(Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Forthcoming)
When we use VR we bump into virtual objects. But, what are they? Are they real? This matters for philosophical reasons because they don’t (seem to) easily fit into our ways of categorising objects. They’re immaterial, ethereal, but so totally convincing! It also matters for legal reasons. They can be financially valuable, and their ownership can be legally confusing.

I’ve given a new account of virtual objects – virtual perceptibilism – on which I argue they’re real but exhausted by their perceptible features. They’re sort of like a rainbow, or a sound – real enough but nothing beyond what can in principle be seen or heard.

(Philosophy, forthcoming)
The way science presents the world is…bizarre. Things seem solid but are filled with empty space, they seem coloured, but colours don’t appear in fundamental physical theory, they seem spatial and temporal, but contemporary physics research (somehow) suggests otherwise!

I’m interested in how far our ordinary language will stretch to accommodate the scientific picture of the world. Is everything we normally say about reality false? No, but getting clear on when science shows our folk conception to be erroneous involves thinking about our ordinary concepts. Through thinking about this, we develop a profound sense of who we are and how we think. It gives us insight into what being human is all about.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2020)
We should be kind, and we should believe in accordance with evidence. But in what sense of “should”? Are the reasons we have to be morally good the same kinds of reasons as those we have to avoid be rational? How does these areas of normative life relate?

I’ve argued that moral and epistemic judgements are closer in kind than people think. Philosophers who think there is no moral dimension to reality (error theorists) are often met by the retort that if that were true, there would be no epistemic dimension to reality either. The parity (or failure of) between the moral and the epistemic might just be enough to convince us that morality is real after all!

Am I a brain in a vat? I don’t think so. In fact, I’m confident that I’m not.

My interest in scepticism is less about knowledge, and more about representation. Can we think of ourselves as so radically deluded? No! Facts about linguistic representation guard against this possibility – it’s literally incoherent! This is fascinating because it involves us bumping up against the limits of coherent thought. It involves, as Bernard Williams put it:

finding our way around inside our own view, feeling our way out to the points at which we begin to lose our hold on it (or it, its hold on us), and things begin to be hopelessly strange to us.

Whether any of this stops one worrying about it all is another matter…

Our most promising fundamental theories (our theories of quantum gravity) share a surprising feature. That is, their fundamental ontology isn’t spatiotemporal.

This provokes a question about how this picture of reality relates to the ordinary one in which objects occupy space. David Chalmers has argued that we can recover the truth of our ordinary claims by understanding them functionally. I argue this leaves them implausibly vulnerable to reference shift and failure. Instead, we should think about how these theories show our terms to be open textured.

Human languages tend to use the same fundamental logico-semantic categories. But is this essential? Are these categories required for linguistic thought? What about minds radically unlike ours? Could there be alien languages?

I’m exploring this by looking at classic works by Donald Davidson and contemporary work by Matti Eklund and Elizabeth Camp. Doing so involves drawing the line between what we can make sense of, and what is sensical per se. Perhaps Lear was right when he said:

there can (for us) be no getting a glimpse of what it might be like to be ‘other-minded’, for as we try to pass beyond the bounds of our mindedness we lapse into what (for us) must be nonsense: that is, we lapse into nonsense.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2021)
I’ve also reviewed Chris Cowie’s book Morality and Epistemic Judgement which is a great place to go if you’re interested in how epistemic and moral normativity do(n’t) differ!