Who am I?I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University (2019-), where I am Director of the Cognitive Science Program (2022-). I am also a member of the Centre for Vision Research and a Core Member of the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) program. From 2018-2019, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, at the University of Antwerp. I received my PhD in Philosophy from UCLA in Spring 2018. Before that, I got 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, which investigates the structural warrant that perception supplies to beliefs in virtue of the format or structure of perceptual states. 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. The workshop 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 the philosophy of mind, psychology, and perception. More specifically, I am a philosopher of vision science. 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. Second, as a naturalistic philosopher of mind, I take the core concepts and commitments that underlie the cognitive sciences, as well as specific experimental findings, 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 vision to explore (a) what it even means to say that a mental state has a specific structure or "code," and (b) what different kinds of codes populate the mind. I hold that our perceptual representations are compositionally structured. Complex visual scenes are coded in terms of more basic features, according to substantive rules of combination. Vision has a "grammar" of sorts, but one that is distinctively different from that of language and thought. My work is guided by the idea that we can gain important insights into the representational, epistemic, and subjective natures of our mental states by getting clear about how those mental states are structured. |
Recent Papers:
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