RESEARCH
RESEARCH
I am a philosopher working in epistemology, philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, philosophy and AI, and philosophy education.
My research began with questions about perception, experience, intentionality, and empirical knowledge. In my doctoral dissertation, I examined skepticism, perceptual experience, and the epistemic contribution of experience through Anil Gupta’s Reformed Empiricism.
More recently, I have extended these concerns to philosophical questions about AI, especially the relation between human understanding and machine-generated representation, and to philosophy education in the age of AI. I am interested in how students learn to ask better questions about AI, ethical dilemmas, responsibility, trust, and human judgment. I approach AI not only as a tool or a technical subject, but also as a philosophical occasion for reflecting on knowledge, understanding, representation, and human inquiry.
With Lauren Hyoseo Yoon, I investigate what shapes inquiry when language-model agents formulate their own discussion questions. Drawing on Philosophy for Children, we studied 576 multi-agent forums in which agents read a philosophical story, chose questions, and worked toward a joint conclusion, without assigning one model to lead or synthesize the discussion. We found that initially varied questions tended to narrow into either/or alternatives, while the discussions relied heavily on philosophical ideas already made explicit in the source text. These findings suggest that allowing models to choose their questions does not necessarily free their inquiry from the framing of the material they read.
Yeri Hong and Lauren Hyoseo Yoon (2026). When Models Choose the Question: Pedagogical Constraints in Bottom-Up Multi-Agent Inquiry. arXiv preprint.
Epistemology
Philosophy of Perception
Philosophy of Mind
Perceptual Experience and Empirical Knowledge
Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science and AI
AI Ethics Education
Philosophy Education
Philosophy for/with Children
Humanities and Liberal Arts Education in the Age of AI
My primary area of research is epistemology, especially perceptual experience and empirical knowledge. I am interested in how experience contributes to knowledge, how perceptual judgment can be justified, and how skeptical challenges reveal assumptions about experience, evidence, and rationality.
My doctoral dissertation, Against Skepticism: A New Defense of Reformed Empiricism, examines skepticism and the epistemic role of experience through a critical engagement with Anil Gupta’s Reformed Empiricism.
This line of work also connects with philosophy of mind. My earlier research on phenomenal intentionality examined the relation between phenomenology, intentionality, consciousness, and representation. These questions continue to shape my interest in perception, mind, and the difference between human experience and merely mechanical or computational representation.
Some of my current work concerns philosophical questions related to cognitive science and AI, especially questions about perception, representation, cognition, understanding, and judgment.
Recently, I have begun developing theory-guided work that brings philosophical questions into contact with AI models. Rather than treating AI models only as technical tools, I use them as sites for philosophical investigation: What kinds of tasks can a model perform? What kind of “understanding” does such performance appear to involve? Where does model behavior resemble human judgment, and where does that resemblance break down?
This project connects my earlier work in epistemology and philosophy of mind with my current interest in AI. I am especially interested in what happens when concepts traditionally used to understand human perception and knowledge are applied to artificial systems, and what this reveals about the difference between human experience and mechanical representation.
My work in philosophy education focuses on how students learn to ask questions, clarify concepts, examine reasons, and form their own judgments.
An earlier part of this work concerned philosophical essay writing. In “Extracting a Voice: A Suggestion for Teaching IPO Essay Writing,” I examined how students can develop their own philosophical voice through writing, especially in the context of the International Philosophy Olympiad. This work already reflected my broader interest in philosophy education as a practice of helping students think for themselves rather than merely reproduce learned positions.
My recent work extends this concern to AI ethics education and humanities education in the age of generative AI. I ask how students can learn to respond to AI-related dilemmas, distinguish ethical and conceptual issues, and reflect on the limits of machine-generated answers.
Across these projects, I approach philosophy education not simply as the transmission of philosophical theories, but as the cultivation of questioning, reasoning, dialogue, and responsible judgment.