•  251
    The bleak implications of moral psychology
    Neuroethics 3 (3): 223-231. 2010.
    In this article, I focus on two claims made by Appiah in Experiments in Ethics: Doris’s and Harman’s criticism of virtue ethics fails, and moral psychology can be used to identify erroneous moral intuitions. I argue that both claims are erroneous.
  •  177
    Concept empiricism: A methodological critique
    Cognition 104 (1): 19-46. 2006.
    Thanks to Barsalou
  • Scientists’ Concepts of Innateness: Evolution or Attraction?
    with P. Griffiths, S. Linquist, and K. Stotz
    In Richard Samuels & Daniel Wilkenfeld (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 172-201. 2019.
  •  18
    Evolution, Rationality, and Cognition: A Cognitive Science for the Twenty-First Century is a fine collection of essays edited by António Zilhão. Most of the essays are written by prominent philosophers of biology and psychology, while a roboticist, Inman Harvey, and a psychologist, Barbara Tversky, complete the list of contributors. Eight of the nine essays are original, although several of the essays are partly made up of material published elsewhere. Most of these articles belong to a growing …Read more
  •  353
    Philosophical temperament
    with Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Adam Feltz, and Richard Scheines
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 313-330. 2010.
    Many philosophers have worried about what philosophy is. Often they have looked for answers by considering what it is that philosophers do. Given the diversity of topics and methods found in philosophy, however, we propose a different approach. In this article we consider the philosophical temperament, asking an alternative question: what are philosophers like? Our answer is that one important aspect of the philosophical temperament is that philosophers are especially reflective: they are less l…Read more
  •  57
    Baumard and colleagues put forward a new hypothesis about the nature and evolution of fairness. In this commentary, we discuss the relation between morality and their views about fairness
  •  174
    Innateness, canalization, and 'biologicizing the mind'
    Philosophical Psychology 21 (3). 2008.
    This article examines and rejects the claim that 'innateness is canalization'. Waddington's concept of canalization is distinguished from the narrower concept of environmental canalization with which it is often confused. Evidence is presented that the concept of environmental canalization is not an accurate analysis of the existing concept of innateness. The strategy of 'biologicizing the mind' by treating psychological or behavioral traits as if they were environmentally canalized physiologica…Read more
  •  84
    Power and Negative Results
    Philosophy of Science 79 (5): 808-820. 2012.
    The use of power to infer null hypotheses from negative results has recently come under severe attack. In this article, I show that the power of a test can justify accepting the null hypothesis. This argument also gives us a new powerful reason for not treating p-values and power as measures of the strength of evidence.
  •  204
    Recent experimental fi ndings by Knobe and others ( Knobe, 2003; Nadelhoffer, 2006b; Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007 ) have been at the center of a controversy about the nature of the folk concept of intentional action. I argue that the signifi cance of these fi ndings has been overstated. My discussion is two-pronged. First, I contend that barring a consensual theory of conceptual competence, the signifi cance of these experimental fi ndings for the nature of the concept of intentional action canno…Read more
  •  32
    It is difficult to overestimate Paul Meehl’s influence on judgment and decision-making research. His ‘disturbing little book’ (Meehl, 1986, p. 370) Clinical versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence (1954) is known as an attack on human judgment and a call for replacing clinicians with actuarial methods. More than 40 years later, fast and frugal heuristics—proposed as models of human judgment—were formalized, tested, and found to be surprisingly accurate,…Read more
  •  62
    Replies to my critics (review)
    Philosophical Studies 149 (3). 2010.
  •  133
    Doing without concepts
    Oxford University Press. 2009.
    Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework. In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptua…Read more
  •  241
    A plea for human nature
    Philosophical Psychology 21 (3). 2008.
    Philosophers of biology, such as David Hull and Michael Ghiselin, have argued that the notion of human nature is incompatible with modern evolutionary biology and they have recommended rejecting this notion. In this article, I rebut this argument: I show that an important notion of human nature is compatible with modern evolutionary biology.
  •  70
    The evolution of punishment
    Biology and Philosophy 27 (6): 833-850. 2012.
