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13Intentional action in folk psychologyIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Blackwell. 2010.
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62Are intentionality judgments fundamentally moralIn Robyn Langdon & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning, Psychology Press. 2012.
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130At the Heart of Morality Lies Folk PsychologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (5): 449-466. 2009.Moral judgments about an agent's behavior are enmeshed with inferences about the agent's mind. Folk psychology—the system that enables such inferences—therefore lies at the heart of moral judgment. We examine three related folk-psychological concepts that together shape people's judgments of blame: intentionality, choice, and free will. We discuss people's understanding and use of these concepts, address recent findings that challenge the autonomous role of these concepts in moral judgment, and …Read more
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268From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free WillReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 211-224. 2010.People’s concept of free will is often assumed to be incompatible with the deterministic, scientific model of the universe. Indeed, many scholars treat the folk concept of free will as assuming a special form of nondeterministic causation, possibly the notion of uncaused causes. However, little work to date has directly probed individuals’ beliefs about what it means to have free will. The present studies sought to reconstruct this folk concept of free will by asking people to define the concept…Read more
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60Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Gap Between Self and Others (edited book)Guilford. 2005.Leading scholars from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy present theories and findings on understanding how individuals infer such complex mental states ...
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294Folk theory of mind: Conceptual foundations of social cognitionIn R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (eds.), [Book Chapter], Oxford University Press. pp. 225-255. 2005.The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particula…Read more
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121The folk concept of intentionalityJournal of Experimental Social Psychology 33 101-121. 1997.When perceiving, explaining, or criticizing human behavior, people distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions. To do so, they rely on a shared folk concept of intentionality. In contrast to past speculative models, this article provides an empirically-based model of this concept. Study 1 demonstrates that people agree substantially in their judgments of intentionality, suggesting a shared underlying concept. Study 2 reveals that when asked to directly define the term intentional, …Read more
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43Intentionality, Morality, and Their Relationship in Human JudgmentJournal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 61-86. 2006.This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality a ff ect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affected than praise. Second, the concept of intentionality is constitutive of many legal judgments (e.g., o…Read more
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183Integrating robot ethics and machine morality: the study and design of moral competence in robotsEthics and Information Technology 18 (4): 243-256. 2016.Robot ethics encompasses ethical questions about how humans should design, deploy, and treat robots; machine morality encompasses questions about what moral capacities a robot should have and how these capacities could be computationally implemented. Publications on both of these topics have doubled twice in the past 10 years but have often remained separate from one another. In an attempt to better integrate the two, I offer a framework for what a morally competent robot would look like and dis…Read more
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Brown UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |