University of Geneva

Post-Doc, Philosophy

Collaborateur scientifique, FNS Project: "Knowledge, Evidence, and Practice"

Thesis Title: The Situated Mind: An Essay in the Theory of Reference

About

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Geneva, within an FNS project entitled “Knowledge, Evidence, and Practice”. In 2010 I defended my PhD thesis under the supervision of Jérôme Dokic at the Institut Jean Nicod and the EHESS in Paris. I also hold an M.A. in History of Philosophy from the University of Paris IV – Sorbonne (2004) and an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science from the EHESS (2005). Before coming to Europe, I finished my undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Antioquia (Colombia).

I am mainly interested in the Philosophy of Mind, and its connections to various topics in the Philosophy of Language and Epistemology. In my PhD dissertation I worked on the epistemology of linguistic reference. I argued that, in order to explain the mastery of referential expressions, the so-called ‘representational theory of mind’ should be rejected. As a result, I was led to explore the notion of practical knowledge, which I thought could provide an alternative framework. The underlying claim is that descriptivism and referentialism do not exhaust the logical space.

In the next few years, I will publish some results of my PhD thesis and start to elaborate an explanatory framework where the notion of practical knowledge is taken as central. This task has proven daunting, so I am not sure I will be able to provide substantial results in the near future.

I am also interested in the philosophy of perception, mainly in its relation to perceptual judgment and the theory of reference. I have argued that conscious perceptual experience has some constitutive links to doxastic states that cannot be explained as justification relations. Right now, I am concerned with the role of generality in perceptual experience and the search for a non-propositional model of perceptual content.

I used to do research on Early Modern Philosophy. A result of this work is a book (in Spanish) on Kant’s refutation of idealism, and some manuscripts on Kant’s conception of the self.

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