•  1019
    On the Matter of Robot Minds
    Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious bei…Read more
  •  601
    Diversity in Representations; Uniformity in Learning
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 330-331. 2010.
    Henrich et al.'s conclusion that psychologists ought not assume uniformity of psychological phenomena depends on their descriptive claim that there is no pattern to the great diversity in psychological phenomena. We argue that there is a pattern: uniformity of learning processes (broadly construed), and diversity of (some) mental contents (broadly construed)
  •  195
    Deep trouble for the deep self
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (5). 2012.
    Chandra Sripada's (2010) Deep Self Concordance Account aims to explain various asymmetries in people's judgments of intentional action. On this account, people distinguish between an agent's active and deep self; attitude attributions to the agent's deep self are then presumed to play a causal role in people's intentionality ascriptions. Two judgments are supposed to play a role in these attributions?a judgment that specifies the attitude at issue and one that indicates that the attitude is robu…Read more
  •  720
    Experimental Philosophy and Causal Attribution
    In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.
    Humans often attribute the things that happen to one or another actual cause. In this chapter, we survey some recent philosophical and psychological research on causal attribution. We pay special attention to the relation between graphical causal modeling and theories of causal attribution. We think that the study of causal attribution is one place where formal and experimental techniques nicely complement one another.
  •  754
    Folk Mereology is Teleological
    Noûs 51 (2): 238-270. 2017.
    When do the folk think that mereological composition occurs? Many metaphysicians have wanted a view of composition that fits with folk intuitions, and yet there has been little agreement about what the folk intuit. We aim to put the tools of experimental philosophy to constructive use. Our studies suggest that folk mereology is teleological: people tend to intuit that composition occurs when the result serves a purpose. We thus conclude that metaphysicians should dismiss folk intuitions, as tie…Read more
  •  67
    Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2): 273-294. 2017.
    In the last decade, several researchers have proposed theories of actual causation that make use of structural equations and directed graphs. Many of these researchers are committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum, according to which an important constraint on the acceptability of a theory of actual causation is agreement between the deliverances of the theory with respect to specific cases and the reports of untutored individuals about those same cases. In the present article,…Read more
  •  94
    Experimental Metaphysics (edited book)
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
    This volume brings together a range of views aimed at addressing the question of how cognitive science might be relevant to metaphysics.
  •  1082
    The Gettier Intuition from South America to Asia
    with Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Florian Cova, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, and Maurice Grinberg
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (3): 517-541. 2017.
    This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “…Read more
  •  643
    From punishment to universalism
    Mind and Language 34 (1): 59-72. 2018.
    Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. Some have taken the folk view to support moral universalism; others have taken the folk view to reflect a deep confusion. And while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra-domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypothesis is that folk judgme…Read more
  •  1277
    In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy
    Metaphilosophy 44 (4): 512-532. 2013.
    Experimental philosophy is often presented as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. This article distinguishes two views of experimental philosophy: a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions, and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the colocation in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly …Read more
  •  4961
    Hypocrisy: What Counts?
    with Mark Alicke and Ellen Gordon
    Philosophical Psychology (5): 1-29. 2012.
    Hypocrisy is a multi-faceted concept that has been studied empirically by psychologists and discussed logically by philosophers. In this study, we pose various behavioral scenarios to research participants and ask them to indicate whether the actor in the scenario behaved hypocritically. We assess many of the components that have been considered to be necessary for hypocrisy (e.g., the intent to deceive, self-deception), factors that may or may not be distinguished from hypocrisy (e.g., weakness…Read more
  •  1117
    Folk intuitions of Actual Causation: A Two-Pronged Debunking Explanation
    Philosophical Studies 174 (5): 1323-1361. 2017.
    How do we determine whether some candidate causal factor is an actual cause of some particular outcome? Many philosophers have wanted a view of actual causation which fits with folk intuitions of actual causation and those who wish to depart from folk intuitions of actual causation are often charged with the task of providing a plausible account of just how and where the folk have gone wrong. In this paper, I provide a range of empirical evidence aimed at showing just how and where the folk go w…Read more
  •  1568
    People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren't beliefs because they don't guide behaviour and affect in the way that beliefs do. Or, if they are beliefs, they are somehow anomalous, atypical, or marginal beliefs. We present e…Read more
  •  1123
    Demoralizing causation
    Philosophical Studies (2): 1-27. 2013.
    There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. Many such claims have been made about the influence of such factors on our folk notion of causation. In this paper, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated, as they are based on one narrow type of data about …Read more
  •  1277
    Causation: Empirical Trends and Future Directions
    Philosophy Compass 7 (9): 643-653. 2012.
    Empirical research has recently emerged as a key method for understanding the nature of causation, and our concept of causation. One thread of research aims to test intuitions about the nature of causation in a variety of classic cases. These experiments have principally been used to try to resolve certain debates within analytic philosophy, most notably that between proponents of transference and dependence views of causation. The other major thread of empirical research on our concept of causa…Read more
  •  1238
    The Lesson of Bypassing
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (4): 599-619. 2013.
    The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a descr…Read more
  •  903
    Culpable Control and Deviant Causal Chains
    with Mark Alicke
    Personality and Social Psychology Compass 6 (10): 723-735. 2012.
    Actions that are intended to produce harmful consequences can fail to achieve their desired effects in numerous ways. We refer to action sequences in which harmful intentions are thwarted as deviant causal chains. The culpable control model of blame (CCM)is a useful tool for predicting and explaining the attributions that observers make of the actors whose harmful intentions go awry. In this paper, we describe six types of deviant causal chains; those in which: an actor’s attempt is obviated by …Read more
  •  1308
    Belief is prior to knowledge
    Episteme 12 (3): 385-399. 2015.
    Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is a composite of belief and non-mental factors. However, Timothy Williamson suggests that orthodoxy implies that the concept of belief is acquired before the concept of knowledge, whereas developmental data suggest the reverse. More recently, Jennifer Nagel reviews the psychological evidence, building a psychological case that the concept of knowledge emerges prior to belief. I assess the psychological state of the art and find support for the opposite conclus…Read more