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804Alief in Action (and Reaction)Mind and Language 23 (5): 552--585. 2008.I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation an…Read more
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2Quarantining and contagion, mirroring and disparity: On the relation between pretense and beliefIn Matthew Kieran & Dominic Lopes (eds.), Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, Routledge. 2003.
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175The elements of philosophy: readings from past and present (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.The Elements of Philosophy: Readings from Past and Present is a comprehensive collection of historical and contemporary readings across the major fields of philosophy. With depth and quality, this introductory anthology offers a selection of readings that is both extensive and expansive; the readings span twenty-five centuries. They are organized topically into five parts: Religion and Belief, Moral and Political Philosophy, Metaphysics and Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind and Language, and Life…Read more
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135Imaginative resistance revisitedIn Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination, Oxford University Press. pp. 149-173. 2006.
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545Continence on the cheap: a response to Roy SorensenMind 107 (428): 821. 1998.A brief "advertisement" in response to Roy Sorensen's "advertisement" "A Cure for Incontinence".
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1697Pretense and ImaginationWiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 2 (1): 79-94. 2011.Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: …Read more
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194Perceptual experience (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2006.In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and …Read more
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IntroductionIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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74Review of Paul Harris, The Work of the Imagination (review)Mind 111 (442): 414-418. 2002.I had a structural worry about the relation of Gaita’s three chapters on truth, interesting though these chapters are, to the rest of Gaita’s project. And I had some residual questions left after reading the book: What are persons? How do we know when we are encountering one, and when are we justified (we must be sometimes: compare the various sorts of animal) in a decision that something we encounter is not a person? Do evil actions always involve a sort of blindness to what is being done? If s…Read more
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463Thought experiments rethought—and reperceivedPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 1152-1163. 2004.Contemplating imaginary scenarios that evoke certain sorts of quasi‐sensory intuitions may bring us to new beliefs about contingent features of the natural world. These beliefs may be produced quasi‐observationally; the presence of a mental image may play a crucial cognitive role in the formation of the belief in question. And this albeit fallible quasi‐observational belief‐forming mechanism may, in certain contexts, be sufficiently reliable to count as a source of justification. This sheds ligh…Read more
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281On the relation between pretense and beliefIn Matthew Kieran & Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), Imagination Philosophy and the Arts, Routledge. pp. 125--141. 2003.By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that prete…Read more
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96Critical Study of Carol Rovane’s The Bounds of Agency (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1). 2002.“Like much recent work on personal identity,” Carol Rovane writes in the opening sentence of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, “this effort takes its main cue from Locke”. The work also—as its title suggests—takes inspiration from Strawsonian neo-Kantianism. And although direct allusion to his writings is limited to a few passing references, Rovane’s essay is largely Davidsonian in spirit. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that The Bounds of Agency answers a…Read more
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83On the possibility of feminist epistemologyMetaphilosophy 27 (1-2): 104-117. 1996.In this article, I propose one way of understanding the expression “feminist epistemology.” I begin from the premise that improper philosophical attention has been paid to the implications of what I call The Fact of Preconditions for Agency: that moral and rational agents become such only through a long, deliberate, and intensive process of intervention and teaching, a process that requires commitments of time, effort and emotion on the part of other agents. I contend that this is a sufficiently…Read more
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419Personal identity and thought-experimentsPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (206): 34-54. 2002.Through careful analysis of a specific example, Parfit’s ‘fission argument’ for the unimportance of personal identity, I argue that our judgements concerning imaginary scenarios are likely to be unreliable when the scenarios involve disruptions of certain contingent correlations. Parfit’s argument depends on our hypothesizing away a number of facts which play a central role in our understanding and employment of the very concept under investigation; as a result, it fails to establish what Parfit clai…Read more
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208Imaginative contagionMetaphilosophy 37 (2): 183-203. 2006.The aim of this article is to expand the diet of examples considered in philosophical discussions of imagination and pretense, and to offer some preliminary observations about what we might learn about the nature of imagination as a result. The article presents a number of cases involving imaginative contagion: cases where merely imagining or pretending that P has effects that we would expect only perceiving or believing that P to have. Examples are offered that involve visual imagery, motor ima…Read more
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504Better Than Mere Knowledge? The Function of Sensory AwarenessIn John Hawthorne & Tamar Gendler (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford University Press. pp. 260--290. 2006.
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3Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2007.Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publicaton which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe and Australasia, it will publish exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: *traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, t…Read more
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