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26Philosophical Implications of Inflationary CosmologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1): 47-67. 2006.Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a non-zero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsd…Read more
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121A counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgmentCognition 190 (C): 157-164. 2019.People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b…Read more
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75What comes to mind?Cognition 194 (C): 104057. 2020.When solving problems, like making predictions or choices, people often “sample” possibilities into mind. Here, we consider whether there is structure to the kinds of thoughts people sample by default—that is, without an explicit goal. Across three experiments we found that what comes to mind by default are samples from a probability distribution that combines what people think is likely and what they think is good. Experiment 1 found that the first quantities that come to mind for everyday beha…Read more
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731Philosophical Intuitions Are Surprisingly Robust Across Demographic DifferencesEpistemology and Philosophy of Science 56 (2): 29-36. 2019.Within the existing metaphilosophical literature on experimental philosophy, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the claim that there are large differences in philosophical intuitions between people of different demographic groups. Some philosophers argue that this claim has important metaphilosophical implications; others argue that it does not. However, the actual empirical work within experimental philosophy seems to point to a very different sort of metaphilosophical question. Spec…Read more
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138Water is and is not H 2 OMind and Language 35 (2): 183-208. 2019.The Twin Earth thought experiment invites us to consider a liquid that has all of the superficial properties associated with water (clear, potable, etc.) but has entirely different deeper causal properties (composed of “XYZ” rather than of H2O). Debates about natural kind concepts have sought to accommodate an apparent fact about ordinary people's judgments: Intuitively, the Twin Earth liquid is not water. We present results showing that people do not have this intuition. Instead, people tend to…Read more
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The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk PsychologyIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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1409Dual Character Art ConceptsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1): 102-128. 2020.Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that is associated with ART can also be found in a broa…Read more
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301Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology (1): 1-36. 2018.Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi stud…Read more
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990Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect: 'Theory of mind' and moral judgmentPsychological Science 17 421-427. 2006.The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where ‘theory of mind’ and moral judgment meet. Preschool children’s judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side-effect is brought about 'on purpose' when the side-effect itself is morally bad but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of ‘on-purpose’ (as opposed to purpose influencing moral j…Read more
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1246Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior: New answers to an old questionJournal of Personality and Social Psychology 9 (4): 491-514. 2007.A long series of studies in social psychology have shown that the explanations people give for their own behaviors are fundamentally different from the explanations they give for the behaviors of others. Still, a great deal of uncertainty remains about precisely what sorts of differences one finds here. We offer a new approach to addressing the problem. Specifically, we distinguish between two levels of representation ─ the level of linguistic structure (which consists of the actual series of wo…Read more
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505Folk moral relativismIn Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 169-192. 2013.It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary folk understanding of morality involves a rejection of moral relativism and a belief in objective moral truths. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist intuitions when confronted with questions about individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions as they were confronted with questions about individuals from increasingly different cultures or …Read more
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1870Moral Disagreement and Moral SemanticsNoûs 109-143. 2016.When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences, it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences. This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain th…Read more
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57Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgmentsCognition 108 (1): 281-289. 2008.An extensive body of research suggests that the distinction between doing and allowing plays a critical role in shaping moral appraisals. Here, we report evidence from a pair of experiments suggesting that the converse is also true: moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Specifically, morally bad behavior is more likely to be construed as actively ‘doing’ than as passively ‘allowing’. This finding adds to a growing list of folk concepts influenced by moral appraisal, including causati…Read more
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577On the instrumental value of hypothetical and counterfactual thought.Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2018.People often engage in “offline simulation”, considering what would happen if they performed certain actions in the future, or had performed different actions in the past. Prior research shows that these simulations are biased towards actions a person considers to be good—i.e., likely to pay off. We ask whether, and why, this bias might be adaptive. Through computational experiments we compare five agents who differ only in the way they engage in offline simulation, across a variety of different…Read more
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1330Water is and is not H 2 OMind and Language 35 (2): 183-208. 2019.The Twin Earth thought experiment invites us to consider a liquid that has all of the superficial properties associated with water (clear, potable, etc.) but has entirely different deeper causal properties (composed of “XYZ” rather than of H2O). Although this thought experiment was originally introduced to illuminate questions in the theory of reference, it has also played a crucial role in empirically informed debates within the philosophy of psychology about people’s ordinary natural kind conc…Read more
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479Causal supersedingCognition 137 (C): 196-209. 2015.When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this paper, we suggest that norm violations also affect the causality attributed to other agents, a phenomenon we refer to as "causal superseding." We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 provide an initial demonstration of the causal superseding effect and distinguish it from previously studied effects. Experiment 3 shows t…Read more
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966Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent CulturesCognitive Science 42 (S1): 134-160. 2018.People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question…Read more
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894The Influence of Social Interaction on Intuitions of Objectivity and SubjectivityCognitive Science 41 (4): 1119-1134. 2017.We present experimental evidence that people's modes of social interaction influence their construal of truth. Participants who engaged in cooperative interactions were less inclined to agree that there was an objective truth about that topic than were those who engaged in a competitive interaction. Follow-up experiments ruled out alternative explanations and indicated that the changes in objectivity are explained by argumentative mindsets: When people are in cooperative arguments, they see the …Read more
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2265Normality: Part Descriptive, part prescriptiveCognition 167 (C): 25-37. 2017.People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of n…Read more
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671Differences in the Evaluation of Generic Statements About Human and Non‐Human CategoriesCognitive Science 41 (7): 1934-1957. 2017.Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias di…Read more
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205The essence of essentialismMind and Language 34 (5): 585-605. 2019.Over the past several decades, psychological essentialism has been an important topic of study, incorporating research from multiple areas of psychology, philosophy and linguistics. At its most basic level, essentialism is the tendency to represent certain concepts in terms of a deeper, unobservable property that is responsible for category membership. Originally, this concept was used to understand people’s reasoning about natural kind concepts, such as TIGER and WATER, but more recently, resea…Read more
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503Experimental philosophyPhilosophy Compass 2 (1). 2006.Claims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science – systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it is now generally agreed that experimental philoso…Read more
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1039Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral JudgmentCognitive Science 39 (1): 96-125. 2015.Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these…Read more
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85Acting intentionally and acting for a reasonJournal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 27 (1): 119-122. 2007.In earlier work, I relied on a commonly-held view about the relationship between the concept of acting intentionally and the concept of performing a behavior in order to achieve a goal. Eric Wiland responds that it was actually a mistake to rely on this view and that the relationship between these concepts is far more complex than was previously thought. I now think that Wiland may be right to reject my earlier approach, and I therefore provide additional empirical support for his basic claim. 2…Read more
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257The good, the bad and the blameworthy: Understanding the role of evaluative reasoning in folk psychologyJournal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2): 252-258. 2004.People ordinarily make sense of their own behavior and that of others by invoking concepts like belief, desire, and intention. Philosophers refer to this network of concepts and related principles as 'folk psychology.' The prevailing view of folk psychology among philosophers of mind and psychologists is that it is a proto-scientific theory whose function is to explain and predict behavior
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414Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1): 47-67. 2006.Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a non-zero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsd…Read more
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |