Research

Metaphysics of Science

In my papers ‘Crystallized Regularities’ (The Journal of Philosophy, 2020) and ‘Naturalness by Law’ (Noûs, 2023) I put forward reductive accounts of special science laws and natural properties. Together, these accounts reconcile foundationalism about physics with a certain kind of autonomy of the special sciences. I argue that the macro-structure that the special sciences uncover may be ultimately based on physics, even though it typically involves (i) physically contingent regularities, and (ii) properties that lack simple physical definitions.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about the value-theoretic assumptions behind different metaphysical conceptions of the nomic. In my paper ‘From Humeanism to Normative Relativism’ (Philosophical Perspectives, 2022), I argue that a widespread humean assumption about how the epistemic value of natural laws is grounded is in conflict with our best accounts of practical rationality, and I discuss how possible revisions to this value-theoretic assumption would affect the plausibility of standard humean accounts.

Truth and Reference in Computational Cognitive Science

Computational approaches to the mind are attractive, in part, because they render talk of mental structures scientifically respectable. But in order to state generalizations, computational cognitive scientists routinely rely on ways of mapping these internal structures to aspects of the world: the objects, properties and states of affairs that they ‘represent’. But the nature and explanatory status of these relations remains unclear. In virtue of what do these representation relations obtain? And what explanatory role, if any, do they play?

In ‘Does matter mind content?’ (Noûs, 2024), I argue against a popular way of vindicating the explanatory importance of representation relations, by locating them in networks of (proportional) counterfactual dependence. In a more recent paper, ‘Deflationist cognitive science and its limits’ (forthcoming), I draw on the ‘resource rationality’ framework in computational cognitive science to argue (abductively) for realism about representation relations and truth conditions.

I’ve also been working on an informational account of representation that improves on Dretske’s 1981 account.

Logical Atomism

I’m also working on two related papers on logical atomism. In one paper, I explore a tension between traditional logical atomism and anti-humeanism about natural modality, and develop a new version of anti-humeanism that vindicates a moderate version of logical atomism. In joint work with Ezra Rubenstein, I develop the idea that logical complexity may be ‘representational’ rather than ‘worldly’.

If you’re interested in any of the papers above, email me for a draft at v.gomez [at] berkeley [dot] edu.