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52Why Variation Matters to PhilosophyRes Philosophica 100 (1): 1-22. 2023.Experimental philosophers often seem to ignore or downplay the significance of demographic variation in philosophically relevant judgments. This article confirms this impression, discusses why demographic research is overlooked in experimental philosophy, and argues that variation is philosophically significant.
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Cognitive penetrability : a no-progress reportIn John Zeimbekis & Athanassios Raftopoulos (eds.), The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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Doubling down on the nomological notion of human natureIn Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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The philosophy of luck and experimental philosophyIn Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck, Routledge. 2019.
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The Folk Concept of RaceIn Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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Experimental philosophyIn Inkeri Koskinen, David Ludwig, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli & Luis Reyes-Galindo (eds.), Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science, Routledge. 2021.
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21Response to Chris Crandall and John SymonsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (5): 615-630. 2022.ABSTRACT This article responds to Chris Crandall's and John Symons's critical discussions of Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. I examine the significance of experimental-philosophy research for philosophy and for psychology and discuss the methodological shortcomings of experimental philosophy. I also consider how we can come to know metaphysical necessities of philosophical importance and defend a pragmatist take on conceptual engineering.
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150Demographic Differences in Philosophical Intuition: a Reply to Joshua KnobeReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 401-434. 2023.In a recent paper, Joshua Knobe (2019) offers a startling account of the metaphilosophical implications of findings in experimental philosophy. We argue that Knobe’s account is seriously mistaken, and that it is based on a radically misleading portrait of recent work in experimental philosophy and cultural psychology.
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320Beyond the Courtroom: Agency and the Perception of Free willIn Samuel Murray & Paul Henne (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action. forthcoming.In this paper, we call for a new approach to the psychology of free will attribution. While past research in experimental philosophy and psychology has mostly been focused on reasoning- based judgment (“the courtroom approach”), we argue that like agency and mindedness, free will can also be experienced perceptually (“the perceptual approach”). We further propose a new model of free will attribution—the agency model—according to which the experience of free will is elicited by the perceptual cue…Read more
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40A mistaken confidence in dataEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 1-17. 2021.In this paper I explore an underdiscussed factor contributing to the replication crisis: Scientists, and following them policy makers, often neglect sources of errors in the production and interpretation of data and thus overestimate what can be learnt from them. This neglect leads scientists to conduct experiments that are insufficiently informative and science consumers, including other scientists, to put too much weight on experimental results. The former leads to fragile empirical literature…Read more
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45Response to Alexander and Weinberg, Baz and DeutschBy Edouard MacheryAnalysis 80 (4): 771-788. 2020.I am grateful for Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg’s, Avner Baz’s and Max Deutsch’s insightful comments on Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. I have lea.
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58An Evidence-Based Study of the Evolutionary Behavioral SciencesBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (1): 177-226. 2012.The disagreement between philosophers about the scientific worth of the evolutionary behavioral sciences (evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, etc.) is in part due to the fact that critics and advocates of these sciences characterize them very differently. In this article, by analyzing quantitatively the citations made in the articles published in Evolution & Human Behavior between January 2000 and December 2002, we provide some evidence that undermines the characterization of the …Read more
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32What do plants and bacteria want? Commentary on Carrie Figdor '_ s _Pieces of mindMind and Language 35 (5): 677-686. 2020.In Pieces of mind, Figdor examines how to interpret psychological predicates that scientists assign to entities that commonsensically do not have a mind such as neurons and plants. She claims that these predicates are used literally to refer to the same structures in humans and non‐human entities. I argue on the contrary that most uses of this kind are merely the extension of preexisting, possibly behaviorist senses of the relevant psychological predicates.
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116What Is a Replication?Philosophy of Science 87 (4): 545-567. 2020.This article develops a new, general account of replication. I argue that a replication is an experiment that resamples the experimental components of an ori...
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359Concepts are not a natural kindPhilosophy of Science 72 (3): 444-467. 2005.In cognitive psychology, concepts are those data structures that are stored in long-term memory and are used by default in human beings.
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658Love and Power: Grau and Pury (2014) as a Case Study in the Challenges of X-Phi ReplicationReview of Philosophy and Psychology (4): 1-17. 2020.Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We then report a large, …Read more
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383You Don't Know How You Think: Introspection and Language of ThoughtBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (3): 469-485. 2005.The question, ‘Is cognition linguistic?' divides recent cognitive theories into two antagonistic groups. Sententialists claim that we think in some language, while advocates of non linguistic views of cognition deny this claim. The Introspective Argument for Sententialism is one of the most appealing arguments for sententialism. In substance, it claims that the introspective fact of inner speech provides strong evidence that our thoughts are linguistic. This article challenges this argument. I c…Read more
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37Response to Akagi, Hughes, and Springle (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (4): 608-623. 2019.I am extremely grateful to Mikio Akagi, Nick Hughes, and Alison Springle for their insightful and challenging comments on Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds (Machery 2017). In this response, I wil...
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23Precis of Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (4): 581-584. 2019.Volume 27, Issue 4, October 2019, Page 581-584.
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29Exploring the Folkbiological Conception of Human NaturePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 366 (1563): 444. 2011.Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further st…Read more
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24The Compositionality of Meaning and Content. Volume I - Foundational Issues, (edited book)De Gruyter. 2005.Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of their parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to …Read more
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26The reification objection to bottom-up cognitive ontology revisionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.
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39The Alpha WarReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1): 75-99. 2019.Benjamin et al. Nature Human Behavior 2, 6–10 proposed decreasing the significance level by an order of magnitude to improve the replicability of psychology. This modest, practical proposal has been widely criticized, and its prospects remain unclear. This article defends this proposal against these criticisms and highlights its virtues.
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34Variation in Intuitions about Reference and Ontological DisagreementsIn Steven D. Hales (ed.), A Companion to Relativism, Wiley & Sons. 2011.This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Semantics, Cross ‐ Cultural Style Metalinguistic and Linguistic Intuitions Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference The Vacuity of Ontological Disagreements Conclusion References.
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The concept of intentional action in high-functioning autismIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford. pp. 152-172. 2014.
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40The normative sense: What is universal? What Varies?In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology, Routledge. 2018.The extent to which normative cognition varies across cultures has implications for a number of important philosophical questions. This chapter examines several striking commonalities and differences in normative cognition across cultures. We focus on cross-cultural commonality and difference in norm typologies (especially the moral-conventional distinction); the externalization of norms; which aspects of life are normativized; and some of the concepts and principles associated with the normativ…Read more
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University of PittsburghHistory and Philosophy of Science
Center for Philosophy of ScienceDistinguished Professor
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |