•  154
    Group Mind
    In Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. pp. 401-04. 2013.
    Talk of group minds has arisen in a number of distinct traditions, such as in sociological thinking about the “madness of crowds” in the 19th-century, and more recently in making sense of the collective intelligence of social insects, such as bees and ants. Here we provide an analytic framework for understanding a range of contemporary appeals to group minds and cognate notions, such as collective agency, shared intentionality, socially distributed cognition, transactive memory systems, and gro…Read more
  •  1339
    Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (edited book)
    MIT Press. 1999.
    This collection of original essays--by philosophers of biology, biologists, and cognitive scientists--provides a wide range of perspectives on species. Including contributions from David Hull, John Dupre, David Nanney, Kevin de Queiroz, and Kim Sterelny, amongst others, this book has become especially well-known for the three essays it contains on the homeostatic property cluster view of natural kinds, papers by Richard Boyd, Paul Griffiths, and Robert A. Wilson.
  •  756
    The transitivity of material constitution
    Noûs 43 (2): 363-377. 2009.
    In metaphysics, the view that material constitution is transitive is ubiquitous, an assumption expressed by both proponents and critics of constitution views. Likewise, it is typically assumed within the philosophy of mind that physical realization is a transitive relation. In both cases, this assumption of transitivity plays a role in discussion of the broader implications of a metaphysics that invokes either relation. Here I provide reasons for questioning this assumption and the uses to which…Read more
  •  123
    This book offers the first sustained critique of individualism in psychology, a view that has been the subject of debate between philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge for many years. The author approaches individualism as an issue in the philosophy of science and by discussing issues such as computationalism and the mind's modularity he opens the subject up for non-philosophers in psychology and computer science. Professor Wilson carefully examines the most influential arguments for i…Read more
  •  146
    MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (edited book)
    with Frank C. Keil
    MIT Press. 1999.
    "Amongst the human mind's proudest accomplishments is the invention of a science dedicated to understanding itself: cognitive science. ... This volume is an authoritative guide to this exhilarating new body of knowledge, written by the experts, edited with skill and good judment. If we were to leave a time capsule for the next millennium with records of the great achievements of civilization, this volume would have to be in it."--Steven Pinker.
  •  501
    Explanation and Cognition
    with Frank C. Keil
    MIT Press. 2000.
    These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual..
  •  43
    Hume's Theory of Moral Judgment (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 48 (2): 394-395. 1994.
    The central, general claim that Brand defends is that an understanding of Hume's view of general rules in book 1 of the Treatise is crucial to a full appreciation of Hume's account of moral judgment in book 3. Although Brand also discusses other respects in which the Treatise is a unified work, both the book's title and subtitle suggest a study more wide-ranging than we actually find. Moreover, discussion of some of the issues important for Brand's interpretation, such as the sense in which Hume…Read more
  •  3659
    Primary and Secondary Qualities
    In Matthew Stuart (ed.), A Companion to Locke, Blackwell. pp. 193-211. 2015.
    The first half of this review article on Locke on primary and secondary qualities leads up to a fairly straightforward reading of what Locke says about the distinction in Essay II.viii, one that, in its general outlines, represents a sympathetic understanding of Locke’s discussion. The second half of the paper turns to consider a few of the ways in which interpreting Locke on primary and secondary qualities has proven more complicated. Here we take up what is sometimes called the Berkeleyan inte…Read more
  •  692
    Promiscuous Realism
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (2): 303-316. 1996.
    This paper is a critical discussion of John Dupré's recent defence of promiscuous realism in Part 1 of his The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. It also discusses some more general issues in the philosophy of biology and science. Dupré's chief strategy of argumentation appeals to debates within the philosophy of biology, all of which concern the nature of species. While the strategy is well motivated, I argue that Dupré's challenge to essentialist and unifi…Read more
  •  113
    Review of Kitcher (review)
    Human Nature Reviews 4 (1): 1-13. 2004.
    The philosophy of biology began to develop as a distinct field within the philosophy of science in the early 1970s, shortly before Philip Kitcher turned from mathematics and physics to biology in his thinking about general issues concerning the nature of science. Not only did the answers to traditional questions within the field seem problematic once one turned from the “hard sciences” to the softer biological sciences, but the questions themselves came to be viewed as less obviously the right o…Read more
  •  453
    Realization: Metaphysics, mind, and science
    Philosophy of Science 71 (5): 985-996. 2004.
    This paper surveys some recent work on realization in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science
  •  824
    Intentionality and phenomenology
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4): 413-431. 2003.
    This paper is a critique of some ideas about narrow content owing to Horgan and Tienson and Brian Loar.
  •  492
    Individualists claim that wide explanations in psychology are problematic. I argue that wide psychological explanations sometimes have greater explanatory power than individualistic explanations. The aspects of explanatory power I focus on are causal depth and theoretical appropriateness. Reflection on the depth and appropriateness of other wide explanations of behavior, such as evolutionary explanations, clarifies why wide psychological explanations sometimes have more causal depth and theoreti…Read more
  •  542
    Despite the fact that the history of eugenics in Canada is necessarily part of the larger history of eugenics, there is a special role for oral history to play in the telling of this story, a role that promises to shift us from the muddled middle of the story. Not only has the testimony of eugenics survivors already played perhaps the most important role in revealing much about the practice of eugenics in Canada, but the willingness and ability of survivors to share their own oral histories make…Read more
  •  434
    Some problems for alternative individualism
    Philosophy of Science 67 (4): 671-679. 2000.
