In her research, she is especially interested in forms of thinking and talking that don’t fit within the standard philosophical model of the human mind as a propositional logic machine. In the realm of communication, this includes phenomena like metaphor, sarcasm, insinuation, and slurs. In the realm of minds, it extends to maps, non-human animal cognition, imagination, and emotion. She grew up in Philadelphia and got her degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley.