Ethan Landes, Academic Philosopher

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology as part of ESDiT’s New Methods for Ethics research line.

My main areas of research are metaphilosophy, philosophy of technology, experimental philosophy, philosophy of language, and epistemology – ideally where all five intersect. One forthcoming publication explores the extent that trust applies to AI, addressing both methodological shortcomings of the relevant psychological literature and the challenges posed by polysemy to the relevant philosophical literature. Another recent paper explores ways to empirically measure the distinct epistemic pathways of showing vs telling in LLM-generated moral advice, pathways that have been conflated in armchair philosophy, experimental philosophy, and psychology.

In 2021, I completed my PhD at the University of St Andrews, where I wrote my dissertation on the need for new approaches in the epistemology of philosophy. I have also been a postdoc at the University of Kent’s Department of Psychology, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, as part of Jim Everett’s Multidimensional Trust in Moral Machines team. There I researched the social epistemology of AI and how AI fits into our existing interpersonal concepts and schemas. Before that, I was an SNF postdoc at the University of Zurich on the project “Dual-Character Concepts: Bridging the Descriptive and the Normative” with Kevin Reuter.