Research

I study range of issues in empirically informed philosophy, with a focus on how cognition arises and the ways it shapes and is shaped by our moral, cultural, and social environments. Here are some projects I’m working on.

  • New architectures and ontologies of cognition
    • I’ve begun to argue that we need to adopt the attitude of productive pessimism (Gomez-Lavin 2019; Gomez-Lavin 2021) to build better ontologies of cognition. Our terms in cognitive science, like working memory, ought to be used to help marshal, collate, and organize data rather than play a strict role in explaining cognitive phenomenon. Especially when they, like working memory, only redescribe the thing they’re meant to explain (aka cognition). I discuss this further in my recent paper on working memory’s use as a Janus like concept (Gomez-Lavin 2024). I’m working on refining this view and applying it to a broader class of phenomena in cognitive science and extending my previous critique of working memory to a manuscript length treatment.
  • Natural Language Processing and Computational Philosophy of Science
    • With folks from the VRAI Lab, we’ve been building a semi-automated pipeline that creates custom corpuses of text drawn from scientific papers ranked on PubMed with the goal of applying ML tools, such as LDA and BERT, on these bodies of text to extract the latent topics embedded in them. These topics can then help us theorize about how these concepts–like Working Memory–change over time and as they move across disciplinary boundaries.
  • Experimental Philosophy, Joint Action and Solidarity
    • Matt Rachar and I have worked on an years-long interdisciplinary project that uses the methods of experimental philosophy to shed new light to longstanding debates in the philosophy of action and social ontology, with five published papers on this work. In particular we’ve shown that most people are very sensitive to behavioral signals of togetherness and group membership and the norms inherent to these episodes of joint, or collective, action. We are extending this work to issues in the economics and game theory, along with the VRAI Lab collaborating on Matt’s new ERC funded project on Unifying Solidarity.
  • Philosophy of AI and AI Literacy
    • With my former postdoc, Bruce Rushing, we’ve been working on a series of experiments aimed at showing that some classes of LM models are capable of learning symmetry properties from synthetic datasets (as we showed in a recent paper). We’re extending this work into the philosophical domain with critiques of scaling principles and the notion of memory in LM models.
    • On the related question of AI Literacy, I’ve played a foundational role in building out the College’s new BA in AI program housed in the Department of Philosophy. We aim to craft a program that gives students relevant training in the mathematical and computational methods at the heart of contemporary AI innovation in industry, paired with training in philosophical argumentation and writing. As part of the VRAI Lab Bruce piloted a novel course in Philosophical Foundations of Machine Learning, which has both informed our department’s new course in Philosophy of Programming and aspects of our college’s new AI Literacy program. Bruce and I also were key organizers in the first ever symposium on the social, political and ethical impacts of high performance computing helped at Supercomputing 2024.
  • Aesthetics
    • I’m also very interested in the ontology of video games and why people enjoy watching other people play video games (perhaps even more so than playing those very games themselves!). Currently I have a work in progress that suggests a new model for video games that understands them to be a kind of instrument, like a musical instrument, that we actively play and with which we can demonstrate skillful action. This Player Based Account also helps us understand why we like to watch others play, as video games are sites for skillful action and virtuosity. I’ve applied this in my prize winning course part of our BA in AI: Introduction to Philosophy through Videogames where students are encouraged to craft new videogames that tackle key philosophical issues (after playing plenty of them during lab hours!).
    • I’m also independently interested in analogue photography and treating it as a personal test case for thinking through the nature of agency and practices, but that’s still in early days.

updated 9.2026