Projects
GoodAttention
Attention norms and their role in practical reason, epistemology, and ethics
What is good attention and what is bad attention?
Much public discussion about social media, public health, and political debates focuses on what deserves our attention, and how we should regulate our attention in the face of distraction.
This project, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, looks into normative questions about attention: what are appropriate, correct, or rational patterns of attention. This is then connected to how attention actually works: both in an individual and in groups and societies
Salient Solutions
responding ethically to the attention crisis
How can we respond ethically to attention framing, misdirection, and the attention economy?
Threats to good attention are faced both by many individuals as well as by society as a whole. But exactly which societal risks are posed by attention manipulation and the social norms governing attentions? What ethical guidelines can be developed to overcome them?
This project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, develops and applies ethical and philosophical tools to counters threats and societal problems that arise in the context of the novel attention economy and new politics of attention.
Thought and Sense
Completed
The distinction between sense perception and cognition is basic to our pre-scientific conception of the mind, and has been of momentous importance in the history of philosophy. Recent developments in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, though, have called for re-examination of the difference between sense and thought.
In light of these new developments, this project (jointly led by Anders Nes and myself and funded by the Norwegian Research Council) investigated the boundary between the two central mental capacities of perception and cognition. Is there a clear distinction at all? Is there one contrast or many? Is there continuity or discontinuity? If there is an important distinction, how is it to be characterized?
For an overview of our research consider our article “The Perception/Cognition Distinction” (with Anders Nes and our former PhD fellow Kristoffer Sundberg)
Centre for Philosophy and the Science (CPS)
Building bridges between philosophy and science
The Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences is an interdisciplinary meeting place for the interaction between the humanities and the sciences.
Modern science bears on areas traditionally occupied by the humanities. The humanities can learn from the sciences. But the sciences also need the reflective understanding that philosophy can provide. At the Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences, you can find innovative opportunities for study and research that facilitate this two-way flow of ideas.
I was the leader of CPS from it inauguration (2019) to 2021. I stepped down to take up work at GoodAttention and SalientSolutions.