My main interest is self-knowledge – how do we know ourselves, given our proneness to biases and self-deception? In particular, I focus on how we gain knowledge of the facts about ourselves that make us who we are, such as our character traits, values, emotions, and so on (what some may call ‘substantial self-knowledge’). I have just completed my PhD at UCL, where I tackled the question ‘How do we know what we value?’.  My thesis developed an inferentialist account for how we might do so, arguing that the imagination can play a significant role in the knowledge generation process.

At the Human Abilities Centre, I will focus on two separate projects. First, I will explore our ability to imagine: would becoming better imaginers help us know ourselves better? And how might one become a better user of the imagination? Second, I will turn from ways of gaining self-knowledge to obstacles we may face. One particularly pernicious obstacle is, I will argue, the fact that self-attributing mental states depends on our use of mental concepts such as ‘kindness’, ‘valuing’, ‘belief’, and so on. Our conceptual mastery is often not as advanced as we may think, such that we often fall short of knowledge by being unable to accurately reason with such mental concepts.