With Pierre Beckmann.
Argues that the concept of understanding needs to be re-engineered for artificial cognition in a way that is empirically informed by mechanistic interpretability research and theoretically informed by a grasp of the functions of the concept.
AI, conceptual engineering, mechanistic interpretability, understanding, conceptual change, functions
PDF coming soonWith Pierre Beckmann.
Offers a unifying account of understanding by reverse-engineering the function of both the state and the concept. Arges that we care about understanding because it grounds robust competence. Our concept of understanding evolved as an efficient proxy to track this elusive property, allowing us to identify who to trust and learn from. This highlights the sociality of understanding and how it shapes the character of human understanding. Understanding is the result of convergent pressures to predict the world using cognitive models that are not only accurate, but also compressed enough to be stored, demonstrated, and transmitted.
epistemology, AI, understanding, conceptual change, compression, competence
Download PDFIn Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf
Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.
conceptual engineering, legal philosophy, law, responsibility, Williams, conceptual change
Download PDFPhilosophical Studies. With Pierre Beckmann. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2507.08017
Draws on detailed technical evidence from research on mechanistic interpretability (MI) to argue that while LLMs differ profoundly from human cognition, they do more than tally up word co-occurrences: they form internal structures that are fruitfully compared to different forms of human understanding, such as conceptual, factual, and principled understanding. We synthesize MI’s most relevant findings to date while embedding them within an integrative theoretical framework for thinking about understanding in LLMs. As the phenomenon of “parallel mechanisms” shows, however, the differences between LLMs and human cognition are as philosophically fruitful to consider as the similarities.
explainable AI, LLM, mechanistic interpretability, philosophy of AI, understanding, conceptual change
Download PDFPhilosophical Studies. 2026. doi:10.1007/s11098-026-02511-3
The article offers an account of “needs of the mind” in terms of a distinctively aptic normativity–a normativity of fittingness. After reconstructing the history of different conceptions of needs and their gradual subjectivization, the article focuses on conceptual needs and argues that they register a cognitive privation that goes beyond a shortage of words, marking a mismatch between our conceptual repertoire and our situation that reorients conceptual engineering from detached amelioration to situated adaptation. This makes a needs-first approach uniquely suited to guiding conceptual adaptation in times of technological disruption.
conceptual adaptation, needs, aptic normativity, privacy, philosophy of language, functions
Download PDFZeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie (ZEMO) – Journal for Ethics and Moral Philosophy. Forthcoming.
In response to Chappell’s work on epiphanies, the article first questions the normative authority of epiphanic experiences over more sober reflection, warning that their power can distort our values and lead to a kind of “transcendent ventriloquism” before challenging Chappell’s political solution of “conversational justice,” arguing that its rationalist constraints ultimately undermine the very experiential and emotional dimension that epiphanies were meant to champion.
authority, politics, epiphanies, experience, conceptual change, practical philosophy
Download PDFWith Nikhil Krishnan.
Uncovers the links between reasons internalism and the Romantic tradition, and shows that internalism does not merely translate Romantic ideas into more technical language, but transforms them.
internalism, internal reasons, romanticism, conceptual change, history of philosophy, Krishnan
PDF coming soonMinds and Machines 35 (35): 1–39. 2025. doi:10.1007/s11023-025-09738-9
Offers a framework for thinking about “the systematicity of thought” that distinguishes four senses of the phrase, defuses the alleged tension between systematicity and connectionism that Fodor and Pylyshyn influentially diagnosed, and identifies a “hard” form of the systematicity challenge that continues to defy connectionist models.
AI, explainable AI, philosophy of AI, rationality, systematicity, conceptual change
Download PDFPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1): 3–29. 2024. doi:10.1111/phpr.13002
By reconstructing the little-known Dworkin-Williams debate over whether political concepts like liberty and equality can and should be reconciled to avoid conflict, the article explores the nature of political values, the limits of philosophical intervention in politics, the challenge of pluralism, and the conditions for political legitimacy in the face of inevitable conflict and loss.
conceptual engineering, legitimacy, political realism, pluralism, Williams, conceptual change
Download PDFPacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (3): 670–691. 2022. With Friedemann Bieber. doi:10.1111/papq.12394
Argues that how much control we have over conceptual change is itself something we can control, and while some domains require the institutionalization of the power to enforce conceptual innovations, because there are strong practical pressures to coordinate on a single harmonized technical terminology, there are also liberal and democratic rationales for making conceptual engineering hard to implement by default.
conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, conceptual change, coordination, liberalism, power
Download PDFThe Monist 105 (4): 435–51. By invitation. 2022. doi:10.1093/monist/onac010
Argues that genealogical explanations can be used to evaluate and improve conceptual practices, taking as an example the demand for conceptual innovation around notions of legitimacy created by the increasing power of international institutions.
conceptual engineering, legitimacy, genealogy, ideology critique, conceptual ethics, international institutions
Download PDFThe Philosophical Quarterly 71 (2): 286–307. 2021. doi:10.1093/pq/pqaa026
Highlights enduring epistemic and metaphysical difficulties for any project of evaluating and improving the values we live by, including contemporary work in conceptual ethics and engineering, and argues that attempts to sidestep these difficulties fall prey to “Saint-Just’s illusion”—the mistake of believing that a set of values from one political context can be successfully transplanted into a different political context.
conceptual ethics, conceptual engineering, conceptual change, genealogy, 19th century, 20th century
Download PDFEuropean Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 758–77. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.1111/ejop.12603
Focusing on the social and political conceptual practices that Wittgenstein neglected, the paper presents a novel, more dynamic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s model of conceptual change, on which conceptual change becomes intelligible not just as a brute, exogenous imposition on rational discourse, but as endogenous and reason-driven. This counters the socially conservative tendencies of existing interpretations and renders intelligible the possibility of radical critique within a Wittgensteinian framework.
conceptual change, conceptual engineering, conceptual ethics, history, Bernard Williams, language games
Download PDFAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2): 135–46. 2021. With Damian Cueni. doi:10.2307/48614001
Offers a practical derivation of the need for public and judicial reasoning to take a more discursive and consistent form than private deliberation (a theme more fully explored in ch. 10 of my second book).
public reason, ethical theory, genealogy, metaethics, legitimacy, conceptual change
Download PDFSynthese 197 (5): 2005–2027. 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-018-1777-9
Attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something are often said to commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices. But this invites a second objection, which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure—the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems.
genealogy, Bernard Williams, Craig, epistemology, normativity, space of reasons
Download PDF