Alex (or “Arc”) is a PhD student in the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science. He mainly works in philosophical logic (in particular modal logic). His research interests intersect with philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.

Arc’s dissertation is on expressive power. One of the goals of this project is to explore different techniques for measuring the expressive power of a language and to use these tools to assess various debates in (meta)ontology. He is also interested in mathematically characterizing the relative expressive power of large classes of quantified modal languages using modern model-theoretic techniques in order to assess their philosophical relevance to debates over modal primitivism and natural language ontology, among others. In addition, he is also working on a variety of semantic and philosophical issues surrounding counterfactuals, explanation, and identity.

On the side, Arc thinks about grounding, time, and decision theory. In the more distant past, he has worked on topics such as fatalism, partial logics, de se skepticism, fiction, the nature of propositions, and (the lack of) emergence in condensed matter physics.