Picture of me looking all serious and brooding about something.

I am a professor in the department of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. I am also a faculty member of UCSD's Interdisciplinary Cognitive Science Program,

and an associate dean in the School of Arts and Humanities.

Before coming to UCSD I was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver during academic 2000-2001. I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy at Rutgers University in 2000. I received my M.A. (philosophy, 1995) and B.A. (philosophy and math, 1993), from the University of Chicago.

Though I've worked in many different areas of philosophy, my principal interests these days are in philosophy of perception and philosophy of language, and especially on questions in these areas that interact with the cognitive sciences.

Much of my work in recent years has involved elaborating and defending a relationalist account of color properties --- a view on which colors are constituted in terms of a relation between perceiving subjects and objects. I've also been writing about interactions between and within perceptual modalities, and the implications of such interactions for our understanding of a range of issues including perceptual architecture, synesthesia, modularity, and sensory substitution. In language, I've been working on the semantics and pragmatics of context-sensitive expressions (i.e., expressions such as 'I' or 'this' that express different things depending on the contexts in which they are uttered), and on extrasemantic expansion (i.e., the ways in which we use words to convey more than what they literally mean, such as when we say 'Jonathan ate some of the cookies' and convey that Jonathan didn't eat all the cookies, or when we ask 'can you pass the salt?' to convey a request that our hearer should pass the salt).


Here is my curriculum vitae.