Dr Giacomo Melis

I am a UKRI Future Leaders Research Fellow and PI of the interdisciplinary project on rational agency called “Agency, Rationality and Epistemic Defeat: ARED”.

I have joined the University of Stirling in March 2017 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the project Knowledge beyond Natural Science. Before coming to Stirling, I held research positions at the University of Copenhagen and at the University of Aberdeen, and a teaching position at the University of Glasgow. I have conducted my doctoral studies at the former Northern Institute of Philosophy under the supervision of Professors Crispin Wright and Carrie Jenkins, and I was awarded a PhD by the University of Aberdeen in 2015. From February 2024, I run the Empirical Epistemology Network in collaboration with Kirsten Blakey, Jack Lyons and Peter Graham.

My research concerns primarily how agents go about, and ought to go about, forming, revising and managing their beliefs. I am concerned especially in how the study of epistemic defeaters (roughly, counterevidence) may contribute to our understanding of the nature of rational agency.

In the project Agency, Rationality, and Epistemic Defeat (ARED), I take an interdisciplinary perspective and investigate whether non-human animals and human infants form and revise beliefs rationally in a way similar to adult humans. To find out more about ARED, please visit: https://ared.stir.ac.uk/

While my background is that of an armchair analytic philosopher, I have become very much interested in fruitful collaborations between philosophy and empirical research. With Kirsten Blakey, Jack Lyons and Peter Graham, I have set up the empirical epistemology network: https://empiricalepistemology.stir.ac.uk/