My research.
My work is about the social world and the ways we represent it in thought, talk, art, and so on. I’m interested in questions like:
Does language have the power to create social kinds?
Does it matter what social kind terms we use to describe the past? Why do questions like “Was St. Catherine of Siena anorexic?” sound so strange?
Can a work of fiction harm members of a marginalized group by depicting that group in a certain way?
And I’m also interested in more specific questions in this realm:
What concepts should we use to think and talk about animals and food?
Could it be wrong to imagine or desire certain things?
To your right, you can find some papers I’ve written about these questions and others. I’m also finishing a dissertation on these topics; see below for more info on that.
My papers.
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In this paper, I argue that labels can’t create new social kinds all on their own. The paper is forthcoming in Phil Quarterly: here’s a PhilPapers link.
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I argue that pornography’s being fiction isn’t a threat to traditional feminist critiques of pornography.
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I argue that questions like “Was Socrates gay?” are harder to answer than questions like “Is Elton John gay?” because we don’t yet know enough about our own conceptual landscape, i.e., what our concepts should look like and pick out.
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I argue that if animals have certain bodily rights, eating their corpses is wrong—even if we don’t kill them or harm them along the way.
My dissertation.
I wrote a dissertation that tries to answer some of the questions above. I have an incredible dissertation committee: Sally Haslanger is my chair, and my committee members are Jack Spencer, Justin Khoo, and Rachel Fraser.
To read drafts of any chapter, just reach out!
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Short abstract: This dissertation is about the social world and the kinds of things in it. In particular, it’s about the extent to which our social practices, especially our ‘representational’ practices (thinking about, talking about, depicting...) relate to the social kinds we find around us. My general aim is to balance an insight from feminist philosophers—that we ‘construct’ the world around us, in part with our thought and talk—with the insight from 20th century analytic philosophy that the world constrains our thought and talk about it. In chapter one, I consider the idea that our linguistic practices shape the social world, perhaps by playing a causal or constitutive role in the creation of social kinds. In chapter 2, I pose a puzzle about certain weighty social kind terms: why are they so hard to use when we try to describe the distant past? In chapter 3, I argue that our social practices surrounding depiction (as in art) explain a common feminist thought about pornography: that it tells us something sexist and false about women, and is therefore morally problematic.
Want to know more?
Email me—drafts of all of the above papers are available upon request. I’d love to hear what you think!