I was born in March 2002 in Manchester, England. However, I lived in Yorkshire for 16 years, and am currently based in Poole, near Bournemouth. I have recently graduated with a Distinction in my Master’s degree in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. I am currently setting the ball rolling to study a PhD in Philosophy, focusing on the philosophical implications of neurodiversity – in particular the impact of neurodiversity on epistemology. I’d say that this is currently my main research interest.
I have previously heavily focused on the juncture of ethics and neurodiversity as part of my Master’s dissertation, which looked at the ethics of the neurodiversity diagnostic process, although my PhD will likely focus much more heavily on epistemology since that’s where my current main academic research interests lie. The PhD’s real-world impact is almost exclusively grounded in ethics, so I plan to use this website as an outlet for those resultant aspects of it. Those ethical debates will likely be explained in a much more accessible form to that seen in the PhD thesis itself.
My academic work on ethics primarily concerns AI Ethics, having also worked in this area during my Master’s. While primarily I focused on AI accountability and responsibility, I also looked at the possibility that AI could have free will and so be considered a moral agent in its own right. Alongside that research, I also worked on an AI-instigated ‘Copernican shift’ concerning the relationship between moral agency and moral patiency. I believe that AI reverses the view that to be a moral patient, you have to be a moral agent: rather, your moral agency is tied to your ability to be a moral patient, or put more simply, your ability to be punished.
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s aged 7, so I have a wealth of lived experience of being neurodiverse which heavily informs my research in Philosophy, across all different topics. Though the world has changed very much for the better in terms of understanding of neurodiversity, I fundamentally believe that there is still a long way to go with it, and that our understanding of the field is nowhere near complete.
The PhD
My PhD Thesis will be provisionally titled The Non-Universality of Neurodiverse Epistemology. It will consider how neurodiversity interacts with three main epistemic theses: the a priori, modularity of the mind (that is, the view that the mind is made up of individual modules which handle specific information), and virtue epistemology (in particular Ernest Sosa’s model, rather than the responsibilist view), and shows how some aspects of them are socially constructed. That is, it appears as though the cognitive variations in neurodiverse minds show that not all minds function in the way that proponents of the aforementioned three theses claim. I plan to use the concept of empathy and how neurodiversity shows that it too has elements that are socially constructed as a way to bring these points out. This argument for the social construction of these theses will lead to an argument for something of an epistemic anti-realism, which will show that epistemology going forward will need to make accommodations for neurodiverse minds. The aim is very much to add to the field rather than outright deny existing aspects of it.
Master’s Thesis
As previously hinted, my Master’s Thesis broke new ground as it discussed the ethical implications of the neurodiversity diagnostic process. I ended up concluding that the process had significant ethical failings. Much of these were grounded in epistemic injustices very similar to those that I plan to address both during my PhD and also on this site as time goes on.