steve's current research
My research centers on a strongly naturalistic approach to good thinking. How can physical creatures - biological or artificial - think better? This involves issues in normative epistemology (what is it to think better?), philosophy of mind (what is it for a physical system to think in the first place?), and cognitive science (how do we humans manage to think well much of the time, and how might we teach machines to do it?). I also study related topics such as inference to the best explanation, formal models of simplicity, information theory, conceptual analysis, and the emotions.Below are some of my papers in various stages of preparation. Some other useful links:
- My most recent curriculum vitae.
- My research statement, in pdf.
- The list of graduate courses I've taken.
publications
- Analysis, schmanalysis, forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. [html abstract]
- Construing faith as action won't save Pascal's wager (2006), in Philo, Fall-Winter 2006, volume 9, number 2, pp. 221-229. [html abstract]
- The ethics of robot servitude (2007), in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, March 2007, volume 19, number 1, pp. 43-54. A video presentation of a shorter version is available on the NA-CAP 2006 website (mine is the second of three 30-minute talks in the video). [html abstract]
- Functions, creatures, learning, emotion (2004), in Architectures for Modeling Emotion: Cross-Disciplinary Foundations, AAAI Press. A paper for conference proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. [html abstract]
presentations
Slides of selected recent presentations. They're a bit harder to read without my patter, of course, but the outlines along the top of each slide should help.- Comments on Carl Wagner's Jeffrey conditioning and external Bayesianity, given May 2008 at the Formal Epistemology Workshop. [view on Slideshare]
- Utilitarian epistemology, given spring 2008 at an epistemology seminar at the University of Buffalo. This is a revised version of the paper / presentation below. [view on Slideshare]
- Utilitarian epistemology and the value of knowledge, given August 2007 at the Value of Knowledge conference in Amsterdam. It's a sort of brief prospectus for a purely utilitarian approach to epistemic value, with applications to the Meno problem, skepticism, and epistemic justification. [view on Slideshare]
- Minimum message length as a truth-conducive simplicity measure, given at the 2007 Formal Epistemology Workshop at Carnegie Mellon June 2nd. Good compression must track higher vs lower probability of inputs, and this is one way to approach how simplicity tracks truth. [view on Slideshare]
- Naturalism is (literally) self-explanatory, given at the Center for Inquiry. It's about how construing naturalism as a methodological commitment to inference to the best explanation - and then construing explanation as unification - solves many problems for naturalism. In particular, it saves naturalism from being self-undermining. I'm working this into a paper and am eager for comments. [view on Slideshare]
- The ethics of robot servitude, given at the University of Buffalo Center for Cognitive Science. This is the presentation version of the paper, above. [view on Slideshare]
- The ethics of intellectual property, given at the 13th Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics. Not my area of specialization, but a topic about which I feel strongly.
drafts
- Simplicity tracks truth because compression tracks probability is a short (~1,700 word) paper; the title (almost) says it all.
- Utilitarian epistemology, a prolegomenon for a utilitarian approach to "epistemic value", and the implications such would have for epistemology.
- Naturalism is (literally) self-explanatory, on how construing naturalism as a methodological commitment to inference to the best explanation saves it from a worry about internal incoherence.
- Comments on Carl Wagner's Jeffrey conditioning and external Bayesianity, for the 2008 Formal Epistemology Workshop.
dissertation
- My dissertation, on a computational proposal for internal epistemology. [html abstract]
