Anandi Hattiangadi Professor

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.