Mikayla Kelley
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy and the College
Mikayla Kelley is a philosopher specializing in philosophy of action and formal epistemology. She is interested in fundamental questions about the nature of action, including our capacity for mental agency, the relationship between intentional action and knowledge, and the centrality of intentional action to ethical life. She is currently developing a control theory of action, specifying conditions under which a movement counts as an action. She aims to extend the control theory of action to a theory of group and institutional control and action, as well as to a unified philosophical theory of control in all its guises. She is also pursuing a research program in formal epistemology that offers justifications for norms of belief under the assumption that our beliefs are epistemically valuable insofar as they are accurate.
Kelley’s research has been published in Philosophy of Science, Noûs, Synthese, and Social Choice and Welfare.
She earned a BA in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MA in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. She received a PhD in philosophy from Stanford University.