Contact Info:
Gabriel Love
Department of Philosophy and Program in Neuroscience
1879 Hall, Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey 08544E-mail: [gabelove AT princeton DOT edu] or [gabelove AT gmail DOT com]
I have spent four years as a graduate student in the Philosophy Department and the Program in Neuroscience at Princeton and will receive a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Neuroscience as soon as I get this pesky dissertation written. I am currently on a leave of absence from Princeton, while I pursue a J.D. at Harvard Law School. Before beginning at Princeton, I received an M.A. from the Tufts University Philosophy Department. My B.A. is from Wesleyan University.
My dissertation is on repairing and refining defective concepts. Concepts can be defective in at least the following three ways: (1) they can be unsatisfiable, either by virtue of being internally inconsistent or by virtue of being inconsistent with external, often empirically discovered facts; (2) they can be incomplete in that there are objects to which they neither determinately apply nor determinately fail to apply; or (3) they can be unsystematic and arbitrary. When one sets out to repair such defects in a concept, one sets out to explicate the concept (to use Rudolf Carnap's term). I can think of two main ways to go about explicating a concept and fixing its defects. The first is the good old way of conceptual analysis, where one attempts to explicate the concept in such a way as to maximize the extent to which one's explicatum (the finished product of an explication) is faithful to one's explicandum (the concept to be explicated). Conceptual analysis has its place, but one objective of my dissertation is to argue that the place of conceptual analysis (at least via the method of possible cases) is extremely limited. The second way to explicate a concept is what I call "conceptual fructification". In fructifying a concept, one chooses as one's explicatum the "best concept in the neighborhood" of one's explicandum, which is to say (I try to argue) the most theoretically fruitful concept in the neighborhood of one's explicandum. Saying what fructification is thus requires saying what the theoretical fruitfulness of a concept amounts to, and this is another major task of my dissertation, for which I draw on the unification theories of explanation developed by Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher. The dissertation proceeds roughly as follows: (A) I start with a discussion of the defects to which concepts can be subject (and the corresponding virtues of good concepts) and some Carnap exegesis, all by way of providing a basic sketch of the process of explication. (B) I give an account of the objects of explication, i.e., concepts. (C) I discuss conceptual analysis, esp. conceptual analysis via the method of possible cases espoused by Frank Jackson, and argue that analysis is the right way to proceed when one is interested either in concepts themselves or in merely conventional kinds whose nature is primarily determined by our concepts. (D) I introduce conceptual fructification as an alternative to conceptual analysis and spell out just what it is and why it's to be preferred when dealing with the concepts that correspond to kinds that aren't merely conventional. (E) Finally, I would like to add a chapter on normatively-loaded concepts, e.g., moral and legal concepts. I would like to consider how explication can and should proceed in the case of this important class of concepts for which the notion of theoretical fruitfulness doesn't obviously make sense and thus for which conceptual fructification might not seem possible.
My philosophical interests, these days, include lots of issues in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and---this is quite new---political philosophy and philosophy of law. Basically, any question about humanity and its place in nature will grab my attention. As far as the law goes, I'm predominantly interested, as of right now, in issues at the intersection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, ethics, and the law – especially criminal law. I'm particularly hung up on the concept of responsiblity, moral and legal. I worry that advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms that determine people's behavior are going to make it difficult to hang on to a robust notion of responsibility. I'm pretty sure that that would be a bad thing. I also, predictably, will readily get drawn in by any virtually any question in legal theory, jurisprudence, or the philosophy of law.
I wish I could say that I have lots of fascinating hobbies, but I mostly like to spend my free time reading novels, watching movies (and some high-quality TV shows), picking up random snippets of information about the natural world (especially about birds), and fantasizing about a utopia/dystopia in which human beings are kept as pets by a race of superintelligent robots.
I am married to the lovely and talented Ms. Yael Goldstein Love, a.k.a., the novelist Yael Goldstein, who positively hates the idea of being kept as a pet by robots, superintelligent or otherwise. Please visit her website: www.yaelgoldstein.com.