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1310Mechanistic explanation without the ontic conceptionEuropean Journal of Philosophy of Science 2 (3): 375-394. 2012.The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers …Read more
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53Review of Michael P. Lynch, True to Life: Why Truth Matters (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (2): 271-273. 2005.
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2051Mechanisms and psychological explanationIn Paul Thagard (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Elsevier. 2007.As much as assumptions about mechanisms and mechanistic explanation have deeply affected psychology, they have received disproportionately little analysis in philosophy. After a historical survey of the influences of mechanistic approaches to explanation of psychological phenomena, we specify the nature of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. Contrary to some treatments of mechanistic explanation, we maintain that explanation is an epistemic activity that involves representing and reasoning a…Read more
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460Minimalism about truth: special issue introductionSynthese 195 (3): 927-933. 2018.The theme of this special issue is minimalism about truth, a conception which has attracted extensive support since the landmark publication of Paul Horwich's Truth (1990). Many well-esteemed philosophers have challenged Horwich's alethic minimalism, an especially austere version of deflationary truth theory. In part, this is at least because his brand of minimalism about truth also intersects with several different literatures: paradox, implicit definition, bivalence, normativity, propositional…Read more
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814Truth, pluralism, monism, correspondenceIn Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj Pedersen (eds.), New Waves in Truth, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.When talking about truth, we ordinarily take ourselves to be talking about one-and-the-same thing. Alethic monists suggest that theorizing about truth ought to begin with this default or pre-reflective stance, and, subsequently, parlay it into a set of theoretical principles that are aptly summarized by the thesis that truth is one. Foremost among them is the invariance principle.
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166Is pluralism about truth inherently unstable?Philosophical Studies 159 (1). 2012.Although it’s sometimes thought that pluralism about truth is unstable—or, worse, just a non-starter—it’s surprisingly difficult to locate collapsing arguments that conclusively demonstrate either its instability or its inability to get started. This paper exemplifies the point by examining three recent arguments to that effect. However, it ends with a cautionary tale; for pluralism may not be any better off than other traditional theories that face various technical objections, and may be worse…Read more
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763Intractability and the use of heuristics in psychological explanationsSynthese 187 (2): 471-487. 2012.Many cognitive scientists, having discovered that some computational-level characterization f of a cognitive capacity φ is intractable, invoke heuristics as algorithmic-level explanations of how cognizers compute f. We argue that such explanations are actually dysfunctional, and rebut five possible objections. We then propose computational-level theory revision as a principled and workable alternative.
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372Review of Bortolotti's Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (review)Philosophical Quarterly 65 (260). 2015.
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867On the functionalization of pluralist approaches to truthSynthese 145 (1). 2005.Traditional inflationary approaches that specify the nature of truth are attractive in certain ways; yet, while many of these theories successfully explain why propositions in certain domains of discourse are true, they fail to adequately specify the nature of truth because they run up against counterexamples when attempting to generalize across all domains. One popular consequence is skepticism about the efficaciousness of inflationary approaches altogether. Yet, by recognizing that the failure …Read more
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1023Rational analysis, intractability, and the prospects of ‘as if’-explanationsSynthese 195 (2): 491-510. 2018.Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their …Read more
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51Autonomy, allostasic mechanisms, and AI: a biomimetic perspective.Pragmatics and Cognition 15 (3). 2007.We argue that the concepts of mechanism and autonomy appear to be antagonistic when autonomy is conflated with agency. Once these concepts are disentangled, it becomes clearer how autonomy emerges from complex forms of control. Subsequently, current biomimetic strategies tend to focus on homeostatic regulatory systems; we propose that research in AI and robotics would do well to incorporate biomimetic strategies that instead invoke models of allostatic mechanisms as a way of understanding how to…Read more
APA Western Division
Long Beach, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Theories of Truth |
Mechanistic Explanation |
Explanation in Neuroscience |
Reduction in Cognitive Science |
Truth |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
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PhilPapers Editorships
Pluralism about Truth |
Reduction in Social Science |
Explanatory Pluralism |