Research
I am a graduate student in Susan Carey's lab at the Harvard Lab for Developmental Studies. I am exploring children's developing sensitivity to the alternative possibilities in the world around them. I also work on counterfactual reasoning and perspective taking tasks.
I have worked in two other academic fields. I hold a PhD in philosophy, where I worked on finding ways to apply teleosemantics to natural languages. As a postdoc in linguistics, I worked on the compositional semantics and formal pragmatics of conditionals.
Documents
Don't you see the possibilities? Young preschoolers may lack possibility concepts
Developmental Science (2023): e13400. Final publication is available here
Minimal representations of possibility at age 3
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(52) (2022): e2207499119; joint work with Michael Huemer, Matt Steele, Stephanie Alderete and Susan Carey. Final publication is available here
Might and might not: Children's conceptual development and the acquisition of modal verbs
Semantics and Linguistic Theory XXXI (2022): 426-445; joint work with Eimantas Zalnieriunas. Final publication is available here
Extended difficulties with counterfactuals persist in reasoning with false beliefs: Evidence for teleology-in-perspective
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 204 (2021): 105058; joint work with Eva Rafetseder, Christine O'Brien, and Josef Perner. Final publication is available here
The Acquisition of Modal Concepts
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24(1) (2020): 65-78; joint work with Susan Carey. Final publication is available here
Could It Be So? The Cognitive Science of Possibility
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24(1) (2020): 3-4; joint work with Susan Carey, Jonathan Redshaw, and Thomas Suddendorf. Final publication is available here
Mental files theory of mind: When do children consider agents acquainted with different object identities?
Cognition 171 (2018): 122-129; joint work with Michael Huemer and Josef Perner. Open access final publication is available here
Counterfactual antecedent falsity and the epistemic sensitivity of counterfactuals
Philosophical Studies 175(1): 45-69. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
Two Arguments for the Etiological Theory Over the Modal Theory of Biological Function
Synthese 194(4) (2017): 1169-1187; joint work with Maximilian Huber. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
Mental Files in Development. Dual Naming, False Belief, Identity and Intensionality
Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7(2) (2016): 491-508; joint work with Josef Perner. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
Simplicity and Elegance in Millikan's Account of Productivity: Reply to Martinez
Philosophical Psychology 29(4) (2016): 503-516. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
On Presuppositional Implicatures
Topoi 35 (2016): 83-91. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
Mental files and belief: A cognitive theory of how children represent belief and its intensionality
Cognition 145 (2015): 77-88; joint work with Josef Perner and Michael Huemer. Open access final publication is available here
Counterfactual Antecedent Falsity and Embedded Antipresuppositions
From MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 75
Teleosemantics: Intentionality, Productivity, and the Theory of Meaning
Language and Linguistics Compass vol. 8 (2014): 197-210. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
Basic Conditional Reasoning: How Children Mimic Counterfactual Reasoning
Studia Logica 102(4) (2014): 793-810; joint work with Eva Rafetseder and Josef Perner. Open access final publication is available here
Can Teleosemantics Deflect the EAAN?
Philosophia vol. 41 (2013): 221-238. Penultimate version; the final publication is available here
Presuppositions and Antipresuppositions in Conditionals
From Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory XXI
A Teleosemantic Theory of Mental Conditionals
Draft; please do not cite without permission