Ted Shear
- Teaching Assistant Professor
Before starting my current position at CU in January 2020, I completed a Postdoc in the School of Economics at the University of Queensland from 2017-2019 under the supervision of and as part of their the ARC . I hold a BA (Philosophy and Linguistics, 2008), and an MA (Philosophy, 2015) and PhD (Philosophy, 2017) from the University of California, Davis.
My research interests are broad. I spend a lot of time thinking about the mental processes associated with epistemic change. These include things like reasoning, considering and evaluating evidence, imagining, and the varieties of updates to our judgments that they involve. While my interests are in the normative constraints on these processes, I am committed to methodological naturalism and see descriptive questions about how real (viz. non-ideal) agents engage in these processes as relevant to the normative questions. As such, my work has cross-disciplinary connections with economics, computer science, and the behavioral sciences. My work often involves the use of logico-mathematical tools, however, as a methodological pluralist I value the use of all available tools in inquiry. I am also a committed teacher interested in helping my students grow and appreciate the complexity of new ideas.
When I’m not doing philosophy, I may be thinking about how awesome cats are, spinning poi, climbing on things, or otherwise having a good time. Check out my website, , for more information about me, my research, or my teaching.