Research: Taxonomizing the mind

Classification and Taxonomy in the Mind-Brain sciences

One goal of scientific inquiry is delineating between real kinds that are grounded in the world and permit of scientifically valuable generalizations, predictions, projections, and explanations and merely nominal or arbitrary categories. In psychology, cognitive science, and psychiatry, this project has been seen as particularly difficult, as many of the categories we employ are largely heterogenous, context sensitive, and socially malleable. Much of my current research attempts to reconcile these two facts. 

Recently, I have been interested in how background conditions account for a wide range of variability in putative real kinds such as water, beryllium, tuberculosis, and E. coli and how these facts can be extended to account for the variability in psychological categories without threatening their status as real kinds. 

Works in progress

A paper on the role of background conditions on the variability of emotional kinds.

A paper that further characterizes the notion of a background condition in the literature on real kinds.

"Mental Geography" in Early Modern Philosophy

Even before Hume coined the term "mental geography," which he claimed was the "delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind" (EHU, 1.13), philosophers in the Early Modern period (and earlier) were interested in taxonomizing the mind into a variety of faculties and parts. For this reason, a large chunk of my research traces the historical movement of this classificatory project, focusing primarily on figures in Early Modern Philosophy. At the moment, I am particularly interested in Margaret Cavendish's work on this subject.

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was an English philosopher, scientist, novelist, playwright, and poet. In contrast to her mechanist predecessors (such as Descartes and Hobbes), she thought that observation of order in the natural world should lead us to posit that all nature is self-moving, perceptive, and knowledgable and that all change in nature is due to the self-motion of natural things. Therefore, our mental categories must capture merely different ways in which the same matter moves itself. I am interested in investigating how Cavendish can account for and categorize our mental life solely in these terms. 

Publications

(2025). Going through the Motions: Memory and remembrance in Cavendish. British Journal for the History of Philosophy,  33(5), 1120-1142.

Works in progress

A paper on Cavendish's views of custom and habit.