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Mental Disorders

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My current research project is in the philosophy of neurodiversity and psychiatry.  My aim is to bridge the gap between the neurodiversity paradigm—which sees conditions such as autism and ADHD as normal variations—and the medical model—which sees them as disorders. In line with the former, I want to see these conditions as valuable traits; in line with the latter, I aim to acknowledge that they can entail suffering and require medical treatment.

Both models share the assumption that, in order for something to deserve treatment, it needs to involve a dysfunction. Drawing on the criticism of proper functions in biology, and on the tradition of the biopsychosocial approach in psychiatry, I will argue against this assumption, and formulate a disjunctive account of mental disorder: something counts as a mental disorder if (a) it is either one or another mental condition and (b) is harmful. Mental conditions are a disparate bunch of metaphysical entities, ranging from natural kinds (identified by differences in brain structures and neural processes), to psychological kinds (patterns of naturally co-occurring behaviours and dispositions), to social constructs (patterns of behaviours and dispositions which are grouped together only in light of explanatory constructs in psychiatry). They all have in common, however, a relatively value-free nature: they are not per se negative, nor involve necessarily a disorder or dysfunction. They count as disorders only when they cause harm and/or interfere with one’s flourishing.

Such an account aligns with current diagnostic practices, which allow for sub-clinical presentations of conditions, explains the context- and social-variability of many disorders, and overcomes the limitations of the dysfunction model, while offering an alternative explanation to how the brain of neurodiverse people can be said to function differently.

In the context of this novel understanding of mental disorders, I am focusing specifically on developing an understanding of ADHD, that recognises the challenges posed by ADHD and justifies and encourages treatment when needed, while at the same time celebrating the strengths that come with ADHD trait, advocating for societal changes to make our environment more neurodiverse-inclusive, and without relying on the problematic notion of dysfunction. 

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Philosophy of Perception

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I am interested in understanding how perception relates us to the world. In particular, I've been interested in defending a naive realist view of perception, whereby particulars in the surrounding environment are constituents of conscious perceptions.

My most recent work on perception focuses on arguing that naive realism can give a unitary account of the phenomenal character of experience, across perception, illusion, and hallucinations.  This work is informed my the belief that philosophy of mind is metaphysics of mind: I thus tackle recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of perception by employing and elucidating metaphysical issues that have been disregarded in recent philosophy of perception,  such as the nature and legitimacy of disjunctive properties, multiple realization, reduction, explanation, mereological parts, ontological dependence, and relations.

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In Progress :

  • A Minimally Unified View of Hallucination (with Keith Wilson)

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In my PhD thesis and earlier papers on perception, I defended disjunctivism, the claim that a perception and a hallucination have different phenomenal characters, even when they are introspectively indistinguishable.

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You can read more about my PhD thesis here: 

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Articles on Naive Realism and Disjunctivism:

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As Editor:  

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  • Perception Without Representation, (co-edited with K.A. Wilson) Topoi, June 2017, 36: 2​​

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The Metaphysics of Colour 

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A proper understanding of how perception relates us to the world requires an understanding of the nature of sensible properties (whose paradigmatic case are colours). It’s impossible to tell what a colour is without describing what it looks like, which is subject to infra- and intra-species variations. How do we accommodate this inextricable link to perception without denying that they are the very same properties instantiated by mind-independent objects? Failing to do so, risks cutting us off from any empirical access to the world, because it is only through sensible properties that objects are manifest in perception.

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Work in progress on the Metaphysics of Colour: 

  • Colour Relationalism and Reflectance Properties: I propose a relationalist account of colours, which engages with questions about how different levels of explanation in different sciences interact. Colours are the result of the way the perceptual system selects and organizes certain physical properties that determine their reflectance profile.This proposal, like physicalist and primitivist objectivism, preserves the idea that colours belong to physical objects, but unlike physicalism it doesn’t fully reduce them to physical properties. Unlike primitivism, it can accommodate colour variations and explain the relation between colour and the physical properties it supervenes upon. It also fares better than current forms of relationalism, in accommodating the phenomenology of colour perception and explaining their relation to physical properties.

  • Naive Realism and Colour Relationalism: I argue that colour relationalism is compatible with naive realism, (contrary to what is often assumed).

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