Publications
Emotions and Ethics in Virtual Reality. Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming). (preprint)
Objects and events in virtual reality don't really exist – so says virtual fictionalism. But then how come some actions in virtual reality can have a distressing emotional impact as if they were real? And if none of it exists, how can we wrong others in virtual worlds? I explain how.
Truth in interactive fiction. Synthese 200, 436 (2022). (open access)
Philosophical work on truth in fiction focuses on linear narrative media like literature and film, failing to capture videogames and other interactive fiction in which content differs depending on the audience's input. I propose an account of truth in interactive fiction, and illustrate its necessity for capturing our aesthetic evaluation of interactive fiction and addressing player culpability for virtual transgressions.
Work in Progress
A paper on the benefits of examples from literary fiction
2021 ASA Outstanding Student Paper and 2022 Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize winner
[Handout]
2021 ASA Outstanding Student Paper and 2022 Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize winner
[Handout]
This paper defends the use of literary extracts as illustrative tools in philosophy, compared with thought experiments and real cases. The distinct psychological vantage point offered by literature renders it a potent epistemological resource for elucidating intricate social dynamics. Several philosophical employments of fictional examples are argued to benefit from their affording such access to the mental lives of characters.
This paper investigates a widespread yet philosophically underexamined phenomenon wherein actors, videogame players, and virtual reality users begin to acquire attitudes of the characters they imagine themselves as through a process of imaginative contagion. I offer an explanation of contagion and identify two preventative mechanisms which mitigate such effects, dampening concerns that contagion might result in moral corruption.
This paper argues that the phenomenology of virtual reality differs from that of depictive images and film. Virtual reality typically lacks the distinctive experience of seeing-in, where we see a surface as giving rise to the objects pictorially represented. I argue that virtual reality instead offers a different kind of twofold experience, where we are perceptually aware of both the content of a virtual reality image and the way that content is represented, but not through awareness of the screen surface.
A paper on the semantics of names of false theoretical posits
Millianism is the view that the sole semantic contribution of a proper name is its referent. This paper presents a dilemma for Millianism regarding the names of false theoretical posits like ‘Vulcan’. If ‘Vulcan’ does not refer, then Millianism cannot account for scientific theorists’ beliefs about Vulcan. If ‘Vulcan’ does refer to a created abstract object, then a satisfactory account of this object’s creation cannot be given due to issues of metaphysical indeterminacy.
Other
I was interviewed in the European Society for Aesthetics Newsletter, as the winner of their 2022 Fabian Dorsch Essay Prize.