My research is at the intersection of mind and medicine. It deals with ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical issues that arise in connection with medicine, psychological medicine, and mind science, especially, but not exclusively, as those sciences investigate mental disorder.

I am interested in investigating the tension that arises between the results of these sciences and various features of our normatively laden, meaning-guided, folk psychologically intelligible lives. For example, we are committed to the idea that people do things for reasons, that people are responsible for what they do at least some of the time, and that a person’s actions can be made intelligible from their own point of view. It is just an open question whether these commitments can be sustained given what we have come to know about what, in fact, makes our minds tick. To answer that question, we have to properly understand the science, we have to know whether it is any good, and when we have to bring to bear our best theory of what it is that we are doing when we interpret one another in those ordinary, normatively-laden terms. This is one place where the philosophy of science meets the philosophy of mind.

I work on both sides of this project, usually at the same time. So, for example, I have argued that Major Depressive Disorder is not properly understood as a brain disease on the grounds that, in at least a large class of cases, there is something akin to rational causation that goes on between major causes of the syndrome of depression and its characteristic phenomenology. That is, there is content-sensitive causation, or meaning-carrying causation that is incompatible with the brain disease theory. The key idea here is that there is a special kind of causation – one that falls out of the interventionist theory of causation, I argue – that corresponds to it being intelligible that someone would react, mentally, to something in a certain way.

I have argued that some examples of monothematic delusions can also be brought partially into the space of intelligibility. This is hard to do, because delusions are paradigmatically irrational. One might think that we can only understand them if they are rational because rational causation is paradigmatically intelligible, but this is a mistake: rational causation is not co-extensive with intelligible causation. Intelligibility-without-rationality allows us to reconstruct the subject’s deliberative situation from their own point of view – with some help from brain science – without over-rationalizing or losing sight of the phenomenon.

I have argued that there is overlap between self-deception and clinical delusion, enough that the ordinary psychological dynamics that go on in self-deception can open a window on what happens in delusional cognition, including making room for qualified judgements of a specific kind of epistemic responsibility. It is very tempting to think that delusions are paradigmatically non-agentive, but I think that’s a mistake. Rather, there is an illuminating continuity between clinical and non-clinical cases of rationally sub-optimal cognition and action.

Indeed, I have argued that self-deception itself has been under-theorized as a phenomenon for which the agent is morally and epistemically responsible. Here, I make use of the best theories of motivated reasoning to construct a view on which the traditional paradoxes of self-deception are dissolved without losing sight of it as something for which the agent is responsible.

I also have interests in the moral emotions – anger, blame, and resentment – and forgiveness and repair. They are, I think, part of the conceptual toolkit that we use to understand make sense of one another. Illuminating the conditions that justify their application is therefore of crucial importance if we want to reconcile how we ordinarily understand one another with the scientific view of ourselves.