Who am I?

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University, where I am Director of the Cognitive Science Program, and core member of the Centre for Vision Research and the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, at the University of Antwerp. ​​I got my PhD in Philosophy from UCLA after getting my MA in Philosophy at Brandeis University. I went to college at Montana State University in Bozeman, MT, where I grew up.

I am the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for my project Forms of Mind. Together with Chaz Firestone, I organize the phiVis: Philosophy of Vision Science Workshop, a satellite event at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, which aims to promote interaction between philosophers of perception and vision scientists.

Jacob Beck and I co-supervise three Postdoctoral Fellows: Brandon Ashby, Lance Balthazar and William Kowalsky.

​​My last name is pronounced: LAN-​dee (IPA: 'lændiː)

What do I do?

I work in philosophy of mind (especially perception), philosophy of cognitive science (especially perceptual psychology and vision science), and epistemology. My research brings together two types of approaches. First, as a philosopher of science, I identify core concepts and commitments that make a productive science of the mind possible. I am often interested in seeing how concepts from one field of cognitive science, such as linguistics (especially syntax and semantics) apply to other fields such as vision science. Second, as a naturalistic philosopher of mind, I use scientific findings and models as a guide in addressing basic philosophical questions about the nature of the mind and knowledge.

My research focuses on the nature of mental representation and the variety of forms that it can take. The mind represents how things are in the world. In seeing the apple in front of me, I represent it as round and red. But content about the world can be represented in different forms. For example, the route from Union Station to Ross Hall can be depicted on a map or verbalized in a list of directions. My work draws on psychophysics, neuroscience, and computational models of perception to explore what it even means to say that a mental state has a specific structure or "code," and how the different ways of structuring representations shape our subjective and epistemic positions in the world.

Selected Papers:

(Forthcoming) "Contours of Vision: Towards a Compositional Semantics of Perception." ​The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science ​[link] [draft]

(2021) "Seeing and Visual Reference." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research [link] [pdf]

(2021) "Mental Structures." Noûs 55(3): 649–677 [link] [pdf]

(2019) "Do You Compute?" Aeon [link]

​(2018) "The Perspectival Character of Perception." Journal of Philosophy 115(4): 187-214. [link] [pdf]