    This paper points to some problems for the position that D.M. Walsh calls "alternative individualism," and argues that in defending this view Walsh has omitted an important part of what separates individualists and externalists in psychology. Walsh's example of Hox gene complexes is discussed in detail to show why some sort of externalism about scientific taxonomy more generally is a more plausible view than any extant version of individualism
  •  923
    When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds
    Philosophical Topics 35 (1-2): 189-215. 2007.
    Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has receiv…Read more
  •  9
    Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations (review)
    Philosophical Books 37 (1): 53-56. 1996.
    This is a short review of Jeff Poland's Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations.
  •  277
    Psychology
    Eugenics Archive. 2014.
    Genetics and the biological sciences are the two contemporary scientific fields most readily called to mind in thinking about science and eugenics. Yet the history of another discipline, psychology, is enmeshed more intricately with eugenics than are the histories of either genetics or even the biological sciences more generally. This is true of the history of eugenics in Canada. Moreover, continuities in the roles that psychology plays in how we think about sorts of people and their ability and…Read more
  •  338
    Material constitution and the many-many problem
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (2). 2008.
    This paper poses a problem of promiscuity for views that endorse material constitution as a metaphysic relation.
  •  3016
    Ugly Laws
    with Susan Schweik
    Eugenics Archives. 2015.
    So-called “ugly laws” were mostly municipal statutes in the United States that outlawed the appearance in public of people who were, in the words of one of these laws, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (Chicago City Code 1881). Although the moniker “ugly laws” was coined to refer collectively to such ordinances only in 1975 (Burgdorf and Burgdorf 1975), it has become the primary way to refer to such laws, which targeted the overl…Read more
  •  334
    Group-level cognition
    Philosophy of Science 68 (3). 2001.
    David Sloan Wilson has recently revived the idea of a group mind as an application of group selectionist thinking to cognition. Central to my discussion of this idea is the distinction between the claim that groups have a psychology and what I call the social manifestation thesis-a thesis about the psychology of individuals. Contemporary work on this topic has confused these two theses. My discussion also points to research questions and issues that Wilson's work raises, as well as their connect…Read more
  •  625
    What Computations (Still, Still) Can't Do: Jerry Fodor on Computation and Modularity
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (sup1): 407-425. 2004.
    Fodor's thinking on modularity has been influential throughout a range of the areas studying cognition, chiefly as a prod for positive work on modularity and domain-specificity. In _The Mind Doesn't Work That Way_, Fodor has developed the dark message of _The Modularity of Mind_ regarding the limits to modularity and computational analyses. This paper offers a critical assessment of Fodor's scepticism with an eye to highlighting some broader issues in play, including the nature of computation an…Read more
  •  221
    Against A Priori arguments for individualism
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1): 60-79. 1993.
    Argues against several influential a priori arguments for individualism in the philosophy of mind that were influential in the 1980s.
  •  300
    This paper argues that the metarepresentational systems we posses are wide or extended, rather than individualistic. There are two basic ideas. The first is that metarepresentation inherits its width from the mental representation of its objects. The second is that mental processing often operates on internal and external symbols, and this suggests that cognitive systems extend beyond the heads that house them.
  •  283
    The social, behavioral, and a good chunk of the biological sciences concern the nature of individual agency, where our paradigm for an individual is a human being. Theories of economic behavior, of mental function and dysfunction, and of ontogenetic development, for example, are theories of how such individuals act, and of what internal and external factors are determinative of that action. Such theories construe individuals in distinctive ways
  •  143
    The Biological Notion of Individual
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.
    Individuals are a prominent part of the biological world. Although biologists and philosophers of biology draw freely on the concept of an individual in articulating both widely accepted and more controversial claims, there has been little explicit work devoted to the biological notion of an individual itself. How should we think about biological individuals? What are the roles that biological individuals play in processes such as natural selection (are genes and groups also units of selection?)…Read more
  •  96
    Review of Laporte on natural kinds (review)
    Philosophy in Review 24 423-426. 2004.
    Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change is a refreshingly direct book that challenges a range of orthodox views in the philosophy of science (especially biology), the philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Amongst these are the views that species are individuals rather than natural kinds; that scientists discover the essences of natural kinds; that the causal theory of reference has commonly-ascribed implications for realism and analyticity; that there is an unacceptable form of incommensurability…Read more
  •  5669
    Eugenics: positive vs negative
    Eugenics Archives. 2014.
    The distinction between positive and negative eugenics is perhaps the best-known distinction that has been made between forms that eugenics takes. Roughly, positive eugenics refers to efforts aimed at increasing desirable traits, while negative eugenics refers to efforts aimed at decreasing undesirable traits. Still, it is easy to fall into confusion in drawing and deploying the distinction in particular contexts. Clarity here is important not only historically, but also for appeals to the disti…Read more
  •  964
    Individualism, causal powers, and explanation
    Philosophical Studies 68 (2): 103-39. 1992.
    This paper examines a recent, influential argument for individualism in psychology defended by Jerry Fodor and others, what I call the argument from causal powers. I argue that this argument equivocates on the crucial notion of "causal powers", and that this equivocation constitutes a deep problem for arguments of this type. Relational and individualistic taxonomies are incompatible, and it does not seem in general to be possible to factor the former into the latter. The distinction between powe…Read more
  •  1113
    While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory ‘‘goes beyond the individual’’ but often run tog…Read more