The PhilLab is part of Dartmouth's interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, and graduate students complete their PhD work in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

The lab's research draws on a broad range of the methods employed across psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science to better understand questions about how humans think both about the actual world and about non-actual possibilities (sometimes called "possible worlds").

We explore both how people think about possibilities themselves and how that influences the way that they think more generally, from the language they use, to the causal and moral judgments they make.

Research on the capacity to understand others’ minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs.