Kalbirsohi.net

Research

My main areas of research are in the philosophy of language and mind (psychology, cognitive science), though I am also work on Feminist Philosophy, Metaphysics and some Early Analytic Philosophy (Frege and Wittgenstein largely).

Currently I am working on the philosophy of action, thinking about the structure of intentional action and the epistemic relationship that we have to our reasons. I'm thinking about whether we have a different relationship to our reasons for acting when we perform highly skilled activities—I'm particularly interested in speaking—and whether, as a result, we can say more about how our skilled activities contribute to the things the we plan to do.

I am also interested in the semantics/pragmatics of indexicals and am working on a proposal whereby we consider non-standard uses of indexicals—such as the use of "I" to refer to something stand as proxy for the speaker (like a playing piece in a game)—as involving pretence. The view is interesting as it is difficult to classify it straighforwardly as a semantic or pragmatic proposal—I think that this case provides a good model for explaining how we violate the contraints of semantic rules in a great deal of our ordinary speach.

Both of these lines of research had their beginnings in work I did in my PhD thesis, "How to do things with indexicals". In the thesis I also talk about how indexicals are used to refer indeterminately and try to give a (admittedly weak!) account of how this works.