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Anandi Hattiangadi

About me

I am currently a professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies. I am also a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, where I am an active researcher in the of the London AI and Humanity Project. I am also an affiliated researcher at the Saul Kripke Center, at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Cultural Evolution at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University.

I did my undergraduate at York University (Toronto), and began working on an MA and PhD at the University of Toronto, where I worked with Ian Hacking. About two years in, I transferred to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science,  Cambridge, where I was a member of Trinity College, and studied under the excellent supervision of Peter Lipton and Martin Kusch, and received my PhD from Cambridge in 2002. In 2001, I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2005, I moved to my first permanent job at St Hilda's College, the University of Oxford, where I was a CUF lecturer and tutorial fellow (roughly equivalent to associate professor). In 2013, I moved to Sweden to take up a Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship from the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies, and a Professorship at Stockholm University. In 2024, I joined the Institute for Futures Studies, which is where I now spend most of my time.

I have a wide range of interests in philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, language, logic, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, as well as epistemology, metaphysics, and meta-ethics.

In both my doctoral dissertation and my first book, Oughts and Thoughts, I discussed Kripke's (1982) argument for meaning skepticism in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. A central focus of my discussion is Kripke's suggestion that meaning and content are normative, which appears to play a decisive role in Kripke's argument. I argued that Kripke's skeptical argument goes through only on the assumption that meaning is robustly prescriptive, in the sense that it has objective normative authority that holds independently of any agent's subjective mental states. And I argued that meaning and content are not normative in this sense, thereby establishing the negative claim that the skeptical conclusion could be blocked.

In 2010, while I was at Oxford, David Chalmers came to give the John Locke Lectures, which formed the basis of Constructing the World (Chalmers 2012). During the weeks he spent in Oxford, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet him frequently to talk philosophy. These discussions had a lasting influence on my work, since it was in light of these conversations that I came to realize that the best solution to the puzzle Kripke found in Wittgenstein might well a form of Naturalistic Dualism, such as Chalmers defends in relation to consciousness, but applied to intentionality. A few years later, I began work on a monograph (which is finally nearing completion) entitled Aboutness First: A Defence of the Fundamentality of Intentionality, in which I argue that semantic  facts, such as the fact that Maya means addition by 'plus' or believes that the sun is shining, are neither fully grounded in nor supervenient on the physical, but are sui generis and connected to the physical by way of contingent psycho-physical laws.

Another strand of research that developed out of my doctoral studies concerned epistemic normativity. Much of my early work on this topic concerned the question whether belief is constituted by a norm of truth. During the global turmoil of the past few years, I became interested in epistemology as it relates to social issues, such as polarization in political and factual belief, as well as 'post-truth' culture and epistemic relativism. My research in these areas is ongoing.

Recently, given the technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence, many of the questions I have been working on in the philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science, have acquired a new significance. I have been working closely with the London AI and Humanity Project, as well as the AI and Humanity Lab at Hong Kong University on projects that are not only inter-disciplinary, but engage with members of industry and the wider public. I have several works in progress on understanding and reference in Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT), the emergence of artificial general intelligence.

Teaching

I regularly teach undergraduate courses in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and meta-ethics. I am happy to accept PhD students in any of these areas. 

Research

Hattiangadi specializes in the philosophy of mind and language, and has research interests in the philosophy of psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics, and philosophy of science. 

 

 

Research projects

Beyond Reductionism: Contingent Grounding and the Mind-Body Problem

This project addresses the fundamental question at the heart of the mind-body problem: what is the nature of the mind, and how does it relate to the physical world? Two main views have traditionally been defended: physicalism, on which matter is more fundamental than mind; and dualism, on which matter and mind are equally fundamental.