    Many researchers have assumed that punishment evolved as a behavior-modification strategy, i.e. that it evolved because of the benefits resulting from the punishees modifying their behavior. In this article, however, we describe two alternative mechanisms for the evolution of punishment: punishment as a loss-cutting strategy (punishers avoid further exploitation by punishees) and punishment as a cost-imposing strategy (punishers impair the violator’s capacity to harm the punisher or its genetic …Read more
  •  131
    Race and racial cognition
    with Daniel Kelly and Ron Mallon
    In John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.
    A core question of contemporary social morality concerns how we ought to handle racial categorization. By this we mean, for instance, classifying or thinking of a person as Black, Korean, Latino, White, etc.² While it is widely FN:2 agreed that racial categorization played a crucial role in past racial oppression, there remains disagreement among philosophers and social theorists about the ideal role for racial categorization in future endeavors. At one extreme of this disagreement are short-ter…Read more
  •  21
    Précis of Doing without Concepts
    Philosophical Studies 149 (3): 401-410. 2010.
  •  402
    In several disciplines within science—evolutionary biology, molecular biology, astrobiology, synthetic biology, artificial life—and outside science—primarily ethics—efforts to define life have recently multiplied. However, no consensus has emerged. In this article, I argue that this is no accident. I propose a dilemma showing that the project of defining life is either impossible or pointless. The notion of life at stake in this project is either the folk concept of life or a scientific concept.…Read more
  •  39
    Arguing About Human Nature: Contemporary Debates (edited book)
    with Stephen Downes
    Routledge. 2013.
    Arguing About Human Nature covers recent debates--arising from biology, philosophy, psychology, and physical anthropology--that together systematically examine what it means to be human. Thirty-five essays--several of them appearing here for the first time in print--were carefully selected to offer competing perspectives on 12 different topics related to human nature. The context and main threads of the debates are highlighted and explained by the editors in a short, clear introduction to each o…Read more
  •  220
    Massive Modularity and Brain Evolution
    Philosophy of Science 74 (5): 825-838. 2007.
    Quartz (2002) argues that some recent findings about the evolution of the brain (Finlay & Darlington, 1995) are inconsistent with evolutionary psychologists’ massive modularity hypothesis. In substance, Quartz contends that since the volume of the neocortex evolved in a concerted manner, natural selection did not act on neocortical systems independently of each other, which is a necessary condition for the massive modularity of our cognition to be true. I argue however that Quartz’s argument fai…Read more
  •  60
    Experimental Philosophy of Science
    In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.
    This chapter shows that the experimental philosophy has much to offer to philosophy of science by reviewing the existing experimental‐philosophy work in the philosophy of science and by defending it against an important criticism. A natural way of extending experimental philosophy methods to the philosophy of science is to survey scientists’ judgments. The chapter presents two projects in the philosophy of science that can benefit from such surveys: analyzing the scientific concepts found in par…Read more
  •  135
    The defining insight of evolutionary psychology consists of bringing considerations drawn from evolutionary biology to bear on the study of human psychology. So characterized, evolutionary psychology encompasses a large range of views about the nature and evolution of human psychology as well as diverging opinions about the proper method for studying them.1 In this article, I propose to clarify and evaluate various aspects of evolutionary psychologists’ methodology, with a special focus on their…Read more
  •  77
    Robot pains and corporate feelings
    The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52): 78-82. 2011.
    Most philosophers of mind follow Thomas Nagel and hold that subjective experiences are characterised by the fact that there is “something it is like” to have them. Philosophers of mind have sometimes speculated that ordinary people endorse, perhaps implicitly, this conception of subjective experiences. Some recent findings cast doubt on this view.
  •  52
    On the relevance of folk intuitions: A commentary on Talbot
    Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 654-660. 2012.
    In previous work, we presented evidence suggesting that ordinary people do not conceive of subjective experiences as having phenomenal qualities. We then argued that these findings undermine a common justification given for the reality of the hard problem of consciousness. In a thought-provoking article, Talbot has challenged our argument. In this article, we respond to his criticism
  •  23
    A better philosophy for a better psychology: Comment on Slaney and Racine (2011)
    Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 31 (2): 90-95. 2011.
    In their thought-provoking article, Slaney and Racine put forth several criticisms of the traditional view that concepts are mental representations used in the cognitive processes that underlie human higher cognitive competences . Considerations of a broadly Wittgensteinian nature underlie their criticisms. In this article, I argue that the considerations advanced by Slaney and Racine do not undermine the clear account of the nature of mental states and psychological processes developed in the 1…Read more