Hugo Mota

I hold a doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Oslo since 2025.
I was under the supervision of Joey Pollock and co-supervision of Catarina Dutilh-Novaes.
My dissertation, Deep disagreements and power: communication under oppression, was part of the New Models of Knowledge Communication project, funded by the Research Council of Norway.
It has been awarded the King’s Gold Medal for its contribution to the Humanities research literature in 2026. It is available here. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing it further.

My doctoral work attempted to join multiple philosophical views to explain deep disagreements, with the ultimate goal of providing a better analysis of real cases of deep disagreement: why they arise, what makes them more complex than normal, and which forms of communication are involved with them. The work does not offer a perfect strategy to solve deep disagreements, but tools that broaden the scope of the analysis, which should benefit the development of better communicative strategies in the future.

My future work focuses on understanding what happens when deep disagreements turn violent, whether peace mediation is the best tool for managing and ending conflicts, and how mediation should be improved with the goal of achieving fair and long lasting peace.

My main fields of expertise are social epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
However, due to the interdisciplinary nature of my research projects, I am also deeply interested in other philosophical fields, such as argumentation studies, political philosophy, and philosophy of psychology, and in other areas of research entirely, such as peace and conflict studies, sociology, social anthropology, social psychology, and critical pedagogy.