The Puzzle of Early Deception
AcceptedLying Before Belief Representation
Explains tactically selective early deception through access-gated, factive epistemic tracking rather than full belief manipulation.
Hello, I’m Aliyar 👋
What does a mind minimally need to represent?
My research concerns the representational foundations of the mind: what formats and structures different cognitive capacities minimally require, and what evidence justifies attributing them.
I bring philosophical analysis, formal modeling, and empirical evidence together to build mechanistic theories with discriminative predictions. One strand asks how lean, action-guiding systems can explain infant mindreading, deception, helping, and interaction without presupposing full belief representation. Another extends the same approach to inquiry, curiosity, assertion, epistemic commitment, and object-directed attitudes.
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philosophy of mind + philosophy of cognitive science + developmental psychology2published/accepted papers
4revise & resubmit
6papers under review
35course sections taught
Selected work
Pinned research
Representation of the Unknown
PublishedA Theory of Indefinite Targeting
Introduces indefinite targeting: a flexible representational format that explains how inquiry remains directed through misdescription, null results, and non-unique outcomes.
Emotion-First Mindreading in Infancy
R&RA Theory of Emotion
Develops a theory of emotion as the earliest domain-specific route into other minds, with testable developmental and behavioral signatures.
Proto-Social Cognition
R&RA Relational Framework for Infant Sociality
Models infants’ earliest social system as a relational controller for live coordination rather than a system for hidden-state inference.
Research pipeline
7 active manuscriptsTwo Curiosities, Not One
Topic-curiosity and episodic curiosity are distinct inquiring attitudes.
Emotion Reading as Mindreading in Infancy
A complexity-cost criterion for belief-independent infant mindreading.
Helping Without Beliefs
A predictive-control account of early instrumental helping.
Finding Enough
A decision-theoretic account of when inquiry can move forward.
Pointing as Adaptive Social Regulation
A minimal regulatory architecture for managing another agent’s attention.
The Strength of Assertion Is Two-Dimensional
Commitment to content and public liability for warrant can come apart.
Dimensions of Self-Relation: What Newborn Cry-Discrimination Tells Us
Proposes that self-relational states be profiled across five dimensions: self-specifying information, functional integration, tracking-as-self, conceptual articulation, and reflective access.
Classroom
Teaching
Principal instructor
Neuropsychology, Social Psychology, Philosophy and Logic, Philosophy and Social Ethics, Problems of Philosophy, History of Science.
UConn · Phillips Academy Andover · Bartın
Teaching assistant
Philosophy and Logic, Problems of Philosophy, Introduction to Logic, Logic I–II, Modern Logic I–II.
UConn · METU · Bartın
Timeline
Academic activity
Accepted in Cognition
Lying Before Belief Representation
Published in Synthese
Representation of the Unknown: A Theory of Indefinite Targeting.
Ph.D. in Philosophy
University of Connecticut · Dissertation: The Sub-Theories of Mind.
Teaching Excellence Award
University of Connecticut Provost’s Teaching Excellence Award.
education.md
University of ConnecticutPh.D. Philosophy · 2025
Graduate certificates in Neurobiology of Language, Cognitive Science, and Logic.
Middle East Technical UniversityM.A. Philosophy · 2016 · B.A. Philosophy · 2013
Research in philosophy of language, logic, and computational ontology.