I am chiefly engaged in examining the notion of representation in cognitive science, and the sometimes exclusive focus on the brain, at the expense of bodily, social, and technological factors, in investigations of the factors that enable human beings to do the neat things they can do.  I am especially concerned about reductive attempts to "naturalistically" explain the "aboutness" of representations and their content.

My principal concern is  with the inherently normative nature of representation (representations correctly represent some things and misrepresent other things).  I believe that this normativity cannot be reduced away, as many attempt.  It is derived from the normative social and linguistic practice of giving intentional states as reasons for actions. However, since the existence of human normative practices like this can be given a naturalistic evolutionary explanation, this appeal to normativity is an appeal to a (non-reductively) naturalizable phenomenon.

I am also interested in issues involving extended cognition, the thesis that sometimes the cognitive system is best seen as extended beyond skin and skull into the physical and social context of cognition. I am concerned with identifying the conditions under which this kind of analysis affords insight into human cognitive capacities, and with how these considerations affect "classical" cognitive science's (purported) explanations of cognition as computational operations on representations.  Do we have a univocal concept of "representation" or of "computation" if we continue to employ this paradigm?

I am also interested in the concept of moral responsibility as it applies to the "Extended Cognition" debate. It seems that our ordinary concept of moral responsibility already include the notion that the agent responsible for an action may extend beyond the person's skin and skull.

I also write about speech act approaches to language, in particular advocating the role of "mindreading" skills (often referred to as "Theory of Mind") in understanding why people make the noises and markings they make (rather than focusing on the meanings of the words they utter or write).  I also concentrate on the role of social and pragmatic norms in linguistic interactions.  This has engendered an interest in connections between the evolution of language and the evolution of normativity.