What does it mean to be the agent of your own cognition? Where does receptivity end and activity begin? On what grounds can a mind regard its representations as its own—that is, as achievements for which it can be credited, rather than as endowments or mere givens for which it cannot? My research pursues these questions, first, in Kant’s critical philosophy, read through his engagements with Locke, Berkeley, and Leibniz, and then in the wider Enlightenment. Across both contexts, I defend a constructivist thesis about agency: a mind is not born an agent but becomes one, and even its most basic representations are acquired in the process of that becoming.
Kant
My core research area is Kant’s theoretical philosophy, particularly his account of agency and cognitive development. Current projects include the following papers that are either based on or extend from my dissertation work.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
This paper traces Kant’s theory of space through a critical engagement with Berkeley’s semiotic theory of vision. I argue that Kant transforms Berkeley’s heterogeneity thesis—that sight and touch deliver irreducibly distinct contents—into a cornerstone of his own account. Whereas Berkeley reduces imagination to a merely reproductive faculty of association, Kant reconceives it as a productive faculty that integrates heterogenous modalities into a unified outer sense. On this reading, spatial representation is not, as Berkeley suggests, a “fleeting shadow” of the divine mind, but an a priori, multi-sensory form of intuition that secures the very distinction between reality and illusion.
This paper begins from Kant’s dictum in the Discovery that time is originally acquired, a term he takes from “the teachers of natural right.” Why must the origin of time be stated in the language of law? My answer exploits the fact that Locke stands on both sides of the question: paradigm of the empirical derivation of time from reflection on the train of ideas, and canonical theorist of the original acquisition of property. On Kant’s diagnosis, Locke’s derivation fails on his own terms—passive reflection cannot generate the representation of succession, and the inner train yields no determinate duration—so what the question of origin demands is not a natural history but a theory of entitlement: how the mind comes to possess, by right, a form it neither found in experience nor was endowed with. Kant’s account of time, on my reading, is Locke’s juridical theory of appropriation, but now radicalized and transposed onto Locke’s own psychology of inner sense. The Berkeley and Locke papers are meant to be companion pieces, converging from opposite directions—mechanism and norms—on the Refutation of Idealism.
This paper challenges the prevailing interpretation that Kant’s categories are fixed and determinate because they arise from preformed dispositions or “germs” within the human mind (e.g., Sloan). Instead, I propose an alternative “acquisition” theory: the categories are not preformed in the relevant sense but are acquired through the justified use of our own understanding. To illustrate this proposal, I draw on insights from developmental psychology, where crucial stages in infants’ cognitive development involve progressive development in self-consciousness—from egocentric to objective perspectives. This alternative account offers new insight into the rationale behind Kant’s anti-nativist stance, his break from the rationalist tradition, and the role of agency in cognition.
This paper extends the dissertation to the defects of agency. It begins from a puzzle: Kant, who denies that even the categories are innate, appears strikingly nativist about the power of judgment. Stupidity [Dummheit] is a want of “mother wit” [Mutterwitz] that no teaching can remedy (A133/B172 and n.). In response, I propose a distinction between capacity [Vermögen] and ability [Fertigkeit]. What cannot be taught is the capacity for judging on pain of regress: any rule for applying rules would itself await application, and so on without end. An ability, by contrast, is a proficiency built up through repeated exercise, admitting of degrees and thus of growth and decay. Whether stupidity is misfortune (a want of capacity) or, like the immaturity of the Enlightenment essay, self-incurred (an ability left uncultivated) then becomes a question of imputation, not endowment.
History and Philosophy of Psychology
My second line of research moves beyond Kant to examine theories of learning and development across the broader Enlightenment, including figures such as Locke, Rousseau, and Condillac, as well as lesser-studied women philosophers. I focus in particular on how affect, motivation, and social environment function as conditions of cognitive and moral development. The following two projects are currently underway.
Sophie de Grouchy (1764-1822)
This paper takes up the famous statue of the Traité des sensations: a mind given one sense at a time, beginning with smell, and nothing else. The question is how such a creature comes to perceive a world. Condillac’s answer is more radical than his empiricist reputation suggests. On his doctrine of transformed sensation, the statue acquires not just contents but also its faculties: attention, memory, comparison, and judgment arise as sensation reworked under the pressure of need. Paradigmatically, touch plays a crucial role in this learning process by teaching the eye to see distance and objects. For Condillac, therefore, perception has a genesis that is radical enough to reach even the capacities Kant takes to be innate.
This paper reinterprets Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (1798) by excavating the genetic mechanism underlying her moral psychology: the physiological “need to be moved” (le besoin d’être ému). I argue that Grouchy identifies this kinetic drive as the fundamental engine of agency, which propels the subject from isolation into social engagement and enables them to overcome what she describes as the “horror of the void.” The paper traces the developmental trajectory of this initially blind affective drive as it becomes cultivated through three stages: first, in the physical dependence of infancy, where the need to be moved establishes primordial social bonds; second, through the aesthetic education of tragedy, where emotional responses are refined and generalized; and finally, into the formation of enduring moral sentiments that ground mature ethical agency.
Philosophy of Cognitive Science and AI
From my historical work, I draw broader implications for empirical, psychological, and legal questions concerning agency. I am currently developing three projects on the agency and interpretability of artificial systems, and the psychological risks of human–computer interaction.
This paper argues that while predictive processing (PP) offers a powerful model of the brain as a prediction machine, it fails to capture the agential dimension of intrinsically motivated learning. Drawing on Kant’s notion of recognition, I suggest that genuine learning involves more than registering prediction errors; it requires recognizing those errors as opportunities for learning. This, in turn, presupposes what I call “second-order recognition”: the capacity of an agent to endorse the very principles guiding their own learning. This Kantian move reframes autonomy as central to cognition and offers resources for extending PP beyond prediction-error minimization to account for other forms of human cognition such as creativity, curiosity, and self-actualization.
This paper pursues the question of behavioural interpretability in artificial systems. When a chatbot is described as having encouraged, escalated, or guided a user, is the folk psychology warranted, or mere projection? Against internalists, for whom attribution must wait on finding belief-like states within the system, and deflationists, for whom it is the illusion of a persisting interlocutor, we defend a relational middle path: some systems behave so as to afford interpretation in terms of what they take to be the case and are trying to do, making the intentional stance rationally warranted at the level of interaction, without first settling what happens inside.
This paper critiques recent attempts to apply “rational analysis” to large language models, specifically the claim that AI behaviors can be explained as optimal adaptations to objective statistical structures in training data (e.g., Griffiths et al.; Lampinen et al.). I challenge this data-driven realism by showing that data structure is not pre-given but constituted through inductive biases—architectural constraints, training objectives, dataset curation, and the broader learning environment all determine which patterns become salient and learnable. Drawing on Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given, I argue that rational analysis commits a category mistake by treating data distributions as simultaneously causal inputs and normative standards that rationalize behavior. Just as sensory experience cannot epistemically justify beliefs without conceptual mediation, data distributions cannot rationalize model behaviors without inductive mediation.