About
Prof. Dove is interested in how the mind works. He believes that philosophical accounts of the mental can and should be informed by findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and related fields. His research falls under the category of philosophy of psychology, broadly construed, and contains both philosophical and empirical elements.
From 2003-2004, Prof. Dove served as a post-doctoral fellow in the Developmental Neuropsychology and Electrophysiology Lab at the University of Louisville. After this training, he taught in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Louisville from 2004 until 2008. From 2008 on, he has been a member of the Philosophy Department.
At present, Prof. Dove’s major research projects are focused on three topics. The first concerns the nature of our concepts. He is particularly interested in the degree to which they may be grounded in action and perception systems. Prof. Dove defends a pluralistic stance that leaves room for both embodied and disembodied conceptual representations. The second concerns the role of language in thought. Prof. Dove contends that language is more than simply a medium of communication; it is also a medium of thought. Acquiring a natural language extends our cognitive abilities not merely by providing access to socially derived information but also by providing new representational powers. In other words, thinking with words is computationally distinct from nonverbal thought. The third concerns the proper characterization of innate knowledge. Prof. Dove maintains that a robustly developmental approach provides new ways to characterize and explain our biological endowment.