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263Analytic Functionalism and Mental State AttributionPhilosophical Topics 40 (2): 129-154. 2012.We argue that the causal account offered by analytic functionalism provides the best account of the folk psychological theory of mind, and that people ordinarily define mental states relative to the causal roles these states occupy in relation to environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states. We present new empirical evidence, as well as review several key studies on mental state ascription to diverse types of entities such as robots, cyborgs, corporations and God, and …Read more
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325Non-Traditional Factors in Judgments about KnowledgePhilosophy Compass 7 (4): 278-289. 2012.One recent trend in contemporary epistemology is to study the way in which the concept of knowledge is actually applied in everyday settings. This approach has inspired an exciting new spirit of collaboration between experimental philosophers and traditional epistemologists, who have begun using the techniques of the social sciences to investigate the factors that influence ordinary judgments about knowledge attribution. This paper provides an overview of some of the results these researchers …Read more
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314Experimental PhilosophyOxford Bibliographies Online (1): 81-92. 2006.Bibliography of works in experimental philosophy.
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556Knowledge and LuckPsychonomic Bulletin and Review 22 (2): 378-390. 2015.Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible with kn…Read more
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830Intuition Fail: Philosophical Activity and the Limits of ExpertisePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2): 378-410. 2016.Experimental philosophers have empirically challenged the connection between intuition and philosophical expertise. This paper reviews these challenges alongside other research findings in cognitive science on expert performance and argues for three claims. First, evidence taken to challenge philosophical expertise may also be explained by the well-researched failures and limitations of genuine expertise. Second, studying the failures and limitations of experts across many fields provides a prom…Read more
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985Descartes’s Schism, Locke’s Reunion: Completing the Pragmatic Turn in EpistemologyAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (1): 25-46. 2017.Centuries ago, Descartes and Locke initiated a foundational debate in epistemology over the relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and practical factors, on the other. Descartes claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally separate. Locke claimed that knowledge and practice are fundamentally united. After a period of dormancy, their disagreement has reignited on the contemporary scene. Latter-day Lockeans claim that knowledge itself is essentially connected to, and perhaps eve…Read more
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1175Telling, showing and knowing: A unified theory of pedagogical normsAnalysis 74 (1): 16-20. 2014.Pedagogy is a pillar of human culture and society. Telling each other information and showing each other how to do things comes naturally to us. A strong case has been made that declarative knowledge is the norm of assertion, which is our primary way of telling others information. This article presents an analogous case for the hypothesis that procedural knowledge is the norm of instructional demonstration, which is a primary way of showing others how to do things. Knowledge is the norm of telli…Read more
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386Inability and Obligation in Moral JudgmentPLoS ONE 10 (8). 2015.It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a…Read more
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88Neuroscientific Prediction and the Intrusion of Intuitive MetaphysicsCognitive Science 41 (2): 482-502. 2017.How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to inde…Read more
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146Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy (edited book)Blackwell. 2016.This is an anthology of experimental papers relevant to philosophical inquiry across many areas of philosophy.
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239Neuroscientific Prediction and the Intrusion of Intuitive MetaphysicsCognitive Science 39 (7). 2015.How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to inde…Read more
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178Phenomenal Consciousness DisembodiedIn Justin Sytsma (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, Bloomsbury. pp. 45-74. 2014.We evaluate the role of embodiment in ordinary mental state ascriptions. Presented are five experiments on phenomenal state ascriptions to disembodied entities such as ghosts and spirits. Results suggest that biological embodiment is not a central principle of folk psychology guiding ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness. By contrast, results continue to support the important role of functional considerations in theory of mind judgments.
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315Factive Verbs and Protagonist ProjectionEpisteme 11 (4): 391-409. 2014.Nearly all philosophers agree that only true things can be known. But does this principle reflect actual patterns of ordinary usage? Several examples in ordinary language seem to show that ‘know’ is literally used non-factively. By contrast, this paper reports five experiments utilizing explicit paraphrasing tasks, which suggest that non-factive uses are actually not literal. Instead, they are better explained by a phenomenon known as protagonist projection. It is argued that armchair philosophi…Read more
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328Knowledge Isn’t Closed on Saturday: A Study in Ordinary LanguageReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3): 395-406. 2010.Recent theories of epistemic contextualism have challenged traditional invariantist positions in epistemology by claiming that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions fluctuate between conversational contexts. Contextualists often garner support for this view by appealing to folk intuitions regarding ordinary knowledge practices. Proposed is an experiment designed to test the descriptive conditions upon which these types of contextualist defenses rely. In the cases tested, the folk patt…Read more
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600Moderate scientism in philosophyIn Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels & Rene van Woudenberg (eds.), Scientism: Prospects and Problems, Oxford University Press. 2018.Moderate scientism is the view that empirical science can help answer questions in nonscientific disciplines. In this paper, we evaluate moderate scientism in philosophy. We review several ways that science has contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. We also review several ways that science has contributed to our understanding of how philosophers make judgments and decisions. Based on this research, we conclude that the case…Read more
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342Epistemic Intuitions in Fake-Barn Thought ExperimentsEpisteme 11 (2): 199-212. 2014.In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-bar…Read more
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490In the Thick of Moral MotivationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2): 433-453. 2017.We accomplish three things in this paper. First, we provide evidence that the motivational internalism/externalism debate in moral psychology could be a false dichotomy born of ambiguity. Second, we provide further evidence for a crucial distinction between two different categories of belief in folk psychology: thick belief and thin belief. Third, we demonstrate how careful attention to deep features of folk psychology can help diagnose and defuse seemingly intractable philosophical disagreement…Read more
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962Belief through Thick and ThinNoûs 49 (4): 748-775. 2015.We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philo…Read more
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1647When Words Speak Louder Than Actions: Delusion, Belief, and the Power of AssertionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy (4): 1-18. 2014.People suffering from severe monothematic delusions, such as Capgras, Fregoli, or Cotard patients, regularly assert extraordinary and unlikely things. For example, some say that their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. A popular view in philosophy and cognitive science is that such monothematic delusions aren't beliefs because they don't guide behaviour and affect in the way that beliefs do. Or, if they are beliefs, they are somehow anomalous, atypical, or marginal beliefs. We present e…Read more
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130Competence, reflective equilibrium, and dual-system theoriesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5). 2011.A critique of inferences from 'is' to 'ought' plays a central role in Elqayam and Evans' defense of descriptivism. However, the reflective equilibrium strategy described by Goodman and embraced by Rawls, Cohen and many others poses an important challenge to that critique. Dual system theories may help respond to that challenge.
