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490Prediction and Topological Models in NeuroscienceIn Fabrizio Calzavarini & Marco Viola (eds.), Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience, Springer. 2020.In the last two decades, philosophy of neuroscience has predominantly focused on explanation. Indeed, it has been argued that mechanistic models are the standards of explanatory success in neuroscience over, among other things, topological models. However, explanatory power is only one virtue of a scientific model. Another is its predictive power. Unfortunately, the notion of prediction has received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of neuroscience, in part because predictions see…Read more
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751The Explanatory Indispensability of Memory TracesThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 23-47. 2020.During the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophers of memory opposed the postulation of memory traces based on the claim that a satisfactory account of remembering need not include references to causal processes involved in recollection. However, in 1966, an influential paper by Martin and Deutscher showed that causal claims are indeed necessary for a proper account of remembering. This, however, did not settle the issue, as in 1977 Malcolm argued that even if one were to buy Mart…Read more
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361Norms and the meaning of omissive enabling conditionsProceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 41. 2019.People often reason about omissions. One line of research shows that people can distinguish between the semantics of omissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: for instance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’t cause you) to graduate. Another line of work shows that people rely on the normative status of omissive events in inferring their causal role: if the outcome came about because the omission violated some norm, reasoners are more likely to select that omission as a ca…Read more
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23Two challenges for a dual system approach to temporal cognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Hoerl & McCormack propose a two-system account of temporal cognition. We suggest that, following other classic proposals where cognitive systems are putatively independent, H&M's two-system hypothesis should, at a minimum, involve a difference in the nature of the representations upon which each system operates, and a difference in the computations they carry out. In this comment we offer two challenges aimed at showing that H&M's proposal does not meet the minimal requirements and.
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124A 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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40Editor’s introductionPhilosophical Psychology 32 (5): 585-587. 2019.Volume 32, Issue 5, July 2019, Page 585-588.
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745Responsibility for forgettingPhilosophical Studies 176 (5): 1177-1201. 2019.In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward p…Read more
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831Know-how, intellectualism, and memory systemsPhilosophical Psychology 32 (5): 720-759. 2019.ABSTRACTA longstanding tradition in philosophy distinguishes between knowthatand know-how. This traditional “anti-intellectualist” view is soentrenched in folk psychology that it is often invoked in supportof an allegedly equivalent distinction between explicit and implicitmemory, derived from the so-called “standard model of memory.”In the last two decades, the received philosophical view has beenchallenged by an “intellectualist” view of know-how. Surprisingly, defenders of the anti-intellectu…Read more
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63Network Modularity as a Foundation for Neural ReusePhilosophy of Science 86 (1): 23-46. 2019.The neural reuse framework developed primarily by Michael Anderson proposes that brain regions are involved in multiple and diverse cognitive tasks and that brain regions flexibly and dynamically interact in different combinations to carry out cognitive functioning. We argue that the evidence cited by Anderson and others falls short of supporting the fundamental principles of neural reuse. We map out this problem and provide solutions by drawing on recent advances in network neuroscience, and we…Read more
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1477Resistance to Position Change, Motivated Reasoning, and PolarizationPolitical Behavior. forthcoming.People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problem…Read more
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658Remembering moral and immoral actions in constructing the selfMemory and Cognition. forthcoming.Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we investigated the ex…Read more
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1265I’m not the person I used to be: The self and autobiographical memories of immoral actionsJournal of Experimental Psychology. General 146 (6): 884-895. 2017.People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative th…Read more
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41How thinking about what could have been affects how we feel about what wasCognition and Emotion 33 (4): 646-659. 2019.ABSTRACTEpisodic counterfactual thoughts and autobiographical memories involve the reactivation and recombination of episodic memory components into mental simulations. Upon reactivation, memories become labile and prone to modification. Thus, reactivating AM in the context of mentally generating CFT may provide an opportunity for editing processes to modify the content of the original memory. To examine this idea, this paper reports the results of two studies that investigated the effect of rea…Read more
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17The problem of consciousness for philosophy of mind and of psychiatryIdeas Y Valores 66 (S3): 15-45. 2017.RESUMEN Muchos psiquiatras se encuentran constantemente con pacientes cuyos síntomas incluyen trastornos o alteraciones de la conciencia. Infortunadamente, el significado del término conciencia es poco claro. Este artículo hace un repaso sistemático de varios significados atribuidos a dicho término, así como de diversos problemas filosóficos asociados. Asimismo, reconstruye varias teorías filosóficas y científicas de la conciencia, identificando sus ventajas y desventajas. Al final, ofrece algun…Read more
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Capas limítrofes Y dominios de evidencia en ciencia cogntivaUniversitas Philosophica 46 53-77. 2006.
