Research

​During the 2026-2029 period, I will be involved in two research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council:

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Natural Properties - a causation-first approach

with Jenn McDonald and Tom Wysocki

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​This project aims to uncover what makes properties natural by comparing the causal roles of stereotypically natural and stereotypically unnatural properties. Our working hypothesis is that naturalness is determined by causal role: a property like being a proton or a moose is less natural than being a proton because it plays a more limited causal role in the world, making it less suited for good explanations. Such a causation-first account of naturalness is reductive, nominalist-friendly, refrains from ruling properties out by fiat (such as extrinsic ones), delivers natural properties directly relevant to the special sciences, and accounts for the explanatory and predictive value of intuitively natural properties.

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How words mean: lessons from large language models

with Jessica Pepp (PI), Dimitri Coelho Mollo, and Pär Sundström
 

Given the right prompt, ChatGPT will output, “Ibuprofen can increase the risk of gastric ulcers”. The same output may be produced by a human doctor. It is natural to assume that these two outputs have the same meaning. But do they?

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This project has two aims. The first aim is to test the hypothesis that ChatGPT’s output is meaningful but has a meaning that differs from the doctor’s utterance. The second aim is to work from the assumption that the two outputs have the same meaning and develop a novel account of what makes this the case. Specifically, we will explore the hypothesis that ChatGPT expresses the same meanings that we express, though not because of any underlying mental states, but because ChatGPT has “quasi-mental states” that ground its meanings.

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Previous projects

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Causation, Correlation, and Insensitivity

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Most causal relations are insensitive: they do not break down under natural changes in the causal situation. For example, regardless of how smoking is caused, it correlates with lung cancer. By contrast, mere correlation is often sensitive: the correlation between cancer and yellowed teeth breaks down if the yellowness is not caused by smoking. The main thesis of this project is that different types of insensitivity can help to distinguish causation from types of spurious correlation that pose challenges for state-of-the-art accounts of causation.

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This project ran from August 2021 to December 2023 and was funded by a Swedish Research council international postdoc grant. The research was jointly hosted by Rutgers University and Umeå University.

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Determinism, Control, and the Consequence Argument

with Andreas Hütteman (PI) and Christian Loew
 

This project investigated whether control over our actions is compatible with determinism. If determinism is true, then the complete state of the world at any time in the distant past (even before we were born) together with the laws of nature completely fixes our current actions. Determinism, therefore, threatens our everyday conviction that we have control over our actions. The project argues that this apparent tension between determinism and control only arises if further assumptions about causation, laws, counterfactuals, and modality are added to determinism. Many of these added assumptions seem prima facie intuitively plausible. However, the project used empirical data (concerning both scientific results and scientific practice) as well as inductive methods to question these assumptions. Among other things, it will show that the so-called “Consequence Argument,” which many consider the strongest argument for the incompatibility of control and determinism, rests on empirically unfounded assumptions about alternative possibilities.

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I was employed on this project from March 2020 to July 2021. It was part of the DFG-funded Inductive Metaphysics research project.

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