The Foundations of Epistemic Normativity

Many of us think that we ought to believe in anthropogenic climate change, that our belief is justified given the evidence and that climate-change skepticism is not rationally permitted. The project aims at clarifying normative claims concerning what we ought, are justified, or are permitted to believe.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Radical interpretation and decision theory

    2021. Anandi Hattiangadi, H. Orri Stefánsson. Synthese

    Article

    This paper takes issue with an influential interpretationist argument for physicalism about intentionality based on the possibility of radical interpretation. The interpretationist defends the physicalist thesis that the intentional truths supervene on the physical truths by arguing that it is possible for a radical interpreter, who knows all of the physical truths, to work out the intentional truths about what an arbitrary agent believes, desires, and means without recourse to any further empirical information. One of the most compelling arguments for the possibility of radical interpretation, associated most closely with David Lewis and Donald Davidson, gives a central role to decision theoretic representation theorems, which demonstrate that if an agent's preferences satisfy certain constraints, it is possible to deduce probability and utility functions that represent her beliefs and desires. We argue that an interpretationist who wants to rely on existing representation theorems in defence of the possibility of radical interpretation faces a trilemma, each horn of which is incompatible with the possibility of radical interpretation.

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  • Radical Interpretation and The Aggregation Problem

    2020. Anandi Hattiangadi. Philosophy and phenomenological research 101 (2), 283-303

    Article

    This paper takes issue with Lewis' influential argument for the supervenience of the semantic on the non-semantic based on the possibility of radical interpretation. Radical interpretation is possible only if an ideal being, who is omniscient about the non-semantic truths, can deduce the semantic truths a priori. The radical interpreter appeals to a set of criteria of interpretation choice, such as most notably some kind of Principle of Charity. It is argued in this paper that the radical interpreter faces an insoluble aggregation problem: the radical interpreter must jointly apply several criteria for evaluating interpretations in order to determine which interpretation is best overall. First, the situation of the radical interpreter is formally modeled using the machinery of social choice theory. Second, it is argued that either Arrow's impossibility theorem or a variant of it applies to the situation of the radical interpreter. The upshot is that radical interpretation is impossible, and Lewis' argument for semantic supervenience fails.

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  • No, one should not believe all truths

    2019. Anandi Hattiangadi. Inquiry 62 (9-10), 1091-1103

    Article

    In a recent paper, Alexander Greenberg defends a truth norm of belief according to which if one has some doxastic attitude towards p, one ought to believe that p if and only if p is true (DA). He responds, in particular, to the 'blindspot' objection to truth norms such as DA: in the face of true blindspots, such as it is raining and nobody believes that it is raining, truth norms such as DA are unsatisfiable; they entail that one ought to believe p, but if one does believe p, they entail that it is not the case that one ought to believe p. In this paper, it is argued that Greenberg's response to the blindspot objection is unsatisfactory.

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  • Moral Supervenience

    2018. Anandi Hattiangadi. Canadian journal of philosophy 48 (3-4), 592-615

    Article

    It is widely held, even among nonnaturalists, that the moral supervenes on the natural. This is to say that for any two metaphysically possible worlds w and w′, and for any entities x in w and y in w′, any isomorphism between x and y that preserves the natural properties preserves the moral properties. In this paper, I put forward a conceivability argument against moral supervenience, assuming non-naturalism. First, I argue that though utilitarianism may be true, and the trolley driver is permitted to kill the one to save the five, there is a conceivable scenario that is just like our world in all natural respects, yet at which deontology is true, and the trolly driver is not permitted to kill the one to save the five. I then argue that in the special case of morality, it is possible to infer from the conceivability of such a scenario to its possibility. It follows that supervenience is false.

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  • The normativity of MEANING and the hard problem of intentionality

    2018. Anandi Hattiangadi. Inquiry 61 (7), 742-754

    Article

    This note addresses two of Gibbard's central contentions in Meaning and Normativity: first, that the concept of meaning is normative, and second, that an expressivist account of semantic concepts and statements can shed light on the hard problem of intentionality, the problem of explaining intentionality in naturalistic terms.

