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887The automatic and the ballistic: Modularity beyond perceptual processesPhilosophical Psychology 28 (8): 1147-1156. 2015.Perceptual processes, in particular modular processes, have long been understood as being mandatory. But exactly what mandatoriness amounts to is left to intuition. This paper identifies a crucial ambiguity in the notion of mandatoriness. Discussions of mandatory processes have run together notions of automaticity and ballisticity. Teasing apart these notions creates an important tool for the modularist's toolbox. Different putatively modular processes appear to differ in their kinds of mandator…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
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1752Explaining the Abstract/Concrete Paradoxes in Moral Psychology: The NBAR HypothesisReview of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (3): 351-368. 2012.For some reason, participants hold agents more responsible for their actions when a situation is described concretely than when the situation is described abstractly. We present examples of this phenomenon, and survey some attempts to explain it. We divide these attempts into two classes: affective theories and cognitive theories. After criticizing both types of theories we advance our novel hypothesis: that people believe that whenever a norm is violated, someone is responsible for it. This bel…Read more
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6492Thinking is BelievingInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (1): 55-96. 2014.Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 55-96, February 2014
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1297Against aliefPhilosophical Studies 165 (1): 197-211. 2013.This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ f…Read more
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793Numerical ArchitectureTopics in Cognitive Science 5 (1): 367-386. 2013.The idea that there is a “Number Sense” (Dehaene, 1997) or “Core Knowledge” of number ensconced in a modular processing system (Carey, 2009) has gained popularity as the study of numerical cognition has matured. However, these claims are generally made with little, if any, detailed examination of which modular properties are instantiated in numerical processing. In this article, I aim to rectify this situation by detailing the modular properties on display in numerical cognitive processing. In t…Read more
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3586Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit BiasNoûs 50 (3): 629-658. 2015.The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |