Philip Sink loves Applied Philosophy

Hello! My name is Philip Sink, and I am a PhD Student in the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon University. At present, I have three different research projects in various stages of completeness. The work that composes my thesis is a novel semantics for epistemic modal logic in simplicial complexes. This work started with a series of internships with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The stated task of the internship was to explore connections between topology, epistemic modal logic, and distributed computing. In particular, they were interested in finding ways of modeling sequences of signals between agents in settings prone to communication failure, such as a forest fire or other disaster relief scenario. Pursuing this project led to my interest in simplicial semantics for epistemic modal logic. In totality, this work connects the areas of simplicial semantics for epistemic logic, action models, belief revision, and distributed computing with a focus on gossip protocols.

My second area of research is an exploration of the work of Alan Turing that draws heavily from and has been guided by Wilfried Sieg’s interpretation of Turing. This work is also joint with a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh named Stephen Perry, who specializes in philosophy of applied mathematics.

My third area of research is on the metaphilosophy of Richard Rorty. In 2024, I was invited to a special session of the APA to present to the Richard Rorty Society. There I gave a talk which compared the metaphilosophies of, on the one hand, Richard Rorty, and on the other, Philip Kitcher, whose recent book “What’s the Use of Philosophy” had made a stir.