About Me

I’m a Ph.D. student in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. I work at the intersection of philosophy of science, philosophy of AI, social and feminist epistemology, and computational methods (in particular, applied machine learning, data science, and computational linguistics). My dissertation explores how AI systems can both shape our epistemic practices and serve as tools for understanding them.

Recently I’ve been focused on understanding the epistemic significance of people’s confessions to AI chatbots: whether those interactions, taken at scale, constitute a novel source of evidence about human behavior (such as bias, belief, and self-disclosure), and if they do, who ought to benefit from those epistemic resources.

I am also working on a large-scale computational project where I apply methods from machine learning and computational linguistics to investigate the evolution of language in domains of science long regarded as gendered. I use these methods to test and extend philosophical claims about scientific language that have traditionally relied on qualitative analysis. One strand of this project examines the longstanding claim that the metaphors used to describe sex cells in reproductive biology are unnecessarily gendered, and another looks at differences in how men’s and women’s pain is characterized in medical journals.

Outside of research, I’m involved in a range of interdisciplinary and community-oriented work, including working as a Graduate Student Researcher with the Institute for Engineering AI and Society in UCI’s Samueli School of Engineering, where I have collaborated with philosophers and engineers on projects in AI auditing, algorithmic fairness, and algorithmic monoculture; organizing the Hypatia Society, a graduate-led initiative supporting women and gender minorities in philosophy; and running a reading group in feminist philosophy of science.

When I’m not doing philosophy, I enjoy painting, baking, and watching (bad) movies with my cat, Captain Cat Sparrow.

You can contact me at: thcotton [at] uci [dot] edu