Research
Most of my research focuses on causation: what it is and how what it is shapes or constrains arguments in philosophy.
I have published work on why causal arguments for physicalism are not as good as they seem, on why a naive semantics ‘therefore’ is better than it seems, and on why treating chatbots as humans is exactly as undignified as it seems.
Published work
Official copies are linked via the journal; open-access versions are linked via the title. Please cite the official copy when possible.
2026
Narrative Therefore
2026
AI Mimicry and Human Dignity: Chatbot Use as a Violation of Self-Respect
with Jan-Willem van der Rijt and Dimitri Coelho MolloResearch projects
During 2026–2029, I am involved in two projects funded by the Swedish Research Council:
Natural Properties — a causation-first approach
with Jenn McDonald and Tom Wysocki
This project aims to uncover what makes properties natural by comparing the causal roles of stereotypically natural and unnatural properties. Our working hypothesis is that naturalness tracks causal role: a property like being a proton or a moose is less natural than being a proton, because it plays a more limited causal role and is less suited to good explanations. The account is reductive, nominalist-friendly, avoids ruling out properties by fiat, and captures the explanatory and predictive value of intuitively natural properties.
How words mean: lessons from large language models
Given the right prompt, ChatGPT will output "ibuprofen can increase the risk of gastric ulcers" — the same string a human doctor might produce. This project asks whether the two outputs really share a meaning. One aim is to test the hypothesis that ChatGPT's output is meaningful but differs in meaning from the doctor's utterance; the other is to develop an account on which the two share a meaning, via "quasi-mental states" that ground the model's outputs without underlying mental states.
Previous projects
Causation, Correlation, and Insensitivity
Most causal relations are insensitive: they persist under natural changes to the causal situation — smoking correlates with lung cancer however the smoking itself is caused. Mere correlation is often sensitive by contrast: the cancer–yellow-teeth correlation breaks down where the yellowing isn't caused by smoking. This project argued that patterns of insensitivity can help distinguish causation from the spurious correlations that challenge state-of-the-art accounts of causation. Funded by a Swedish Research Council international postdoc grant; hosted jointly by Rutgers and Umeå, August 2021 – December 2023.
Determinism, Control, and the Consequence Argument
with Andreas Hüttemann (PI) and Christian Loew
Investigated whether control over our actions is compatible with determinism. The project argued that the apparent tension only arises given further, empirically contestable assumptions about causation, laws, counterfactuals, and modality — including those underlying the Consequence Argument, widely taken to be the strongest case for the incompatibility of control and determinism. Part of the DFG-funded Inductive Metaphysics project, March 2020 – July 2021.
PhD thesis
Causal After All: A Model of Mental Causation for Dualists
Defends the thesis that a standard dualist ontology of mind can allow for mental causation even where all events have sufficient physical causes — that dualist mental phenomena can non-overdeterministically cause behaviour in worlds where the physical realm is causally complete — and critically assesses previous proposals to this effect.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Mercier Prize for monographs in metaphysics and first philosophy (KU Leuven / Université Catholique de Louvain).
Full text via DiVA; hard copies available on request.
Work in progress
Drafts available on request:
- A paper on difference-making, arguing it fails as a sufficient criterion for causation because it omits regularity requirements.
- A paper on grounding causal relations, arguing that proportionality-like considerations complicate grounding causal facts.
- A paper on the causal pairing argument, arguing it poses no serious threat to current accounts of dualist mental causation.
- A paper (with Torfinn Huvenes ) on causation and impure sets, arguing such sets pose a puzzle for mainstream theories of causation.
- A paper (with Audrey Powers) on exclusion arguments in metaethics, arguing they fare no better there than in philosophy of mind.
- Another paper on exclusion arguments, against solutions that deny causal status to physical determiners.