In-Progress Monograph: The Practical Roots of Mind develops a radical new theory that overturns longstanding assumptions about action, perception, and mental representation. The book’s primary thesis is that the fundamental activity of mind is not, as is standardly assumed, to reflect the world by standing in for it, but rather to grasp the world by appropriately engaging with it. Primary support for the book’s thesis rests on three pivotal moves, each of which topples a pillar of philosophical and often scientific orthodoxy. 

The first pivotal move is grounding intentionality–the defining feature of minds– in the nature of practical agency, and thereby inverting the orthodox understanding of the explanatory relationship between action and representation. Where the orthodox view grounds intentional actions in causation by intentional states (i.e., mental representations), this book demonstrates the advantages of instead grounding  intentional states (mental representation) in intentional actions. To be clear, the claim is not that mental representations are caused by intentional actions (indeed, while this is true of public representations, it leads to absurdity in the case of mental representations). Rather, building off of an “Anscombean” tradition in the philosophy of action, the book argues that actions are intrinsically teleologically, and thus intentionally, directed developing processes. More precisely, the book proposes that intentional actions are developing processes that aim to solve practical problems.

To reap the theoretical benefits advertised by its predecessors, however, the view must overcome objections they have faced. It does this, first, by identifying mental representations with intentional actions in the “acorn” stage and with the “roots” of intentional actions in the performance stage. Actions that develop into performances are thus direct manifestations of the mind. Accordingly, this book not only rejects the common idea that the fundamental task of mind is to reflect the world, it also rejects the idea that observable actions are  “reflections” of essentially hidden mental states.

The book further establishes the plausibility of the view of action and mental representation it proposes by highlighting the existence and rage of species of epistemic intentional actions and activities. A key part of this argument involves building off of the psychologist J.J. Gibson’s conception of perception to show that sensory perception is itself a primitive species of practical epistemic intentional activity. Perceptual activity is also a type of intentional activity in its own right: it aims at learning by attuning and calibrating practical problem-solving capacities. It does this in part by initiating, and thus forming a proper part of, other forms of intentional action and activity. Perceptual representations are thus acorns and roots of perceptual actions and activities which are, in turn, crucial aspects of the acorns and roots of other intentional actions and activities. 

However, the coherence and comprehensibility of the book’s radical conception of mental representation and perception ultimately turns on toppling the third pillar: the orthodox conception of representation. According to this conception, which is near universal in philosophy and the mind sciences alike, the contents of mental representations and public representations (e.g., linguistic sentences, maps, photos, etc.) are fundamentally analogous in form. In place of this assumption, the book presents and builds on the “Practical Epistemic Access" (PEA) analysis of representation I have developed elsewhere.  According to this analysis, mental representations function to provide a direct form of PEA and their contents have a “de agendo” form. Public representations, on the other hand, function to provide an indirect form of PEA and constitute “acorns” or “roots” of discursive activities which may be performed overtly (in the public space) or covertly (as when one, e.g., talks to oneself). Their contents have a “de substituto” form. So, public representations are re-presentational in the familiar sense of standing in for targets. But mental representations are re-presentational in a different sense: they are constituted by instances of repeatable modes of being present, i.e., of engaging and being ready to engage directly with targets the world. The PEA analysis thus unifies public and mental representations without eliding their respective contents.

The book has eight chapters. After introducing the pillars of orthodoxy, the first chapter, “Overview,” presents a birds-eye-view of the theory to be developed as a whole, making it explicit how the pieces– the theories of action, perception, and representation developed in the next three (core) chapters– hang together. The second chapter, “Action,” will motivate inverting the orthodox conception of the explanatory relationship between action and mental representation before presenting the particular variety of  “Anscombean” theory it defends and demonstrating its capacity to withstand objections. The third chapter, “Perception,” will argue for understanding perception as species of epistemic intentional activity, and show how this view vindicates the popular idea that perception is, as Burge (2010, 2022) puts it, where “mind begins,”  but without incurring common problematic commitments.  The fourth chapter, “Representation,” challenges the orthodox view that representations function to stand-in for, and thus “accurately” (truly or veridically) “portray” targets by developing a unifying account of representation on which representations are powers (abilities or potentials) for intentional actions, i.e., responses to targets. In this view, the fundamental standard of representational success is "appropriateness," or “practical fittingness,” while alethic standards of success (i.e. truth, veridicality, and satisfaction) describe the conditions under which specifically de subsituto representations are appropriate. The chapter further argues for identifying problem-solving powers (or capacities for intentional action), exercises of which constitute intentional actions, as de agendo concepts, exercises of which constitute de agendo representations, and develops a practical computationalist theory of mind which centers on agendo representations and the practico-logical structure of de agendo concepts. 

The final part of the book further highlights what’s distinctive about the theory and begins to put the theory to work. Chapter five returns to perception, situating my de agendo theory of perceptual representations in relation to historical, mainstream, and alternative counter-mainstream theories of perception, and highlighting its relative advantages. Chapter six provides a rough recipe for interpreting  contemporary scientific concepts and studies a la the practical computationalist theory of mind articulated in chapter four and argues that the practical computationalist theory avoids the solipsism, homuncularism, and simultaneous over- and under-intellectualising of cognition that plague the orthodox computational theory of mind. Chapter seven argues that the overall theory of mind developed in the book to some extent reconciles seemingly opposed views about the relationship between both human and other animal minds as well as knowledge-how and knolwedge-that. Finally, chapter eight indicates the theory’s potential to illuminate a variety of phenomena, from akrasia (weakness of will), implicit bias, and incongruent beliefs, to the epistemic content of emotions and the possibility of moral perception.

Peer-Reviewed Journals & Book Chapters Organized by Topic: 

Action and Knowledge-How:

1. (forthcoming, Philosophical Studies) Mistaken Actions: Davidson’s Enduring Dilemma: This essay is about a variety of action errors I call “Mistaken Actions” and a puzzle they pose for Causal Theories of Action. I begin with Davidson’s version of the Causal Theory and pose the puzzle as a dilemma: if his theory explains what makes a mistaken action mistaken, then it can’t explain what makes it intentional; and if his theory explains what makes a mistaken action intentional, then it can’t explain what makes it mistaken. I then propose three ways in which more recent Causal Guidance Theories may be able to resolve the dilemma but argue that none yield a definitive solution. 

2. (2026, Book Chapter) Dumb like a fox? Intellectualism and non-human minds: This paper considers whether intellectualism about know-how—the view that knowing-how is entirely reducible to propositional knowledge—has the theoretical resources at its disposal to ground a plausible characterisation of the seemingly impressive behavioural feats of non-human animals. Since intellectualism takes know-how to be a relatively sophisticated cognitive achievement, some have questioned whether it can plausibly ascribe know-how to non-human animals. This paper evaluates three intellectualist attempts to deal with the issue of animal know-how and finds each of them wanting. Along the way, it is argued that anti-intellectualism is better placed than intellectualism when it comes to characterising the prima facie skilful doings of non-human animals.

3. (2021, Synthese) Anti-intellectualism, instructive representations, and the intentional action argument: Intellectualists hold that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that, and consequently that the knowledge involved in skill is propositional. In support of this view, the intentional action argument holds that since skills manifest in intentional action and since intentional action necessarily depends on propositional knowledge, skills necessarily depend on propositional knowledge. We challenge this argument, and suggest that instructive representations, as opposed to propositional attitudes, can better account for an agent’s reasons for action. While a propositional-causal theory of action, according to which intentional action must be causally produced “in the right way” by an agent’s proposition-involving reasons, has long held sway, we draw on Elizabeth Anscombe’s insights offer a path toward an alternative theory of action. In so doing, we reject the implicitly Cartesian conception of knowledge at the core of the intentional action argument, while hanging on to the idea that mental states are representations of a certain kind. Our argument provides theoretical support for anti-intellectualism by equipping philosophers with an account of non-propositional, practical content.

4. (2019, Philosophical Psychology) Methods, minds, memory, and kinds: The acquisition of a skill, or knowledge-how, on the one hand, and the acquisition of a piece of propositional knowledge on the other, appear to be different sorts of epistemic achievements. Does this difference lie in the nature of the knowledge involved, marking a joint between knowledge-how and propositional knowledge? Intellectualists say no: All knowledge is propositional knowledge. Anti-intellectualists say yes: Knowledge-how and propositional knowledge are different in kind. What resources or methods may we legitimately and fruitfully employ to adjudicate this debate? What is (or are) the right way(s) to show the nature of the knowledge knowers know? Here too there is disagreement. I defend the legitimacy of the anti-intellectualist appeal to cognitive neuroscientific findings against a recent claim that anti-intellectualists conflate the scientific categories of procedural and declarative knowledge with the mental kinds of skill (knowledge-how) and propositional knowledge, respectively. I identify two kinds of arguments for this claim and argue that neither succeeds.

Perception & Intentionality:

1. (2024, Synthese) Seeing What to Do: Embodied Instructive Representations in Vision: Most representationalist accounts of visual perception hold that visual representations are belief—or judgement-like sensory states with veridicality or accuracy conditions. In a word: visually perceiving is seeing something as being some way. I propose an alternative account on which visual representations are intention-like and have “appropriateness” rather than veridicality or accuracy conditions. In a word: visually perceiving is seeing what to do. According to this view, visual representations are a species of “embodied instructive representation.” After sketching the general account of embodied instructive representations and saying a bit about why they deserve to be called representations, I’ll argue that visual perceptual representations may be fruitfully understood as embodied instructive representations.

2. (2024, Synthese) Practical perceptual representations: a contemporary defense of an old idea: According to ‘orthodox’ representationalism, perceptual states possess constitutive veridicality (truth, accuracy, or satisfaction) conditions. Typically, philosophers who deny orthodox representationalism endorse some variety of anti-representationalism. But we argue that these haven’t always been, and needn’t continue to be, the only options. Philosophers including Descartes, Malebranche and Helmholtz appear to have rejected orthodox representationalism while nonetheless endorsing perceptual representations of a fundamentally practical kind not captured by orthodox representationalism. Moreover, we argue that the perceptual science called on by contemporary philosophers to defend orthodox representationalism instead motivates a return to this older view, and we suggest that contemporary philosophers may conceptualize fundamentally practical perceptual representations as _‘de agendo’_ representations, a species of representation that has constitutive appropriateness rather than veridicality conditions.

3. (2019, Philosophy of Science) Perception, Representation, Realism, and Function: According to orthodox representationalism, perceptual states have constitutive veridicality or accuracy conditions. In defense of this view, several philosophers—most notably Tyler Burge—employ a realist strategy that turns on the purported explanatory ineliminability of representational posits in perceptual science. I argue that Burge’s version of the realist strategy fails as a defense of orthodox representationalism. However, it may vindicate a different kind of representationalism.

4. (2018, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) Agency, perception, space and subjectivity: The goal of this paper is to illuminate the connections between agency, perception, subjectivity, space and the body. Such connections have been the subject matter of much philosophical work. For example, the importance of the body and bodily action on perception is a growth area in philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, there are some key relations that, as will become clear, have not been adequately explored. We start by examining the relation between embodiment and agency, especially the dependence of agency on perception and the dependence of perception on agency. We also consider the nature of subjectivity itself: In virtue of what do humans and animals but not rocks and pencils have genuine perceptual and agentive intentional contents? We sketch a hylomorphic account of subjects and subjectivity, which highlights connections between the conclusions argued for in the previous sections and some basic principles of teleosemantics.

(also the 2023 SEP article: Action-based Theories of Perception) 

Memory: 

1. (forthcoming, Topoi) Capacitism: A Defensible Epistemic Conception of Memory: Epistemological orthodoxy has it that memory is, in some sense, a kind of knowing, or as Lai (2022a), quoting Lackey (2008: 251), puts it, “an epistemic source” which “preserves knowledge from one time to another.” Lai dubs this the “Epistemic Conception of Memory" (ECM). But several recent papers argue that ECM falls prey to counterexamples. Of these, Lai (2022a) is the most thorough, as it takes aim at four distinct variants of ECM. The present paper introduces a neglected fifth variant of ECM we call “Capacitism.” According to Capacitism, remembering that p is the exercise of an epistemic capacity that functions to afford knowledge that p. It is argued that Capiticism is an attractive variant of ECM which avoids Lai’s counterexamples as well as a further problem facing other variants of ECM tied to their commitment to memory’s factivity, namely, their resulting commitment to either metaphysical or epistemological disjunctivism. Capacitism avoids these problems by grounding memory’s fundamental link to knowledge in its distinctive teleological, epistemic function for knowledge acquired in the past.

2. (forthcoming, Philosophy of Science) Mental Kinds as Human Kinds: The Case from Declarative Memory: While mental disorders like schizophrenia are paradigmatic human kinds, the going view of human mental kinds like declarative memory is that they are not human kinds. This essay challenges the going view by arguing that declarative memory bears the distinguishing marks of a human kind. We propose that a “constructionist-functionalist” metaphysics for mental kinds like declarative memory can be articulated on the model of existing accounts of other constructed kinds. Finally, we argue that such a metaphysics addresses the more pressing objections to our claim that mental kinds like declarative memory may properly be considered human kinds.

3. (2025, Philosophical Psychology) An action-first account of episodic memory: Building off of a recent account of intentionality, the action-forward framework, we introduce a novel account of episodic memory and defend its plausibility as an account of such memory. According to our account, episodic remembering consists in acts of performative retelling of the remembering subject’s initial experience of an event where such retelling activates connected capacities for perceptual recognition of the event and its constituents. When such acts are overt, the remembering subject expresses their memory, say, verbally, imagistically, through performance, etc., where doing so reactivates those recognitional capacities. When such acts are covert, the remembering subject merely activates capacities for such expressions without going on to overtly express where doing so reactivates the relevant recognitional capacities. In §2, we introduce two desiderata on accounts of episodic memory. In §3, we give an overview of the action-forward framework for intentionality. In §4, we introduce our account of episodic memory. In §5, we show how the account satisfies the desiderata. We conclude by saying how the account differs from standard accounts in the literature while retaining what we take to be their insights.

4. (2025, Review of Philosophy and Psychology) In Defense of the Essentially Epistemic Nature of Episodic Memory: According to the traditional approach in philosophy of memory, when all goes well, our episodic memories of particular events in our personal past constitute firsthand knowledge of the who, what, where, and what-was-it-like of those events. That is, according to the traditional approach, episodic memory is at bottom a capacity for a specific kind of knowledge. However, it’s now becoming increasingly common to treat the core epistemic dimension of episodic memories as present but non-essential, that is, as secondary to whatever episodic memory exists to do. What are the grounds for this “non-epistemic turn” in the philosophy of memory? We identify three based on the empirical study of memory: “the argument from construction” appeals to evidence that the contents of episodic memory are constructed rather than stored; “the argument from error” appeals to evidence that episodic memory is highly error-prone; and, finally, “the argument from animals” appeals to evidence that some nonhuman animals can episodically remember. We argue that all three fail.

5. (2023, Philosophical Psychology) Trauma, trust, & competent testimony: Public discourse implicitly appeals to what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument” (TUA). To motivate, articulate, and assess the TUA, we appeal to Hawley’s (2019) commitment account of trust and trustworthiness. On Hawley’s account, being trustworthy consists in the successful avoidance of unfulfilled commitments and involves three components: the actual avoidance of unfulfilled commitments, sincerity in one’s taking on elective commitments, and competence in fulfilling commitments one has incurred. In contexts of testimony, what’s at issue is the speaker’s competence and sincere intention to speak truthfully. The TUA targets trauma victims’ competence rather than their sincerity. According to the TUA, empirical evidence shows that trauma undermines victims’ trustworthiness with regard to speaking truthfully about their trauma by undermining their competence to remember the relevant event. We argue that what the evidence shows is rather that remembering traumatic events involves a distinct “mode of manifesting” the competence to remember particular events from the personal past. Trauma victims are competent to speak truthfully about their trauma and ought to be trusted at least with regard to the central details of the event. By suggesting otherwise, the TUA threatens an insidious form of epistemic injustice which Hawley’s account helps us locate.

6. (2023, Philosophy of Science) Trusting Traumatic Memory: Considerations from Memory Science: Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA)” according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic events. The TUA is not obviously based in mere distrust of women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, etc. Rather, it seeks to justify skepticism on epistemic and empirical grounds. We consider how the TUA might appeal to the psychology and neuroscience of memory for empirical support. However, we argue that neither support the TUA.

Philosophy of Science & AI : 

1. (2023, Book Chapter) A Case for Epistemology- and Context-Driven Accounts of Cognitive and Biological Functions: Philosophers tend to focus on the metaphysics of functions: establishing unifying theories employing general criteria for being a function, avoiding spooky backward causation, distinguishing functions from accidents, and correctly representing the functional structure of the world. We show that there is a need for localized, practice-sensitive accounts of the epistemology of functions—accounts that explain the identification, justification, and explanatory applications of function attributions in particular scientific contexts—and that this need is best met alongside a plurality of unifying metaphysical theories of functions. Our argument begins with the observation that unifying theories assume that (i) functions are discovered or justified by criteria for being a function and (ii) criteria identified in a theory are generally applicable across target systems. We then draw on examples from cognitive science and ecology to show that function ascriptions are sometimes presupposed or assigned based on highly contextual epistemic factors not described in unifying metaphysical theories.

2. (2024, Synthese) Inductive neutrality and scientific representation: Prima facie, accounts of scientific representation should illuminate how models support justified surrogative reasoning while remaining neutral on the nature of inductive inference. We argue that doing both at once is harder than it first appears. Accounts like “DEKI,” which distinguish justified and unjustified surrogative inferences by appealing to a distinction between derivational and factual correctness, cannot accommodate non-formal, non-rule-based accounts of inference such as John Norton’s material theory of induction. In contrast, a recent expressivist-inferentialist account appears compatible with material inference, but at the cost of abandoning inductive neutrality.

3. (2022, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences) Phenomenology: What’s AI got to do with it?: Nowadays, philosophers and scientists tend to agree that, even though human and artificial intelligence work quite differently, they can still illuminate aspects of each other, and knowledge in one domain can inspire progress in the other. For instance, the notion of “artificial” or “synthetic” phenomenology has been gaining some traction in recent AI research. In this paper, we ask the question: what (if anything) is the use of thinking about phenomenology in the context of AI, and in particular machine learning? We will isolate one sense of “phenomenology”, namely the sense in which it is commonly understood within analytic philosophy of perception. Then, we will give examples of projects within sensory substitution and restoration science that rely heavily on machine learning and to which, according to us, phenomenology in the sense specified makes a relevant contribution. Finally, we will shed some light on what this contribution looks like and why it is important.