Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Indiana University, Bloomington

Welcome to my very skeletal home page. With apologies, I must admit I haven't yet taken the time to add newer work, or any typical personal information. I expect the next thing I'll post here is a draft of my article, "Mental Representation: Reframing the Question", now in revision for Philosophical Psychology. Another is "Beyond Causal Histories and Elusive Semantics", under review at Canadian Journal of Philosophy. A third paper, under revision for a second round of submission, is "What Might Representation Be, If Not Semantic?". When these are posted, comments will certainly be welcome. Please feel free to email me at kvanclea[splat]indiana[splot]edu (address modified to defeat web robots).

Visitors will likely be interested in following one or both of these links:

• Proxy Representation. This is a web slide show based on a poster I presented at the McDonnell Project conference on Neurophilosophy at Caltech in June, 2005. It also serves as an outline of a talk on the same subject I presented at the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology conference in Guelph, Ontario, in July of 2005.This subject is the topic of my dissertation.
• Evolution and Philosophy is my old philosophy website, dating back to my days at Arizona State in the '90s. The work there isn't fully mature, but I remain pleased with the promise of the key insights. It's the home of my rather radical "metaethical functionalism," which suggests a way to naturalize ethics. It also houses papers on a range of topics, from philosophy of language to eugenics to rationality. One of the ideas it advances is "metaphysical functionalism", on which I expect to do much more work. [The term 'functionalism' here, unfortunately, is a bit off. No actual functions are involved; I was trying to convey, loosely, a sort of "it is what it does" characterization of things in the world. Perhaps a better term would be 'dispositionalism'.]

Thanks for visiting.