Office Hours
By Appointment
Education
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
About Me
Jessica Heine works primarily at the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Her central project consists in providing an alternative account of the relationship between perceivers, perceptual experiences, and the perceptible world. In “Against Character Constraints” (2025, Australasian Journal of Philosophy), she defends the view that any scene can be veridically seen via any visual phenomenal character. She also investigates how language and other forms of representation relate to perception in their capacity to present reality. Lately, she’s been developing a theory of semantic understanding, with a focus on the minimal level of understanding required to intentionally express propositions linguistically. Through this work, she’s also studying the semantic properties of the linguistic output of AI entities. Finally, she has projects in philosophy of science and epistemology involving the role of perspectival facts in representations of reality.
Research Interests
Philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language