Research
I ask architectural questions about minds, identity, and knowledge: what these systems are made of, and how they hold together or come apart. I work at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and social epistemology. My engineering background shapes how I think about systems — cognitive, social, and artificial.
Areas of Interest
- Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of AI
- Social Epistemology
Research Lines
Unequal Costs of Disbelief
Disbelieving costs more than believing. Acceptance is the cognitive default while rejecting taxes executive function, and on leading accounts of testimony it is also the rationally entitled stance. People from marginalized identities pay that cost more often, and it compounds. The cost is acute at acquisition, escalates under identity threat, and turns chronic as rejected claims stay accessible in the mind and are re-cued by a marginalizing environment. Unequal Costs of Disbelief terms this burden disbelief labor and argues it is a distinct epistemic injustice.
Status: Presented as a poster at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP), Johns Hopkins University, June 2026. Being revised for publication.
Group Minds
Can groups literally have minds? The debate has run for decades without a criterion for what separates a mind from a system that merely has mental properties. In Mind or Functional Organization? I argue the debate conflates two properties that co-occur in individual minds and so have been invisible as distinct: functional organization — the structural arrangements that route information and produce rational outputs — and first-order cognitive subjecthood, where informational states combine through sub-agential mechanisms rather than through communication between agents. Groups, however epistemically impressive, exhibit the first without the second.
Status: Graduate seminar paper (CUNY Graduate Center, Spring 2026).
AI and Epistemic Infrastructure
Communities of inquiry such as science, law, medicine, and scholarship turn cognition into knowledge through an accountability architecture of peer review, citation, named authorship, and replication. That architecture has always assumed the producer of a claim can be held answerable for it. AI now participates in knowledge production without participating in its accountability. No one has done the epistemic work, and no one can be questioned or corrected when its outputs fail. What breaks when epistemic productivity and accountability decouple, and what would provenance and trust infrastructure need to look like to repair it?
Status: Early stage.
Identity as Process
My thesis work, Gender Identity as Regulatory Self-Model, argues that gender identity is best understood as a dynamically stabilized regulatory process rather than a static property or social designation. Drawing on dynamical systems theory, I treat transgender embodiment as a high-information case that reveals how identity patterns can destabilize, reorganize, and cohere under affective and social perturbation.
Status: Presented at the Queer Analytic Philosophy Conference (QAφ), UC Santa Cruz, June 2026 — slides · manuscript in revision.
Research Output
I architected the Queer Robot Companion project at Hunter College's TIER Robotics Lab, where we build queer-affirming robot companions (HRI '26 full paper, 23.2% acceptance; interactivity demo); I remain involved in an advisory role.
For a complete list of publications and presentations, see my CV.