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880The psychological representation of modalityMind and Language 33 (1): 65-94. 2018.A series of recent studies have explored the impact of people's judgments regarding physical law, morality, and probability. Surprisingly, such studies indicate that these three apparently unrelated types of judgments often have precisely the same impact. We argue that these findings provide evidence for a more general hypothesis about the kind of cognition people use to think about possibilities. Specifically, we suggest that this aspect of people's cognition is best understood using an idea de…Read more
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243The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (and Others Like It)Emotion Review 3 (3): 929-937. 2011.Consider people’s ordinary concept of belief. This concept seems to pick out a particular psychological state. Indeed, one natural view would be that the concept of belief works much like the concepts one finds in cognitive science – not quite as rigorous or precise, perhaps, but still the same basic type of notion. But now suppose we turn to other concepts that people ordinarily use to understand the mind. Suppose we consider the concept happiness. Or the concept love. How are these concepts to…Read more
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2387True happiness: The role of morality in the folk concept of happinessJournal of Experimental Psychology: General 146 (2): 165-181. 2017.Recent scientific research has settled on a purely descriptive definition of happiness that is focused solely on agents’ psychological states (high positive affect, low negative affect, high life satisfaction). In contrast to this understanding, recent research has suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness is also sensitive to the moral value of agents’ lives. Five studies systematically investigate and explain the impact of morality on ordinary assessments of happiness. Study 1 demonstra…Read more
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32Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3): 727-729. 2007.
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1051An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.
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701The Average Isn’t Normal: The History and Cognitive Science of an Everyday Scientific PracticeIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3, Oxford University Press. 2023.Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the average, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science and in the history of science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Cognitive science research on the ways people ordinarily make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical notio…Read more
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162Experimental philosophy and folk concepts: Methodological considerationsJournal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 331-342. 2006.Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be possible to provide mor…Read more
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208Experimental PhilosophyAnnual Review of Psychology 63 (1): 81-99. 2012.Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally rela…Read more
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99The Ordinary Concept of ValuingPhilosophical Issues 19 (1): 131-147. 2009.This paper relates an empirical study demonstrating asymmetry in the concept of valuing.
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184The ordinary concept of valuingIn Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Metaethics, Wiley Periodicals. pp. 131-147. 2009.The concept of valuing plays an important role in the way we think about people’s attitudes toward the things they care about most. We invoke this concept in sentences like: I value your friendship. We need to find a leader who truly values political equality. To live a good life, one must always return to the things one values most. Yet there also seem to be cases in which a person has a strong desire for a particular object but in which we would not say that he or she ‘values’ this object. Thu…Read more
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278The folk concepts of intention and intentional action: A cross-cultural studyJournal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 113-132. 2006.Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of _intention_ and their use of the concept of _acting intentionally_. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their beliefs about whether the behavior is morally…Read more
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298Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgmentsCognition 108 (2): 353-380. 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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2731Cause and NormJournal of Philosophy 106 (11): 587-612. 2009.Much of the philosophical literature on causation has focused on the concept of actual causation, sometimes called token causation. In particular, it is this notion of actual causation that many philosophical theories of causation have attempted to capture.2 In this paper, we address the question: what purpose does this concept serve? As we shall see in the next section, one does not need this concept for purposes of prediction or rational deliberation. What then could the purpose be? We will ar…Read more
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24Purposes in Law and in Life: An Experimental Investigation of Purpose AttributionCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 36 (1): 1-36. 2023.There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both case…Read more
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2109Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?Mind and Language 25 (3): 346-358. 2010.Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cros…Read more
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318Experimental PhilosophyOxford Bibliographies Online (1): 81-92. 2006.Bibliography of works in experimental philosophy.
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197Syntax and intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mindCognition 133 (1). 2014.Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias).…Read more
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The case for Nietzschean moral psychologyIn Brian Leiter & Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and morality, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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54Kindhood and Essentialism: Evidence from LanguageIn Marjorie Rhodes (ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, . 2020.A large body of existing research suggests that people think very differently about categories that are seen as kinds (e.g., women) and categories that are not seen as kinds (e.g., people hanging out in the park right now). Drawing on work in linguistics, we suggest that people represent these two sorts of categories using fundamentally different representational formats. Categories that are not seen as kinds are simply represented as collections of individuals. By contrast, when it comes to kin…Read more
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329Experimental Philosophy (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.The present volume provides an introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy, bringing together some of the most influential articles in ...
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Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol 5. (edited book)Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
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543An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgmentCognition 228 (C): 105183. 2022.Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judgments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people’s judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another fact…Read more
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29Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2024.The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field. It features papers by philosophers, papers by psychologists, and papers co-authored by people in both disciplines. The series heralds the emergence of a truly interdisciplinary field in which people from different disciplines are working tog…Read more
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603Difference and Robustness in the Patterns of Philosophical Intuition Across Demographic GroupsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 435-455. 2023.In a recent paper, I argued that philosophical intuitions are surprisingly robust both across demographic groups and across development. Machery and Stich reply by reviewing a series of studies that do show significant differences in philosophical intuition between different demographic groups. This is a helpful point, which gets at precisely the issues that are most relevant here. However, even when one looks at those very studies, one finds truly surprising robustness. In other words, despite …Read more
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390Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the _average_, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Research on the cognitive processes involved in people’s ordinary efforts to make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical notion of the…Read more
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508Changing use of formal methods in philosophy: late 2000s vs. late 2010sSynthese 199 (5-6): 14555-14576. 2021.Traditionally, logic has been the dominant formal method within philosophy. Are logical methods still dominant today, or have the types of formal methods used in philosophy changed in recent times? To address this question, we coded a sample of philosophy papers from the late 2000s and from the late 2010s for the formal methods they used. The results indicate that the proportion of papers using logical methods remained more or less constant over that time period but the proportion of papers usin…Read more
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1251Personal Identity and Dual Character ConceptsIn Kevin Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self, Bloomsbury. 2022.
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383Teleology beyond explanationMind and Language 38 (1): 20-41. 2021.People often think of objects teleologically. For instance, we might understand a hammer in terms of its purpose of driving in nails. But how should we understand teleological thinking in the first place? This paper separates mere teleology (simply ascribing a telos) and teleological explanation (thinking something is explained by its telos) by examining cases where an object was designed for one purpose but is now widely used for a different purpose. Across four experiments, we show that teleol…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |