Director
Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences

I work in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, especially on topics that relate these two fields. I am also interested in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Much of my work focuses on the nature of representation—both how our minds represent the world and how we use other forms of representation, such as scientific models.

I am especially interested in the idea that many of our representations of the world involve "fictions"—claims that we adopt for certain purposes, even though we know that they are false.

My research draws on work in philosophy, cognitive science, history, and sociology of science. I also conduct my own empirical studies.

My latest book is Mind as Metaphor (Oxford University Press, 2023). You can listen to interviews about the book on the New Books Network and The Dissenter and read reviews in The Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophical Psychology.

In 2023, I gave the Gottlob Frege Lectures at the University of Tartu. My title was "The Story of the Mind: Cartesianism, Behaviourism, and Fictionalism". You can watch recordings here.

I am a member of the Organising Committee for the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice.

Biography:

I joined Exeter in October 2013.

From 2013-2015, I held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for the project Science as extended cognition: The role of material culture in scientific reasoning

In 2015, I became a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology and a member of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences.

Before coming to Exeter, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

I did my PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (supervised by Prof. Martin Kusch).

Before that, I studied for a BA in Natural Sciences at King’s College, Cambridge and an MSc in Philosophy and History of Science at the London School of Economics.

Research supervision:

I am interested in supervising PhD projects relating to any of my research interests, including topics in philosophy of science (e.g. scientific modelling, representation in science, material and social dimensions of scientific practice) and philosophy of mind (e.g. distributed cognition, the extended mind thesis, mental fictionalism).

Please send me an email if you'd like to talk about PhD supervision or discuss potential topics. My email address is a.toon@exeter.ac.uk