Affiliated Members | Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning Research Group

Robyn Carston
Professor, Linguistics , University College London

Professor Carston’s main research interests are in pragmatics, semantics, relevance theory, metaphor, and word meaning. Her approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on cognitive-scientific approaches to language and communication and on the philosophy of language. She has published a monograph Thoughts and Utterances: the Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Blackwell, 2002) and is preparing a collection of her papers to be published under the title Pragmatics and Communicated Content, Oxford University Press.

Richard Moore
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick

Richard Moore is interested in the cognitive foundations of language and communication, and in their development in ontogeny, phylogeny, and in human evolution. He has published on the nature of communicative intentions, and on the development of language and other uniquely human forms of cognition; as well as empirical studies of the communication of infants, dogs, and non-human great apes. His UKRI-funded Communicative Mind research group is based at the University of Warwick.

Alison Ann Springle
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami

Alison works on topics in and at the intersections between philosophy of mind, perception, action, science, epistemology and the ethics of knowing. She's especially interested in the nature of representations, from the most basic kinds of mental representations to scientific representations and art works, and she's driven to understand mental representations in a way that does justice to both continuities and discontinuities between the minds of humans and other animals. Her work draws inspiration from Aristotle, Kant, American Pragmatists (especially Dewey), JJ Gibson, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Ruth Millikan among others. She's developing a systematic account of intentionality that centers on the concept of organisms' needs for flourishing (very broadly construed). She argues for three fairly radical theses: (1) That actions are developmental teleological processes that function to satisfy, and are type-individuated partly in terms of, needs for flourishing; (2) That mental representations are the "acorns" of such developmental processes; and (3) That mental representations belong to a hitherto neglected "de agendo" species of representation; similar to what Millikan calls "pushmi-pullyus" or (borrowing from Gibson) "affordance representations." Alison puts these views to work addressing problems in the philosophy of mind, action, perception, science, epistemology, and the ethics of knowing. Some of her work on the ethics of knowing examines connections between conceptions of the proper functioning of mnemonic capacities and certain forms of epistemic injustice that impact trauma survivors. '

Before coming to the University of Miami, Alison was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma

Ben Winokur
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Macau

Benjamin Winokur is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau. Previously, he was a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Ashoka University (2022-2023) and adjunct professor of philosophy at York University (2021-2022). He works primarly on topics in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind, such as self-knowledge, first-person authority, the nature of belief, digital epistemology, the epistemology of inquiry, and “hostile” epistemology. He has published papers in venues such as Synthese, The European Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, Philosophical Psychology, Dialectica, Episteme, and elsewhere. He is also the co-editor, with Adam Andreotta, of “New Perspectives on Transparency and Self-Knowledge”, published with Routledge in 2025. Finally, he is the author of a book in progress titled “Knowing Where You Stand: Essays on the Value of Reflective Commitment”, under contract with Routledge.

Michael J. Hegarty
Postdoctoral Researcher, UMass, Boston

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. I work mostly on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of AI. I combine empirically-informed philosophy, analysis of scientific research, and neo-Kantian ideas to explore continuities and discontinuities between animal and human mentality—whether behavioral, functional, psychological, physiological, or evolutionary. I use this approach to shed light on phenomena such as intentionality, mental representation, and agency. In recent publications, I have drawn on empirical studies of animal problem-solving to argue that certain forms of tool use require a limited kind of self-consciousness.