I am a researcher interested in how we think think about and experience time (and paradigmatic temporal phenomena).
I currently have three primary and converging research programs, these each fall within the themes of the philosophy of mind (especially perception) and philosophy of psychology. My first research program builds upon my doctoral research, where I am interested in a phenomenological investigation of our experience of time. Across a series of papers (some under review, some in progress, and some planned), I am interested in articulating the sense in which we have a point of view in time, and what this is a point of view upon. Within this program I am also interested in how related issues are discussed in the history of analytic philosophy, as well as connected topics concerning temporal representation in art, focusing on the depiction of activity.
My second and third research programs are collaborative and interdisciplinary. Within the second, my collaborators and I empirically probe subjects’ naïve beliefs about time, and about temporal experience, and investigate how these relate to the more sophisticated models of time developed by philosophers and physicists. Some of this research has been published (Shardlow et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2022 – see the 'papers' tab above) and some remains ongoing. These studies systematically examine the components of people’s everyday beliefs about time, and temporal experience, investigating whether people hold an ‘intuitive theory’ of time – i.e., a set of tacit or explicit beliefs about time that are coherent, can be used to make inferences, and go beyond what is readily observable.
Within the third program, my collaborators and I look to empirically probe subjects’ beliefs about the utility of memory and investigate whether such beliefs contribute to people’s time biases – i.e., the bias towards the future and the bias towards the near. We also examine the developmental trajectory of the value that people assign to experiential memories of past painful and past pleasurable experiences. Some of this research has been published (Lee et al., 2022– see the 'papers' tab above), and some remains ongoing.