Research Interests


I work primarily in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.


I also have research interests in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.


Publications


Absolutism vs Comparativism About Quantities forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume

  1. 8 (2013). Winner of the 2011 OSM Younger Scholars Prize.


  1. In this paper I discuss an issue that arises for all quantities but is best illustrated by the case of mass. We naturally think that something’s mass is one of its intrinsic properties, and we also think that things with mass stand in various mass relationships with one another, such as x being more massive than y. But of the intrinsic masses and the mass relationships, which are the more fundamental? In this paper I broadly survey what I take to be the more important lines of argument for each answer, and conclude in favor of the view that the mass relationships are fundamental.



The Bare Necessities forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives (2011)


  1. Substantivalism is the view that the material history of the world plays out in a container, spacetime, that exists independently of its material contents. Though it is the received view these days, I argue that it faces far more serious objections than is normally appreciated. The objection that is normally discussed is the Hole Argument, but it is now well known that that argument makes various modal assumptions that substantivalists can deny. In this paper I raise related objections to substantivalism that make no modal assumptions and which are therefore immune to the standard substantivalist responses to the Hole Argument. I finish by suggesting how a substantivalist might develop a new version of her view in light of these objections.



Individuals: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics  Philosophical Studies 145 (2009): 37-67.


  1. We naturally think of the material world as being populated by a large number of individuals. These are things, such as my laptop and the particles that compose it, that we describe as being propertied and related in various ways when we describe the material world around us. To what extent is this natural conception true of the fundamental structure of reality? In this paper I argue that it gets things entirely wrong: fundamentally speaking at least, there are no such things as material individuals. I then propose and defend an individual-less view of the material world. The view I propose has the surprising consequence that the world is radically holistic, that it is at root a unified whole rather than a collection of disparate parts.

My current research is part of the general project of attempting to discover metaphysical truths from broadly empirical premises. I am particularly interested in using symmetries in physics as guides to the fundamental structure of our world. There are three parts to this project.


1/ Some of the papers below (Individuals, Absolutism vs Comparativism, The Bare Necessities) address first-order metaphysical issues concerning the nature of individuals, quantities, and space-time respectively. In each case I use symmetry considerations to argue for metaphysical theses of a structuralist flavor.


2/ What is the content of metaphysical theses like these? Two of the papers below (On the Plurality of Grounds, The Status of Ground) develop and defend a notion of ground that I believe is suitable for formulating a variety of metaphysical theses including those that I motivate in the first set of papers.


3/ What justifies the use of symmetry considerations in metaphysical investigations? Two papers in progress (Symmetry as an Epistemic Concept, Inquiry and Ignorance) develop the epistemological foundations of this use of symmetry as a guide to metaphysics. 

Drafts in Progress


On the Plurality of Grounds  (draft of September 2011)


  1. Recent metaphysics has contained a good deal of discussion about the notion of ground. In this paper I argue that ground is irreducibly plural: there are cases in which a plurality of facts are, when taken together, grounded in some underlying facts, even though none have a ground on their own. I argue that there are at least two examples of such pluralities: facts about particular individuals and facts about measurements of quantities like mass in a given scale. But regardless of those particular cases, the mere possibility that ground is irreducibly plural has significant implications for metaphysics. For one of the central aims of contemporary metaphysics is to establish which facts of the world are fundamental, and a canonical strategy of arguing that a given fact is fundamental is to argue that it has no ground. But if ground is irreducibly plural then this line of argument is invalid, for a fact may have no ground itself but nonetheless be part of a plurality that together have a ground in which case it would be a mistake to conclude that it is fundamental. I discuss some of the ways that this sort of mistake has permeated the metaphysics literature.



The Status of Ground  (draft of November 2011)


  2. Ground is an explanatory notion: to say that some facts ground another is just to say that the former explain the latter, in a particularly metaphysical sense of ‘explain’. But if the Xs ground Y, what is the status of this grounding fact itself? Is it grounded in something else, or is it a brute, unexplained fact about our world? In this paper I argue that facts about what grounds what are grounded in the essences of things and that these latter facts about essence are groundless. But the reason these facts about essence are groundless is not that it makes sense to ask what grounds them and it just so happens that nothing does. Rather, I claim that it is in some sense a mistake to ask what grounds them in the first place. Pictorially, I think of facts about essence not as occupying the lowest level of the hierarchy of grounds but rather as the scaffolding around which the hierarchy is built.



Symmetry as an Epistemic Concept  (in progress...)


  1. Physical theories come associated with symmetries, and these symmetries play a central role in physical and metaphysical reasoning. In this paper I argue that in order to make sense of its role in physical reasoning we must recognize that symmetry is an essentially epistemic concept.



Inquiry and Ignorance  (in progress...)


  1. What is the aim of inquiry? I argue that it is not just to acquire true (relevant) beliefs and avoid false ones, and nor is it just that our beliefs have various epistemic virtues that reflect how well-formed they are such as being justified, rational, reasonable, knowledgable, reliably formed, and so on. Even if those are amongst our aims, I argue that an additional aim is that our beliefs represent the world in a particular way. If that is right, then one can fail to achieve the aim of inquiry--and so in a sense to be ignorant--even though one’s beliefs are true, justified, rational, reasonable, knowledgable, reliably formed, and so on. In these cases one is ignorant merely because one’s beliefs fail to represent the world in the right kind of way. I finish by arguing that this curious state of ignorance is surprisingly widespread.