About

Hi, I am Samuel Boardman. I am a postdoctoral researcher at Technische Universität Dresden at Moritz Schulz’s chair, as part of the DFG project Norms and Nature of Acceptance.

My main areas of interest are in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. My recent work explores the nature and norms of practical attitudes (e.g., acceptance, policy, and intention) and various issues in the epistemology of modality (e.g., imagination, and emotion).

My PhD dissertation argues that we use emotions to acquire modal knowledge. I completed it in 2023 at Freie Universität Berlin, under the supervision of Barbara Vetter. Prior to that, I earned a BPhil at the University of Oxford, with a thesis supervised by Tim Williamson. Before that, I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Manchester.

Publications

Forthcoming. The Agentive Achievement of Acceptance. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

This paper is about whether acceptance is a mental state or a mental action. It argues that linguistic evidence about the lexical aspect of the verb ‘accept’ supports the view that there is an act and a state of acceptance. The act and the state of acceptance have an intimate connection. To accept is to intentionally cause the state of acceptance to commence at will. [final]

Forthcoming. Core Imagination (with Tom Schoonen). Philosophers’ Imprint.

This paper is about imagination and modal knowledge acquisition. It argues that imagination, as deployed in quotidian modal knowledge acquisition, is constrained by core cognition (e.g., folk physics). It replies to objections to the effect that these constraints are not of the right strength to generate all and only the relevant possibilities. [preprint]

2023. Epistemologists of modality wanted (with Tom Schoonen). Synthese 202 (6):1–20.

This paper is about metaphysics and modal knowledge acquisition. It argues against the “metaphysics-first” view that metaphysical theses straightforwardly settle questions in the epistemology of modality. The upshot is that modal epistemologists cannot infer modal epistemologies from their favourite modal metaphysics. We suggest that cognitive science provides a more fruitful starting point than metaphysics. [preprint] [final]

Work In Progress

A paper about [redacted] (R&R at Synthese)

A paper about acceptance and intention (with Sophie Kikkert)

A paper about acceptance and context