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83The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Developed Dynamic Reference WorkMetaphilosophy 33 (1‐2): 210-228. 2003.The present information explosion on the World Wide Web poses a problem for the general public and the members of an academic discipline alike, of how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic. At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), we have since 1995 been developing and implementing the concept of a dynamic reference work (DRW) to provide a solution to these problems, while maintaining free access for readers. A DRW is much mor…Read more
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71Conditioned anti-anthropomorphismComparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews 2 147-150. 2007.How should scientists react to anthropomorphism (defined for the purposes of this paper as the attribution of mental states or properties to nonhuman animals)? Many thoughtful scientists have attempted to accommodate some measure of anthropomorphism in their approaches to animal behavior. But Wynne will have none of it. We reject his argument against anthropomorphism and argue that he does not pay sufficient attention to the historical facts or to the details of alternative approaches.
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69Ethics, Law, and the Science of Fish WelfareBetween the Species 16 (1): 7. 2013.Fish farming is one of the fastest growing sectors of agriculture, attracting considerable attention to the question of whether existing farming regulations and animal welfare laws are adequate to deal with the expanding role of fish in feeding humans. The role of fish as model organisms in scientific research is also expanding -- a majority of research biology departments now keep zebrafish for the purposes of genome biology, and they are used widely used for basic neuroscience research. Howeve…Read more
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68Methodological questions beggedBehavior and Philosophy 39. 2011.I argue in opposition to Sam Rakover that the current lack of fully adequate theories of the subjective and qualitative aspects of mind does not justify the adoption of what he calls “methodological dualism” (Rakover, this issue). Scientific understanding of consciousness requires the continuation of attempts to explain it in terms of the neural mechanisms that support it. It would be premature to adopt a methodological stance that could foreclose on the possibility of more reductionistic approa…Read more
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67Cognitive ethology: Slayers, skeptics, and proponentsIn R. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson & H. L. Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, Suny Press. pp. 313--334. 1997.
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63The evolution of rational demonsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 742-742. 2000.If fast and frugal heuristics are as good as they seem to be, who needs logic and probability theory? Fast and frugal heuristics depend for their success on reliable structure in the environment. In passive environments, there is relatively little change in structure as a consequence of individual choices. But in social interactions with competing agents, the environment may be structured by agents capable of exploiting logical and probabilistic weaknesses in competitors' heuristics. Aspirations…Read more
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62How to reason without words: inference as categorizationCognitive Processing 10 77-88. 2009.The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree.Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Her…Read more
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51Social play is more than a Pavlovian rompBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2): 250-251. 2000.Some aspects of play may be explained by Pavlovian learning processes, but others are not so easily handled. Especially when there is a chance that specific actions can be misinterpreted; animals alter their behavior to reduce the likelihood that this will occur. The flexibility and fine-tuning of play make it an ideal candidate for comparative and evolutionary cognitive studies.
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47Working the crowd: Design principles and early lessons from the social-semantic webProceedings of Workshop on Web 3.0: Merging Semantic Web and Social Web 2009 (SW)^2 Turin, Italy, June 29, 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. 2009.The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project is presented as one of the first social-semantic web endeavors which aims to bootstrap feedback from users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. Our approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming approaches to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. We describe the basic principles and initial experimental results of our sy…Read more
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46Temporal binding: digging into animal minds through time perceptionSynthese 200 (1): 1-24. 2022.Temporal binding is the phenomenon in which events related as cause and effect are perceived by humans to be closer in time than they actually are). Despite the fact that temporal binding experiments with humans have relied on verbal instructions, we argue that they are adaptable to nonhuman animals, and that a finding of temporal binding from such experiments would provide evidence of causal reasoning that cannot be reduced to associative learning. Our argument depends on describing and theoret…Read more
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46Does evidence from ethology support bicoded cognitive maps?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (5): 570-571. 2013.The presumption that navigation requires a cognitive map leads to its conception as an abstract computational problem. Instead of loading the question in favor of an inquiry into the metric structure and evolutionary origin of cognitive maps, the task should first be to establish that a map-like representation actually is operative in real animals navigating real environments
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45Communication and Cognition: Is Information the Connection?PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992 81-91. 1992.Donald Griffin has suggested that cognitive ethologists can use communication between non-human animals as a "window" into animal minds. Underlying this metaphor seems to be a conception of cognition as information processing and communication as information transfer from signaller to receiver. We examine various analyses of information and discuss how these analyses affect an ongoing debate among ethologists about whether the communicative signals of some animals should be interpreted as refere…Read more
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44Conceptual discontinuity involves recycling old processes in new domainsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 136-137. 2011.
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43Why Eshkol-Wachman behavioral notation is not enoughBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 266-267. 1992.
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41Comparative cognitive studies, not folk phylogeny, pleaseBehavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (1): 122-123. 1996.Barresi & Moore (B&M) provide a useful tool for the comparative study of social cognition that could, however, be improved by more subtle analysis of first person information about intentional relations. Knowledge of misrepresentation also needs to be better handled within the theory. I urge skepticism about B&M's sweeping phylogenetic claims.
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39The Case for Animal Emotions: Modeling Neuropsychiatric DisordersIn John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and neuroscience, Oxford University Press. pp. 522--536. 2009.
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37Animal ConsciousnessIn Susan Schneider & Max Velmans (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley. 2017.This article surveys philosophical and scientific issues arising from questions about animal consciousness. These questions include: which animals have consciousness and what (if anything) that consciousness might be like. Just what sort(s) of science can bear on these questions is a live issue, but investigations of the behavior and neurophysiology of a wide taxonomic range of animals, as well as the phylogenetic relationships among taxa are relevant. Such questions are also deeply philosophica…Read more
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30Language-of-thought hypothesis: Wrong, but sometimes useful?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Quilty-Dunn et al. maintain that language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) is the best game in town. We counter that LoTH is merely one source of models – always wrong, sometimes useful. Their reasons for liking LoTH are compatible with the view that LoTH provides a sometimes pragmatically useful level of abstraction over processes and mechanisms that fail to fully live up to LoT requirements.
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27Cross-Cutting Categorization Schemes in the Digital HumanitiesIsis 104 (3): 573-583. 2013.Digital access to large amounts of scholarly text presents both challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. Meeting these challenges depends on having high-quality representations of the contents of digital resources suitable for both machines and humans to use. Different ways of categorizing these contents are appropriate for different purposes, leading to the further problem of relating the contents of different categorization schemes to each other. This essay discusses the…Read more
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25Out of the Sludge: How Vertebrates Came to Have Subjective Experience (review)BioScience 67 1004-1007. 2017.
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20Letters to the EditorProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 75 (2). 2001.
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16Hormonal Correlates of Exploratory and Play-Soliciting Behavior in Domestic DogsFrontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.
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16Static-Dynamic Hybridity in Dynamical Models of CognitionPhilosophy of Science 89 (2): 283-301. 2022.Dynamical models of cognition have played a central role in recent cognitive science. In this paper, we consider a common strategy by which dynamical models describe their target systems neither as purely static nor as purely dynamic, but rather using a hybrid approach. This hybridity reveals how dynamical models involve representational choices that are important for understanding the relationship between dynamical and non-dynamical representations of a system.
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16Nature’s Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology (edited book)The MIT Press. 1997.This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.
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16Logic primerMIT Press. 2022.Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.
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10Actions and objects: Unequal partners in the evolution of communicationIn Garrison W. Cottrell (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 18--52. 1996.
UCLA
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |
PhilPapers Editorships
Animal Minds |
Animal Communication |
Animal Minds, Misc |