Publications

​De Se Names (with Maite Ezcurdia)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming

 

We argue that there are names with de se contents and that they are theoretically fruitful. De se names serve to challenge intuitive and otherwise plausible orthodoxies such as Stalnaker’s view of communication and Bayesian views of belief update, consequences relevant even to those already sympathetic to the irreducibility of de se content.

​The Fragmentation of Felt Time

Philosophers' Imprint, Volume 22 • 2022​

 

I develop the idea of a subjective clock to explain experiences as of time flying by in cases where we become absorbed by an activity--e.g., listening to music—that itself requires experiencing time. I argue that existing models fail to accommodate these cases and propose that what best explains them is that felt time becomes fragmented. More specifically, I propose that attentive engagement fragments felt time such that we experience the activity we are engaged in as if it were located in a temporally isolated branch or fragment of the main experienced timeline. Time then seems to pass only in this branch, creating the sensation — upon integration — that less time has passed in the main timeline. I then explain how, by indexing its inputs, a subjective clock can model the proposed fragmentation. 

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time by Carlos Montemayor

Crítica, 2020​

 

Montemayor proposes an interesting, novel, and ambitious two-phased model of temporal experience that aims to reconcile two opposing camps: one comprised of cinematism and retentionalism and, the other comprised of extensionalism. Montemayor proposes to take each of these camps as concerned with two different notions of consciousness: cinematism and retentionalism are concerned with access-consciousness while extensionalism is concerned with phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I raise two challenges to this proposal. First, I object that Montemayor’s notion of the sensorial present—which on his proposal is what views on the first camp are concerned with—can be taken as a notion of access-consciousness of the present. Secondly, I argue that even if the sensorial present could be seen as a notion of access-consciousness, all the views in this debate—cinematism, retentionalism, and extensionalism—are ultimately concerned with offering an account of phenomenal-consciousness. 

A Quantum Theory of Felt Duration 

Analytic Philosophy, 2014 (Winner of Marc Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Mind)

 

I characterize puzzling aspects of our duration experiences and argue that existing accounts fail to properly account for them. I then propose to account for them in terms of the idea of a subjective clock. A distinctive feature of a subjective clock is that it accounts for our experiences of duration in terms of other experiences—what I call an experienced quantum, a short-lived chunk of a situation that is experienced as forming a temporally extended but tightly unified whole, and experiences of the numerosity of such quanta. 

Why Lewis’ appeal to natural properties fails to solve Kripke’s rule-following paradox

Philosophical Studies, 2014

 

I argue that the claim that meaning-facts are guiding is crucial to a proper formulation of Kripke’s paradox. Kripke, for instance, rejects a number of candidate solutions by explicitly appealing to the idea that meaning facts should be able to guide us in responding to new cases—for example, in responding to instances of ‘+’ that we have not encountered before. After motivating this guiding constraint and defending this interpretation of Kripke’s paradox, I argue that Lewis’s appeal to natural properties fails to solve Kripke’s paradox precisely because it fails to satisfy the guiding constraint. 

Comment on “Specialness and Egalitarianism”

Thought, 2013

 

I challenge Giovani Merlo’s use of cross-temporal grounding relations to reconcile the intuition that the present is objectively different from the past and the future with the intuition that the present is on a par with all other times. After examining various alternatives, I conclude that Merlo’s view cannot distinguish itself from a version of The Frozen Spotlight View according to which, if the present time t is special by being the time at which propositions are true and facts obtain, then no time other than t is ever special. But The Frozen Spotlight View is implausible and thus clearly not an attractive way of vindicating the two initial intuitions.