Research Statement Dissertation Description

Broad Research Program My philosophical research aims to develop a general theory of pragmatic embodied epistemology. Pragmatic embodied epistemology is the philosophical investigation of the possibility conditions and normative principles for embodied agents to represent their world and to utilize the representations in their interactions with the world. Pragmatic embodied epistemology differs from the traditional Cartesian epistemology and its modern counterpart, analytic epistemology, in that: (1) it holds that the agent is essentially an embodied system; (2) it replaces the notion of “rationality” with the more general and more widely applicable notion of “cognition”; (3) it does not assume doxastic representations but relies on a more general notion of information; and, (4) it is not centered on the concept of “knowledge”, but instead bases its normative principles on the role of the representation systems for goal-directed interactions of the agent with its world.