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442Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?Philosophical Psychology 26 (5): 629-638. 2013.Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people's moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers' moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philoso…Read more
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796Perceived Weaknesses of Philosophical Inquiry: A Comparison to PsychologyPhilosophia 44 (1): 33-52. 2016.We report two experiments exploring the perception of how contemporary philosophy is often conducted. We find that (1) participants associate philosophy with the practice of conducting thought experiments and collating intuitions about them, and (2) that this form of inquiry is viewed much less favourably than the typical form of inquiry in psychology: research conducted by teams using controlled experiments and observation. We also found (3) an effect whereby relying on intuition is viewed more…Read more
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604General Introduction to "A Companion to Experimental Philosophy"In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.This is the general introduction to the edited collection "A companion to Experimental Philosophy"
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146Surveying Philosophers: a Response to Kuntz & KuntzReview of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (4): 515-524. 2012.Experimental philosophers have recently questioned the use of intuitions as evidence in philosophical methods. J. R. Kuntz and J. R.C. Kuntz (2011) conduct an experiment suggesting that these critiques fail to be properly motivated because they fail to capture philosophers' preferred conceptions of intuition‐use. In this response, it is argued that while there are a series of worries about the design of this study, the data generated by Kuntz and Kuntz support, rather than undermine, the motivat…Read more
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273The Epistemic Side-Effect EffectMind and Language 25 (4): 474-498. 2010.Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. …Read more
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236The Role of Justification in the Ordinary Concept of Scientific ProgressJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 45 (1): 151-166. 2014.Alexander Bird and Darrell Rowbottom have argued for two competing accounts of the concept of scientific progress. For Bird, progress consists in the accumulation of scientific knowledge. For Rowbottom, progress consists in the accumulation of true scientific beliefs. Both appeal to intuitions elicited by thought experiments in support of their views, and it seems fair to say that the debate has reached an impasse. In an attempt to avoid this stalemate, we conduct a systematic study of the facto…Read more
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742Knowledge, Stakes, and MistakesNoûs 49 (2). 2015.According to a prominent claim in recent epistemology, people are less likely to ascribe knowledge to a high stakes subject for whom the practical consequences of error are severe, than to a low stakes subject for whom the practical consequences of error are slight. We offer an opinionated "state of the art" on experimental research about the role of stakes in knowledge judgments. We draw on a first wave of empirical studies--due to Feltz & Zarpentine (2010), May et al (2010), and Buckwalter (2…Read more
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96Epistemic Contextualism and Linguistic BehaviorIn Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. pp. 44-56. 2017.Epistemic contextualism is the theory that “knows” is a context sensitive expression. As a linguistic theory, epistemic contextualism is motivated by claims about the linguistic behavior of competent speakers. This chapter reviews evidence in experimental cognitive science for epistemic contextualism in linguistic behavior. This research demonstrates that although some observations that are consistent with epistemic contextualism can be confirmed in linguistic practices, these observations are a…Read more
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430Actionability Judgments Cause Knowledge JudgmentsThought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (3): 212-222. 2016.Researchers recently demonstrated a strong direct relationship between judgments about what a person knows and judgments about how a person should act. But it remains unknown whether actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments, or knowledge judgments cause actionability judgments. This paper uses causal modeling to help answer this question. Across two experiments, we found evidence that actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments.
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270Function and feeling machines: a defense of the philosophical conception of subjective experiencePhilosophical Studies 166 (2): 349-361. 2013.Philosophers of mind typically group experiential states together and distinguish these from intentional states on the basis of their purportedly obvious phenomenal character. Sytsma and Machery (Phil Stud 151(2): 299–327, 2010) challenge this dichotomy by presenting evidence that non-philosophers do not classify subjective experiences relative to a state’s phenomenological character, but rather by its valence. However we argue that S&M’s results do not speak to folk beliefs about the nature of …Read more
Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Moral Psychology |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |