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335Folk psychologyEncyclopedia of Cognitive Science 235--255. 1994.For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. Doing…Read more
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148How can psychology contribute to the free will debate?In J. Baer, J. Kaufman & R. Baumeister (eds.), Psychology and Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2009.Are people free and morally responsible? Or are their actions determined, i.e. inevitable outcomes of the past conditions and the laws of nature? These seem fairly straightforward questions, but it is important to distinguish 3 different dimensions of the free will debate: a descriptive project, a substantive project, and a prescriptive project. In this chapter, I’ll consider how psychology can contribute to each project in turn. First, I should say a bit more about the projects.
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Reading One's Own Mind: Self-Awareness and Developmental PsychologyCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 30 297-339. 2004.The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the g…Read more
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38Evolutionary psychology: Ultimate explanations and panglossian predictionsIn Valerie Gray Hardcastle (ed.), Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays, Mit Press. pp. 47--66. 1999.
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832Free Will and the Bounds of the SelfIn Robert H. Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2001.If you start taking courses in contemporary cognitive science, you will soon encounter a particular picture of the human mind. This picture says that the mind is a lot like a computer. Specifically, the mind is made up of certain states and certain processes. These states and processes interact, in accordance with certain general rules, to generate specific behaviors. If you want to know how those states and processes got there in the first place, the only answer is that they arose through the i…Read more
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1Reading one's own mind: A cognitive theory of self-awarenessIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.
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63Gratitude Without a SelfJournal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 40 75-108. 2023.Gratitude plays a critical role in our social lives. It helps to build and strengthen relationships, and it enhances wellbeing. Gratitude is typically thought of as involving oneself having a positive feeling towards another self. But this kind of self-to-self gratitude seems to be at odds with the central Buddhist view that there is no self. Feeling gratitude to someone for some past generosity seems misplaced since there is no continuing self who both performed the generous action and is now t…Read more
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53Normativity and epistemic intuitionsIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 429-460. 2008.In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence sugges…Read more
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87Semantics, Cross-Cultural StyleO Gnition 92. 2004.Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intui…Read more
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31The identity of what? Pluralism, practical interests, and individuationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.In this paper, we present a set of preregistered studies inspired by both Lockean pluralism about individuation and discussions of conjoined twinning in the contemporary personal identity debate. In combination, these studies provide evidence of folk pluralism about individuation of “individuals like us” and also ways in which individuation judgments are integral to practical interests. First, our studies show that individuation judgments depend on a sortal supplied. Study participants tend to s…Read more
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2371Phenomenal Abilities: Incompatibilism and the Experience of AgencyIn David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility, Oxford University Press. 2013.Incompatibilists often claim that we experience our agency as incompatible with determinism, while compatibilists challenge this claim. We report a series of experiments that focus on whether the experience of having an ability to do otherwise is taken to be at odds with determinism. We found that participants in our studies described their experience as incompatibilist whether the decision was (i) present-focused or retrospective, (ii) imagined or actual, (iii) morally salient or morally neutra…Read more
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97Second thoughts on simulationIn Paul L. Harris (ed.), Mental Simulation, Blackwell. 1995.The essays in this volume make it abundantly clear that there is no shortage of disagreement about the plausibility of the simulation theory. As we see it, there are at least three factors contributing to this disagreement. In some instances the issues in dispute are broadly empirical. Different people have different views on which theory is favored by experiments reported in the literature, and different hunches about how future experiments are likely to turn out. In 3.1 and 3.3 we will conside…Read more
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10618 The baby in the lab-coat: why child development is not an adequate model for understanding the development of scienceIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich & Michael Siegal (eds.), The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2002.Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human mind…Read more
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76Bayesian Occam's Razor Is a Razor of the PeopleCognitive Science 42 (4): 1345-1359. 2018.Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of possible data—and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people's intuitive probabilis…Read more
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4Selections fromBeyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the IdolsIn Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy A. Nahmias & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 251. 2010.
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5An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and VirtueIn Thomas Nadelhoffer, Eddy A. Nahmias & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 111. 2010.
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37Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporaryIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 1--353. 2005.
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43Reading one's own mind: A cognitive theory of self-awarenessIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.
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20Experimental EthicsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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1. Moral Rules and Moral ReasoningIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 297. 2010.
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57RulesIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.Is it wrong to torture prisoners of war for fun? Is it wrong to yank on someone’s hair with no provocation? Is it wrong to push an innocent person in front of a train in order to save five innocent people tied to the tracks? If you are like most people, you answered "yes" to each of these questions. A venerable account of human moral judgment, influential in both philosophy and psychology, holds that these judgments are underpinned by internally represented principles or rules and reasoning abou…Read more
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3Moral emotionsIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 111. 2010.
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11Timothy Schroeder, Adina L. Roskies, andIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 72. 2010.
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56Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityLexington Books. 2013.Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications
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31Vows without a selfPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1): 42-61. 2024.Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows in the Buddhis…Read more
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1Moral learningIn Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology, Routledge. 2018.
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What does labor mixing get you?In Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
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204Awareness of Unawareness Folk Psychology and Introspective TransparencyJournal of Consciousness Studies 18 (11-12): 11-12. 2011.A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection . Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental events. In this paper, we distinguish two dimensions of introspective access: the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and the domain of acc…Read more
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24Bound: Essays on Free Will and ResponsibilityOxford University Press. 2015.Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |