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431IndividualismIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 256--287. 2002.An overview of individualism in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
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652Ten questions concerning extended cognitionPhilosophical Psychology 27 (1): 19-33. 2014.This paper considers ten questions that those puzzled by or skeptical of extended cognition have posed. Discussion of these questions ranges across substantive, methodological, and dialectical issues in the ongoing debate over extended cognition, such as whether the issue between proponents and opponents of extended cognition is merely semantic or a matter of convention; whether extended cognition should be treated in the same way as extended biology; and whether conscious mental states pose a s…Read more
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519Critical Notice (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (1): 117-132. 2006.In this initially daunting but ultimately enjoyable and informative book, Mohan Matthen argues that this tradition is mistaken about both the processes of perception or sensing and the relationship between sensation, perception, and cognition. Since this tradition is sufficiently alive and well in the contemporary literature to constitute something like the received view of perception and the role of sensation in it, Matthen’s challenge and the alternative view he proposes are potentially signif…Read more
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1113Cohesion, Gene flow, and the Nature of SpeciesJournal of Philosophy 107 (2): 59-77. 2010.A far-reaching and influential view in evolutionary biology claims that species are cohesive units held together by gene flow. Biologists have recognized empirical problems facing this view; after sharpening the expression of the view, we present novel conceptual problems for it. At the heart of these problems is a distinction between two importantly different concepts of cohesion, what we call integrative and response cohesion. Acknowledging the distinction problematizes both the explanandum…Read more
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388Persons, social agency, and constitutionSocial Philosophy and Policy 22 (2): 49-69. 2005.In her recent book Persons and Bodies1, Lynne Rudder Baker has defended what she calls the constitution view of persons. On this view, persons are constituted by their bodies, where “constitution” is a ubiquitous, general metaphysical relation distinct from more familiar relations, such as identity and part-whole composition
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2510Kinship Past, Kinship Present: Bio-Essentialism in the Study of KinshipAmerican Anthropologist 118 (3). 2016.In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider’s influential critique that concluded that kinship was “a non-subject” (1972:51). Schneider’s critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialis…Read more
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Individualism, Psychological Explanation, and Mental RepresentationDissertation, Cornell University. 1992.Individualism in psychology is the view that mental states must be individuated so as to be intrinsic to particular individuals. This view has been thought to impose an intuitive and plausible constraint on explanation in psychology. The dissertation is a sustained examination of individualism, especially with respect to its role in psychological explanation. My particular interest is in showing that individualism is not a constraint on psychology which follows from either psychology's scientifi…Read more
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722The Sound of Music: Externalist StyleAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 139-154. 2016.Philosophical exploration of individualism and externalism in the cognitive sciences most recently has been focused on general evaluations of these two views (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2008, Wilson 2004, Clark 2008). Here we return to broaden an earlier phase of the debate between individualists and externalists about cognition, one that considered in detail particular theories, such as those in developmental psychology (Patterson 1991) and the computational theory of vision (Burge 1986, Sega…Read more
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384Extended VisionIn Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Michael Madary & Finn Spicer (eds.), Perception, Action and Consciousness, Oxford University Press.. 2010.Vision constitutes an interesting domain, or range of domains, for debate over the extended mind thesis, the idea that minds physically extend beyond the boundaries of the body. In part this is because vision and visual experience more particularly are sometimes presented as a kind of line in the sand for what we might call externalist creep about the mind: once all reasonable concessions have been made to externalists about the mind, visual experience marks a line beyond which lies a safe have…Read more
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573Wide computationalismMind 103 (411): 351-72. 1994.The computational argument for individualism, which moves from computationalism to individualism about the mind, is problematic, not because computationalism is false, but because computational psychology is, at least sometimes, wide. The paper provides an early, or perhaps predecessor, version of the thesis of extended cognition.
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185The individual in biology and psychologyIn V. Harcastle (ed.), Where Biology Meets Psychology, . pp. 355--374. 1999.Individual organisms are obvious enough kinds of things to have been taken for granted as the entities that have many commonly attributed biological and psychological properties, both in common sense and in science. The sorts of morphological properties used by the folk to categorize individual animals and plants into common sense kinds (that's a dog; that's a rose), as well as the properties that feature as parts of phenotypes, are properties of individual organisms. And psychological propertie…Read more
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86Review of Robert D. Rupert, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (3). 2010.
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1097Thinking about relations: Strathern, Sahlins, and Locke on anthropological knowledgeAnthropological Theory 4 (16): 327-349. 2016.John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke’s work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins’ about cultural relativism,…Read more
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333Pluralism, entwinement, and the levels of selectionPhilosophy of Science 70 (3): 531-552. 2003.This paper distinguishes and critiques several forms of pluralism about the levels of selection, and introduces a novel way of thinking about the biological properties and processes typically conceptualized in terms of distinct levels. In particular, "levels" should be thought of as being entwined or fused. Since the pluralism discussed is held by divergent theorists, the argument has implications for many positions in the debate over the units of selection. And since the key points on which the…Read more
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1766Extended Mind and IdentityIn Jens Clausen & Neil Levy (eds.), Handbook of Neuroethics, Springer. pp. 423-439. 2014.Dominant views of personal identity in philosophy take some kind of psychological continuity or connectedness over time to be criterial for the identity of a person over time. Such views assign psychological states, particularly those necessary for narrative memory of some kind, special importance in thinking about the nature of persons. The extended mind thesis, which has generated much recent discussion in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, holds that a person’s psychological stat…Read more
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777Intentionality and phenomenologyPacific 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.
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404Causal depth, theoretical appropriateness, and individualism in psychologyPhilosophy of Science 61 (1): 55-75. 1994.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
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516The Role of Oral History in Surviving a Eugenic PastIn Steven C. High (ed.), Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, Ubc Press. pp. 119-138. 2015.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
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407Some problems for alternative individualismPhilosophy 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
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885When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural KindsPhilosophical 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
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9Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations (review)Philosophical Books 37 (1): 53-56. 1996.This is a short review of Jeff Poland's Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations.
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250PsychologyEugenics 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
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320Material constitution and the many-many problemCanadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (2). 2008.This paper poses a problem of promiscuity for views that endorse material constitution as a metaphysic relation.
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2759Ugly LawsEugenics 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
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324Group-level cognitionPhilosophy 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
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1291What Computations (Still, Still) Can't Do: Jerry Fodor on Computation and ModularityCanadian 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
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273The Mind Beyond ItselfIn Dan Sperber (ed.), Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Oxford University Press. pp. 31-52. 2000.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.
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208Against A Priori arguments for individualismPacific 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.
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