Meet Postdoctoral Fellow Jasmin Özel

Postdoctoral Fellow Jasmin Özel joined the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science (MCPS) in fall ‘25. Özel recently finished her PhD in philosophy at the University of Paderborn in Germany and worked in a Junior Research Group in the mathematics department at the University of Siegen, also in Germany. 

Özel moved to Minnesota to pursue her work in philosophy of science and mathematics.

What has been exciting about your time at UMN so far?

One of the highlights was the AI symposium at the MCPS last semester: AI and the Nature of Science. Cameron Buckner, whose recent book From Deep Learning to Rational Machines: What the History of Philosophy Can Teach Us about the Future of Artificial Intelligence we had read in the MCPS Center Discussion Group. It was exactly the kind of interdisciplinary conversation that drew me to Minnesota. It even influenced the direction of my own research: the symposium was part of what prompted me to develop a paper examining the AI mentality debate, namely in light of a recent discussion about psychological constructs in quantitative psychology.

I'm also looking forward to discussing some of these issues when I teach Minds, Bodies, and Machines in Spring 2027, which will also explore foundational issues common to AI and cognitive science in both theoretical frameworks and practical applications.

What projects are you working on right now?

I'm currently working on two major projects.

First, I'm continuing work from my dissertation in the philosophy of cognitive science and psychology — which I recently presented at the MCPS colloquium. My dissertation focused on the phenomenon of delusions to examine how we can make natural kind claims in psychology. The MCPS Director Alan Love investigates similar issues in the life sciences using the same theoretical framework I work with — the "homeostatic property cluster" account.

The core question I'm addressing is this: scientists commonly make natural kind assumptions across disciplines, but they often understand the same concept differently at different levels of description. For instance, how neuroscientists understand "belief" differs from how social psychologists understand it. Should we eliminate these concepts from science entirely? I argue no — drawing on recent work in the philosophy of emotions, I show how we can understand beliefs, delusions, and similar concepts as multi-level kinds that remain scientifically legitimate despite this variation. This question took on a new dimension when I turned to the debate over whether large language models have genuine beliefs: LLMs satisfy the behavioral and epistemic criteria for belief attribution surprisingly well, while failing the deeper ontological criteria we normally rely on. The framework I developed for delusions turned out to apply here too — a genuine surprise — and this application has since grown into a paper of its own.

Second, I'm working on a book with Roy Cook from the Philosophy Department on Christine Ladd-Franklin, a logician, mathematician, and psychologist who studied with Charles Sanders Peirce and made groundbreaking contributions to the Algebra of Logic tradition. Most notably, she introduced the "antilogism" — an "argument of inconsistency" — which allowed her to characterize all ninety-six valid syllogisms in a single general form. She was the first person to accomplish this since Aristotle.

Despite growing interest in Ladd-Franklin's impact on both the American and European logic traditions, there's currently no comprehensive overview of her work, and much remains unpublished. We've already begun locating materials in archives in both the United States and Europe. Our book will situate Ladd-Franklin within the 19th-century Algebra of Logic tradition and examine her interactions with the German and British traditions. We're also questioning recent assumptions that she was primarily concerned with syllogistic logic. Ultimately, we argue her innovative notation system already possessed the expressive power to capture claims about possibility and necessity — decades before this was thought possible — and in a way that's more compatible with the American philosophical tradition. 

What questions and ideas are you most interested in exploring right now?

The topic of natural kinds in cognitive science and psychology is receiving much more attention recently, but the debate is still in its early stages. Meanwhile, other sciences — especially biology — have a much more developed literature. I'm fortunate that MCPS director Alan Love's research focuses on similar conceptual issues in the biological sciences, so I'm excited to draw on this unexpected wealth of literature while I’m at UMN. 

Second, I'm currently working on a chapter about the German logician Ernst Schröder, with whom Ladd-Franklin corresponded intensively. I began this work over the past two years as a member of a junior research group at the University of Siegen in Germany, focusing mainly on the historical aspects of the Algebra of Logic tradition. Now I'm excited to shift more attention to the actual logic of Ladd-Franklin's system in my work with Roy Cook.

This story was edited by Avery Vrieze, an undergraduate student in CLA.