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41Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental ReadingsOup Usa. 2012.Recently, the fields of empirical and experimental philosophy have generated tremendous excitement, due to unexpected results that have challenged philosophical dogma. Responding to this trend, Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings is the first introductory philosophy reader to integrate cutting-edge work in empirical and experimental philosophy with traditional philosophy. Featuring coverage that is equal parts historical, contemporary, and empirical/experimental, this topically org…Read more
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66La Philosophie Expérimentale (edited book)Vuibert. 2012.La philosophie expérimentale est un mouvement récent qui tente de faire progresser certains débats philosophiques grâce à l'utilisation de méthodes expérimentales. À la différence de la philosophie conventionnelle qui privilégie l'analyse conceptuelle ou la spéculation, la philosophie expérimentale préconise le recours aux études empiriques pour mieux comprendre les concepts philosophiques. Apparue il y a une dizaine d'années dans les pays anglo-saxons, cette approche constitue actuellement l'un…Read more
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15Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2013.Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 contains fourteen articles -- thirteen previously published and one new -- that reflect the fast-moving changes in the field over the last five years. The field of experimental philosophy is one of the most innovative and exciting parts of the current philosophical landscape; it has also engendered controversy. Proponents argue that philosophers should employ empirical research, including the methods of experimental psychology, to buttress their philosophical cl…Read more
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2Great Philosophical DebatesTeaching Co.. 2008.Part 1. lecture 1. Free will and determinism-- the basic debate -- lecture 2. Fate and karma -- lecture 3. Divine predestination and foreknowledge -- lecture 4. Causal determinism -- lecture 5. Ancient and medieval indeterminism -- lecture 6. Agent causation -- lecture 7. Ancient and classical compatibilism -- lecture 8. Contemporary compatibilism -- lecture 9. Hard determinism -- lecture 10. Free will impossibilism -- lecture 11. The belief in free will -- lecture 12. Physics and free will --.
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Semantics, Cross-Cultural StyleIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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2Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk IntuitionsIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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794An experimental philosophy manifestoIn Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 3--14. 2008.It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a …Read more
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235Moral MotivationIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. 2010.In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of motivation itself, and use that discussion to sketch four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: caricature versions of familiar instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories about morally worthy motivation. To test these theories, we turn to a wealth of scientific, particularly neuroscientific, evidence. Our conclusions are that (1) although the scientific evidence does not at present mandate a unique philosop…Read more
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82Rational Learners and Moral RulesMind and Language 31 (5): 530-554. 2016.People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we draw on Bayesian learning theory to develop a rational learning account. We argue that the ‘size principle’, which is implicated in word learning, ca…Read more
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106Colours, colour relationalism and the deliverances of introspectionAnalysis 70 (2): 218-228. 2010.An important motivation for relational theories of color is that they resolve apparent conflicts about color: x can, without contradiction, be red relative to S1 and not red relative to S2. Alas, many philosophers claim that the view is incompatible with naive, phenomenally grounded introspection. However, when we presented normal adults with apparent conflicts about color (among other properties), we found that many were open to the relationalist's claim that apparently competing variants can s…Read more
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112Rational learners and metaethics: Universalism, relativism, and evidence from consensusMind and Language 35 (1): 67-89. 2020.Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and un…Read more
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1Approaches to Intentionality (review)Review of Metaphysics 50 (3): 672-673. 1997.A theory of intentionality should explain how mental states can carry information or be "about" something. This ambitious book offers both an introduction to the controversy over intentionality as well as a set of new proposals for approaching the issue. In the first part of the book, Lyons presents a critical history of recent work on intentionality. The history begins with Carnap and traces the debate from Instrumentalism through Rationalism, Teleology, Informationalism, and Functionalism. Lyo…Read more
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28Lyons, William. Approaches to Intentionality (review)Review of Metaphysics 50 (3): 672-673. 1997.
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19Mind, Meaning, and Mental Disorder (review)Philosophical Review 108 (4): 559-562. 1999.This book offers a broad, systematic philosophical approach to mental disorder. The authors spend the first half of the book presenting their basic philosophical allegiances, and they go on to apply their philosophical approach to mental disorder. As the authors note, psychiatry has been largely neglected by contemporary philosophy of mind, and this book is a laudable attempt to rectify the situation by producing a sustained and clinically well-informed philosophical treatment of mental disorder…Read more
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115Diachronic Identity and the Moral SelfIn Julian Kiverstein (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind, Routledge. pp. 449-464. 2016.
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77No brute facts: The Principle of Sufficient Reason in ordinary thoughtCognition 238 (C): 105479. 2023.
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23Free Will and Experimental PhilosophyIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.This chapter highlights the common practice of appealing to lay intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories of free will. These arguments often seem to assume that the purported intuitions in question are not results of error, and the purported intuitions are generalizable to some interesting extent. Some empirical investigations of these two assumptions, including some studies that revealed intra‐personal variation in compatibilist intuitions are reviewed. The chapter examines two popular…Read more
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9Folk PsychologyIn Stephen Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Why Does Folk Psychology Play an Important Role in the Philosophy of Mind? What is Folk Psychology? Two Possible Answers The Challenge from Simulation Theory Three Accounts of Mindreading: Information‐rich, Simulation‐based and Hybrid Conclusion.
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61Is Desert in the Details?1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1): 121-133. 2010.Modern political philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to recognize desert in their theories of distributive justice.2 A large measure of the philosophical resistance to desert can be attributed to the fact that much of what people possess ultimately derives from brute luck. If a person’s assets come from brute luck, then she cannot be said truly to deserve those assets. John Rawls suggests that this idea is “one of the fixed points of our considered judgments;”3 Eric Rakowski calls it “u…Read more
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257Thinking things and feeling things: on an alleged discontinuity in folk metaphysics of mindPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (4): 703-725. 2013.According to the discontinuity view, people recognize a deep discontinuity between phenomenal and intentional states, such that they refrain from attributing feelings and experiences to entities that do not have the right kind of body, though they may attribute thoughts to entities that lack a biological body, like corporations, robots, and disembodied souls. We examine some of the research that has been used to motivate the discontinuity view. Specifically, we focus on experiments that examine …Read more
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85Variations in ethical intuitionsIn Ernest Sosa & Enrique Villanueva (eds.), Metaethics, Wiley Periodicals. pp. 368-388. 2009.Philosophical theorizing is often, either tacitly or explicitly, guided by intuitions about cases. Theories that accord with our intuitions are generally considered to be prima facie better than those that do not. However, recent empirical work has suggested that philosophically significant intuitions are variable and unstable in a number of ways. This variability of intuitions has led naturalistically inclined philosophers to disparage the practice of relying on intuitions for doing philosophy …Read more
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146The rise of compatibilism: A case study in the quantitative history of philosophyMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1): 260-270. 2007.Incompatibilists about free will and responsibility often maintain that incompatibilism is the intuitive, commonsense position. Recently, this claim has come under unfavorable scrutiny from naturalistic philosophers who have surveyed philosophically uneducated undergraduates.1 But there is a much older problem for the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive – if incompatibilism is intuitive, why is compatibilism so popular in the history of philosophy? In this paper I will try to answer this que…Read more
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46The Indeterminist IntuitionThe Monist 95 (2): 290-307. 2012.Evidence from experimental philosophy indicates that people think that their choices are not determined. What remains unclear is why people think this. Denying determinism is rather presumptuous given people’s general ignorance about the nature of the universe. In this paper, I’ll argue that the belief in indeterminism depends on a default presumption that we know the factors that influence our decision making. That presumption was reasonable at earlier points in intellectual history. But in lig…Read more
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79The essence of mentalistic agentsSynthese 194 (3): 809-825. 2017.Over the last several decades, there has been a wealth of illuminating work on processes implicated in social cognition. Much less has been done in articulating how we learn the contours of particular concepts deployed in social cognition, like the concept MENTALISTIC AGENT. Recent developments in learning theory afford new tools for approaching these questions. In this article, I describe some rudimentary ways in which learning theoretic considerations can illuminate philosophically important a…Read more
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19The Folk Psychology of Free Will: Fits and StartsMind and Language 19 (5): 473-502. 2004.According to agent‐causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent‐causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent‐causation develo…Read more
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260The folk psychology of free will: Fits and startsMind and Language 19 (5): 473-502. 2004.According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develo…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |