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I work mainly in the philosophy of mind, language and society. My doctoral thesis was on the mind/body-problem. I have published articles on consciousness, perception and action, practical knowledge, intentions and their limits, collective intentionality, joint attention, propositions and the force-content distinction, questions and group speech acts. Recently, I have written some things on legal phenomena from a point of view that brings together the theory of collective intentionality with some traditional questions of the philosophy of law.
Many of my interests revolve around the notion of force/mode, both in the sense of what distinguishes assertions and directions, beliefs and intentions, and of modes such as we-mode and role-mode, where we think, feel perceive and act in modes of identification with groups and with roles we may have in these groups. I also work on a layered view of mind and language, where different layers can be distinguished in terms of the formats of the involved representations.
In my FWF-project “What is in a question?”, with which I am at CEU, I develop a new account of questions and the meaning of force indicators that overcomes the traditional force-content dichotomy. I argue that force indicators present the theoretical or practical positions subject take up towards the world and that questions, as well as logical and fictional acts, are higher-level acts. Through a question a subject presents an assertion or a direction and itself as wondering whether to accept or reject that assertion or direction (yes-no questions) or how to complete it (constituent questions). Two of my main goals here are to integrate force indicators into the theory of meaning and to develop a framework that treats the theoretical domain of assertion and theoretical knowledge and the practical domain of direction and practical knowledge as mutually irreducible, but structurally parallel at the same time.
Before coming to CEU, I was a member of the interdisciplinary research group “Limits of Intentionality” at the University of Konstanz and an Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna, where I am still Privatdozent and a member of the supervisory faculty of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy. I have also been a Jacobsen Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, University College London, a Visiting Lecturer at UC Berkeley and a frequent visitor to the Berkeley Social Ontology Group.