Current research
The Geography of Philosophy Project
The
Geography of
Philosophy Project, directed by Édouard Machery, Stephen Stitch
and Clark Barrett, aims at mapping the diversity of epistemic
concepts across cultures. My role in this project is to head the
corpus study, which will gather corpora of textual data from nine
different sites across the world, identify relevant epistemic
concepts and compare them across cultures.
Conceptual analysis and textual data
In the last few decades, conceptual analysis has mostly
been associated either with aprioricity and the physicalist
programme on one side, or with intuitions and experimental
philosophy on the other. None of these programmes have had much
interest in texts. As a result, while discussions on
methodology have become abundant in the last few years,
there have been little interest in exploiting textual data, and
on how it should be done. Drawing on the
LATAO group's work in computer-assisted
textual analysis in the last two decades, I want to
adapt the methodologies we have developed for social
science in general to philosophical analysis in
particular, and root it in philosophical traditions,
experimental philosophy in particular.
Concept mining
In order to facilitate analysis of a given concept in a
corpus, I study how concepts and topics are expressed
in textual discourse. Through the making of annotated
corpuses, I study how experts and laypeople detect the
presence or absence of a concept in text. Then, with
the help of machine learning and natural language
processing techniques, I model concepts and topics and
use those models to predict which concepts are present
in any given textual segment. I've been pursuing this
interest with the
LATAO group and as part of an
internship with
Jackie Cheung.
Epistemics communities
As part of my work as an activist, I have been
developing ways to facilitate inclusive and
constructive discussion, be it for growth, empowerment,
intellectual purposes or organization. As a researcher,
I'm interested in how these groups act as vectors
enabling knowledge construction and diffusion, and how
they counteract epistemic injustice. Along with my
colleagues from the
Groupe-Réseaux,
I study how groups and social networks interact with
knowledge dynamics.
