Christian Torsell
  • April 2, 2026

  • Honor recognizes the UC Irvine logic & philosophy of science Ph.D. student for academic excellence

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Christian Torsell, UC Irvine logic & philosophy of science graduate student, is the recipient of this year’s Justine Lambert Prize. The honor is awarded every other year to recognize students for outstanding work addressing foundations of the formal, natural, or social sciences. Below, the Leadville, Colorado native shares more about his pathway to UCI’s LPS Ph.D., his award-winning work - “Task-Switching and Natural Projectibility” - and his future plans which will be taking him to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow.

Q: Where did you earn your undergrad degree? What made you decide to pursue your current field of study, and specifically at UCI? What interests you most about your work?

A: I earned a BA in philosophy from Notre Dame with a minor in PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics).

I started college as an economics major, but I found I was most excited by philosophical questions at the edge of the discipline—questions about things like distributive justice and the methods of the social sciences. So I switched my major to philosophy, and shortly afterward I decided I wanted to go to grad school.

In my junior year, I took a game theory class taught by Hannah Rubin, a UC Irvine LPS alum. Game theory is a mathematical framework for studying strategic interactions. While it’s usually treated as a branch of economics, Hannah introduced us to applications of game theory in philosophy, some of which were authored by LPS faculty and alumni. I was excited by the purchase these tools provided on tricky philosophical questions, especially problems in social and political philosophy. I decided that was the kind of philosophy I wanted to do (I never really got away from economics!). There weren’t many programs that could support that kind of work, and none that specialized in it to the extent that LPS did. I was very fortunate to be admitted here.

Right now, I’m excited about using game theory to model self-assembly, that is, processes in which order emerges out of the initially unstructured interactions of simple systems.

Q: Tell us about your research. What problem will your findings help solve?

In science and in everyday life we learn by generalizing from patterns in what we observe. But any body of observations will exhibit many different patterns, depending on how we describe it. Some of these we think of as merely accidental, and so we don’t extrapolate from those ones, while others we take to reflect firmer, more permanent regularities in the world. In philosophy, we call patterns of the second kind projectible. Some philosophers have been troubled by the fact that, once we start pressing, it quickly becomes difficult to justify the choice to privilege one pattern over the others. Nevertheless, lots of successful learning happens in nature—most of it in organisms much simpler than us—which means that natural learners have found ways to latch onto patterns that are good guides for action and prediction. My work uses tools from psychology and game theory to model how simple trial-and-error learners might learn to attend to projectible regularities in their environments. The hope is that this might help to demystify problems of projectibility by showing how even primitive methods of learning might suffice to solve those problems as they arise in nature.

Q: Where can your work be found if someone wanted to learn more about your research? Any publications to point to?

A: My publications are available on my website. My first single-authored paper is about intellectual history. In it, I show that Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, a Polish logician and philosopher, proved a version of a classic result in decision theory long before it was proved (individually) by David Blackwell and I.J. Good, who are usually cited as its originators. I’m also on three coauthored papers on learning. Two of these were written with Jeff Barrett, both on metalearning, that is, processes in which an agent learns how to learn better. The third, which studies learning in a communication game widely studied by economists, was coauthored with Jeff Barrett, Cailin O’Connor, and Brian Skyrms. Most recently, I published a paper showing how a preference for material equality might evolve in a bargaining context.

Q: Tell us about the work that specifically earned you recognition as the Justine Lambert Prize winner.

A: My paper, “Task-Switching and Natural Projectibility,” is part of the broader project I mentioned earlier. In it, I consider an animal learning experiment on task switching, in which subjects learn to distinguish and rapidly switch between different tasks. I build a model that shows how this might be achieved by a kind of simple reinforcement learner.

Q: What organizations, foundations, or others have funded your research while you’ve been at UCI? 

A: I’ve been supported by a UCI Social Science Merit Fellowship, a Junior Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies (2026), and Adam Smith (2023-2024) and Carl Menger (2024-2025) Fellowships from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Q: What are some of your proudest accomplishments while at UCI?

A: I’m proud of the collaborations I’ve been involved in. My coauthors are the people I was reading six years ago when I was in Hannah Rubin’s game theory class! At the time, I couldn’t have imagined them as potential collaborators. I’m also proud of my teaching. I think I’ve improved significantly as a teacher over the last five years.

Q: Who have been your faculty mentors while here, and what impact have they had on your graduate career?

A: Jeff Barrett is my primary advisor. My work has been shaped in important ways by our conversations, which have been a reliable source of encouragement, incisive feedback, and exciting research ideas. He’s struck an ideal balance between providing guidance and leaving me space to explore whatever interests me. I’ve also worked closely with Cailin O’Connor and Brian Skyrms, who have taught me a lot about philosophy, biology, economics, and how to use models well.  Though not a faculty member at UCI, I should also mention my friend Daniel Herrmann, an LPS alum and professor at UNC Chapel Hill. When I first got here, Daniel was in his fifth year in the program, and he did a lot to help me get on my feet.

Q: When do you plan to complete your Ph.D.? What are your plans thereafter?

A: I plan to graduate this summer. I’ll be starting a postdoc at the University of Toronto in the fall, working with Sara Aronwitiz’s group in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Q: Any unique life experiences that have guided your educational journey? Give us some background.

A: I don’t really have a neat story connecting my current trajectory to particular life experiences. But I owe a lot to my parents’ constant support and openness to my interests and goals, even when they veered into potentially parent-worrying territory. As a kid, my terribly arachnophobic mom would read me books about spiders and scorpions (with illustrations!) because I liked them and wanted to learn about them. In high school, when I told my parents I wanted to go to college for jazz saxophone, they didn’t lecture me about thinking practically. They drove me to jazz camps and concerts and helped me buy my first professional instrument. They continued to support me when I decided to go into philosophy, and they’ve been a rock throughout grad school.

 

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