I am a late-stage PhD candidate in philosophy at Stanford University. I completed my B.A. in Heidelberg, Germany during which I spent a year at UNC, Chapel Hill.

Recently, my work has focused on social epistemology, especially on peer disagreement and the dynamics of collective belief revision. My work employs probabilistic models and simulations to examine how individuals can respond to disagreements, and what norms should govern these responses.

Separately, my dissertation develops a compression-based account of understanding. The central idea is that to understand some domain requires possessing relevant compressed representations. Drawing from cognitive science, statistics and information theory, I give an account of mental compression, and examine why it is distinctly valuable.

You can contact me at mforster [at] stanford [dot] edu.