My university career began psychology because I have always had an interest in the human mind. As time passed, I became more and more fascinated with the social aspect of the human mind, including the profound uniqueness and raw power of language, as well as the socio-epistemic implications. However, it was not long before my research interests broadened to include social epistemology more generally and I began asking questions that I felt were best answered philosophically. This prompted a switch to philosophy for me, and I am currently working on a M.A in where I intend to use philosophical tools like logic and conceptual analysis to obtain clarity and insights in social epistemology.
My current research interests within social epistemology include the philosophy of expertise and technology, especially looking through the lens of cognitive science, artificial intelligence and data science. In particular, my current project seeks to begin analyzing and thinking about models that represent how social groups actually receive and transmit knowledge and information. I plan to adopt useful concepts from social epistemology like “Collective Doxastic Agent (CDA)”. I have chosen CDAs and philosophy of expertise as starting point to explain how knowledge is transmitted in social settings (like in science, or other social knowledge building for example).
I want to explore philosophical work on general expert psychology that draws on empirical data. This has not yet been done, I suspect, since expertise has an element of inherent domain-specificity and conceptual fluidity, and so most work on expert psychology becomes esoteric to one field or another. The philosopher in me hopes to break down those barriers, to stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before and use the tools of philosophy and modern computation to answer the normative question at the root: which experts should we trust?