On this page you can find information and updates regarding my NWO-VENI project “A role for content and mental causation in empirical psychology”, which runs from 2015-2019.

The project attempts to answer a very simple but difficult question: what are attitudes? Examples of familiar types of attitudes as they are discussed in philosophy are beliefs, desires, and moral judgments. I defend a dispositional account of attitudes, according to which beliefs, desires and so on are not representations that exist ‘inside your head’, but  psychological dispositions, the ascription of which entails normative commitments. In the second part of the project I will explore what such an understanding of attitudes would mean for psychological measurement of attitudes, specifically for the science of measuring moral judgment, and what it means for our understanding of pathological attitudes.