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  • The limits of expressivism

    2015. Anandi Hattiangadi. Meaning without representation, 224-244

    Chapter

    In his recent book, Meaning and Normativity, Allan Gibbard argues at length that the concept of meaning is normative, and that his own brand of expressivism can be applied in the semantic and intentional domain. In this paper, I  argue that the extension of expressivism to semantic discourse is unprofitable and—worse still—in a certain sense self-undermining. It is unprofitable because it sheds no light on the problem of intentionality; undermines itself because many of the sentences that make up the expressivist’s theory are semantic sentences, and if these are understood to express non-cognitive attitudes of some kind, the expressivist’s explanations are spurious.

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  • The open future, bivalence and assertion

    2014. Corine Besson, Anandi Hattiangadi. Philosophical Studies 167 (2), 251--271

    Article

    It is highly now intuitive that the future is open and the past is closed now—whereas it is unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first. Recently, it has become increasingly popular to claim that the intuitive openness of the future implies that contingent statements about the future, such as ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow,’ are non-bivalent (neither true nor false). In this paper, we argue that the non-bivalence of future contingents is at odds with our pre-theoretic intuitions about the openness of the future. These intuitions are revealed by our pragmatic judgments concerning the correctness and incorrectness of assertions of future contingents. We argue that the pragmatic data together with a plausible account of assertion shows that in many cases we take future contingents to be true (or to be false), though we take the future to be open in relevant respects. It follows that appeals to intuition to support the non-bivalence of future contingents are untenable. Intuition favours bivalence.

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  • Non-Reductive Realism, Primitivism, and the Reduction Argument

    2019. Anandi Hattiangadi. Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (6), 697-706

    Article

    In Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer defends the error theory by rejecting all competitors to it. My aim here is to defend one brand of realism from Streumer's objections: primitivim. The primitivist holds that there exist sui generis normative properties that do not supervene on any descriptive properties. It is argued that Streumer's objections to primitivism can be met.

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  • The Rules of Thought By Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Benjamin W. Jarvis Oxford University Press,  2013

    2016. Anandi Hattiangadi. Analysis 76 (3), 393-397

    Article

    The Rules of Thought , by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Benjamin Jarvis (henceforth IJ), is a dense and ambitious book whose principal aim is to defend the view that philosophical inquiry is a priori inquiry into essential natures. The book covers a broad range of philosophical issues spanning the philosophy of mind and language, the epistemology of metaphysical modality and the philosophy of philosophy. It will be of considerable interest to many, since there is something in it for just about everyone. That said, the authors do not do as much as one might like to make their views accessible to the uninitiated or convincing to the unconverted.

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  • The love of truth

    2010. Anandi Hattiangadi. Studies in history and philosophy of science 41 (4), 422-432

    Article

    It is frequently said that belief aims at truth, in an explicitly normative sense—that is, that one ought to believe the proposition that p if, and only if, p is true. This truth norm is frequently invoked to explain why we should seek evidential justification in our beliefs, or why we should try to be rational in our belief formation—it is because we ought to believe the truth that we ought to follow the evidence in belief revision. In this paper, I argue that this view is untenable. The truth norm clashes with plausible evidential norms in a wide range of cases, such as when we have excellent but misleading evidence for a falsehood or no evidence for a truth. I will consider various ways to resolve this conflict and argue that none of them work. However, I will ultimately attempt to vindicate the love of truth, by arguing that knowledge is the proper epistemic goal. The upshot is that we should not aim merely to believe the truth; we should aim to know it.

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  • Can truth relativism account for the indeterminacy of future contingents?

    2022. Corine Besson, Anandi Hattiangadi. Synthese 200 (3)

    Article

    John MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: assertions about the future that express propositions that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and aims to solve the puzzle, his truth relativism is not apt to solve the problem of future contingents. We argue that the theory fails to vindicate the intuition that future contingent propositions are neither true nor false, leaving the theory open to a charge of Reductio. We show that these problems cannot be answered while preserving the core tenets of truth relativism.

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