Kyle Landrum is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod/CNRS. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp and at the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he also obtained his doctorate. He holds a master's degree from the University of Houston, where he is originally from.
His research focuses on distinctions and their relationship to concepts, a relationship highlighted in the mental file tradition by work on Frege's cases (treating one thing as if it were two) and confusion (treating two things as if they were one). He is particularly interested in cases of confusion between theoretically related phenomena, such as the confusion between weight and mass, which are naturally confused in part because of the role played by mass in determining weight. He explores the ways in which we initially fail to mark a distinction, what is required to realize our error, and how we then represent this distinction in thought and language.
His work addresses issues such as the individuation of concepts, de jure coordination/coreference, the metasemantics of mental content, lexical polysemy, the mental representation of scientific theories and communication between interlocutors who do not all make the same distinctions.