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35Emotional intensity in episodic autobiographical memory and counterfactual thinkingConsciousness and Cognition 48 283-291. 2017.
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102Cognitive systems and the changing brainPhilosophical Explorations 20 (2): 224-241. 2017.The notion of cognitive system is widely used in explanations in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Traditional approaches define cognitive systems in an agent-relative way, that is, via top-down functional decomposition that assumes a cognitive agent as starting point. The extended cognition movement challenged that approach by questioning the primacy of the notion of cognitive agent. In response, [Adams, F., and K. Aizawa. 2001. The Bounds of Cognition. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.] sugges…Read more
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23Correction to: The Effect of What We Think may Happen on our Judgments of ResponsibilityReview of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2): 447-447. 2018.On pages 263, 265, and 266, incorrect degrees of freedom and t values were reported. The statistical conclusions are not affected by these reporting errors, but the corrected values are shown below.
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52El problema de la conciencia para la filosofía de la mente y de la psiquiatríaIdeas Y Valores 66 (S3): 15-45. 2017.Muchos psiquiatras se encuentran constantemente con pacientes cuyos síntomas incluyen trastornos o alteraciones de la conciencia. Infortunadamente, el significado del término conciencia es poco claro. Este artículo hace un repaso sistemático de varios significados atribuidos a dicho término, así como de diversos problemas filosóficos asociados. Asimismo, reconstruye varias teorías filosóficas y científicas de la conciencia, identificando sus ventajas y desventajas. Al final, ofrece algunas suger…Read more
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24Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging changes during relational retrieval in normal aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairmentJournal of the International Neuropsychological Society 18 886-897. 2012.
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29Prinz, Jesse J. Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 358 p.(2002)[2004] (review)Ideas Y Valores 56 (133): 163-168. 2007.
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142Attention and consciousnessWiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 1 (1): 51-59. 2010.For the past three decades there has been a substantial amount of scientific evidence supporting the view that attention is necessary and sufficient for perceptual representations to become conscious (i.e., for there to be something that it is like to experience a representational perceptual state). This view, however, has been recently questioned on the basis of some alleged counterevidence. In this paper we survey some of the most important recent findings. In doing so, we have two primary goa…Read more
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147The Effect of What We Think may Happen on our Judgments of ResponsibilityReview of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2): 259-269. 2013.Recent evidence suggests that if a deterministic description of the events leading up to a morally questionable action is couched in mechanistic, reductionistic, concrete and/or emotionally salient terms, people are more inclined toward compatibilism than when those descriptions use non-mechanistic, non-reductionistic, abstract and/or emotionally neutral terms. To explain these results, it has been suggested that descriptions of the first kind are processed by a concrete cognitive system, while …Read more
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412Is memory for remembering? Recollection as a form of episodic hypothetical thinkingSynthese 191 (2): 155-185. 2014.Misremembering is a systematic and ordinary occurrence in our daily lives. Since it is commonly assumed that the function of memory is to remember the past, misremembering is typically thought to happen because our memory system malfunctions. In this paper I argue that not all cases of misremembering are due to failures in our memory system. In particular, I argue that many ordinary cases of misremembering should not be seen as instances of memory’s malfunction, but rather as the normal result o…Read more
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145Content and Consciousness Revisited: With Replies by Daniel Dennett (edited book)Springer. 2015.What are the grounds for the distinction between the mental and the physical? What is it the relation between ascribing mental states to an organism and understanding its behavior? Are animals and complex systems vehicles of inner evolutionary environments? Is there a difference between personal and sub-personal level processes in the brain? Answers to these and other questions were developed in Daniel Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness (1969), where he sketched a unified theoretica…Read more
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187Responsibility and the brain sciencesEthical Theory and Moral Practice 12 (5): 511-524. 2008.Some theorists think that the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings of our behaviors, the less likely we will be to hold people responsible for their actions. This intuition has driven some to suspect that as neuroscience gains insight into the neurological causes of our actions, people will cease to view others as morally responsible for their actions, thus creating a troubling quandary for our legal system. This paper provides empirical evidence against such intuitions. Particular…Read more
Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Memory and Cognitive Science |