I completed a BBA with a specialisation in economics at York University (2014) in Canada and Nanyang Technological University (on exchange) in Singapore. I worked briefly in foreign exchange before an interest in persistent moral disagreements brought me back to academia. I got an MA in philosophy at York University (2016) and a PhD in philosophy at the University of Arizona (2023).
At first, I was interested in developing naturalistic accounts of normativity, which seek a basis for normativity in the physical world as described by the sciences. However, I was disappointed that these approaches weren’t seriously engaged with scientific practice. To rectify this in my own work, I sought two doctoral minors in neuroscience and cognitive science. I was impressed by the central roles that norms play in these fields, particularly in the form of experimental tasks.
It dawned on me that I might be getting things backwards. My research now aims to show that norms (however they relate to the physical world) are indispensable to neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning. Eventually, I hope to show that inference the best explanation supports a realist attitude towards these norms. In other words, I hope to show that the world has rich normative structure, which makes possible (and successful) various strategies in science.
Through this work, I hope to build a bridge from philosophy of science to metanormative theory.