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63No brute facts: The Principle of Sufficient Reason in ordinary thoughtCognition 238 (C): 105479. 2023.
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3Free Will and Experimental PhilosophyIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 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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7Folk PsychologyIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, 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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254Is 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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221Thinking 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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236Variations 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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142The 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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171The 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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245The 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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70The 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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15The 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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174Sentimental rules: on the natural foundations of moral judgmentOxford University Press. 2004.Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules'…Read more
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102Skepticism and the acquisition of “knowledge”Mind and Language 33 (4): 397-414. 2018.Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learn…Read more
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25Replies to Kane, McCormick, and VargasPhilosophical Studies 174 (10): 2511-2523. 2017.This is a reply to discussions by Robert Kane, Kelly McCormick, and Manuel Vargas of Shaun Nichols, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsibility.
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62Reading One's Own Mind: Self-Awareness and Developmental PsychologyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (sup1): 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 and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of …Read more
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296On The Genealogy Of Norms: A Case For The Role Of Emotion In Cultural EvolutionPhilosophy of Science 69 (2): 234-255. 2002.One promising way to investigate the genealogy of norms is by considering not the origin of norms, but rather, what makes certain norms more likely to prevail. Emotional responses, I maintain, constitute one important set of mechanisms that affects the cultural viability of norms. To corroborate this, I exploit historical evidence indicating that 16th century etiquette norms prohibiting disgusting actions were much more likely to survive than other 16th century etiquette norms. This case suggest…Read more
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1016An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.
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25Mind, Meaning, and Mental Disorder: The Nature of Causal Explanation in Psychology and PsychiatryPhilosophical Review 108 (4): 559. 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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141Moral dilemmas and moral rulesCognition 100 (3): 530-542. 2006.Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants sho…Read more
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177Mindreading and the cognitive architecture underlying altruistic motivationMind and Language 16 (4): 425-455. 2001.In recent attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying altruistic motivation, one central question is the extent to which the capacity for altruism depends on the capacity for understanding other minds, or ‘mindreading’. Some theorists maintain that the capacity for altruism is independent of any capacity for mindreading; others maintain that the capacity for altruism depends on fairly sophisticated mindreading skills. I argue that none of the prevailing accounts is adequate. Rat…Read more
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11Is Religion What We Want? Motivation and the Cultural Transmission of Religious RepresentationsJournal of Cognition and Culture 4 (2): 347-371. 2004.Many psychologists and philosophers have suggested that religious ideas emerge because they are motivationally attractive. This paper attempts to support a version of the motivational thesis by relying on religious creeds as a source of historical evidence. This simple source of evidence indicates that the cultural evolution of religious ideas is partly a function of the motivational attractiveness of the religious ideas.
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42How Psychopaths Threaten Moral RationalismThe Monist 85 (2): 285-303. 2002.Over the last twenty years, a number of central figures in moral philosophy have defended some version of moral rationalism, the idea that morality is based on reason or rationality. According to rationalism, morality is based on reason or rationality rather than the emotions or cultural idiosyncrasies, and this has seemed to many to be the best way of securing a kind of objectivism about moral claims. Consider the following representative statements
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108Imagination and theIMind and Language 23 (5): 518-535. 2008.Abstract: Thought experiments about the self seem to lead to deeply conflicting intuitions about the self. Cases imagined from the 3rd person perspective seem to provoke different responses than cases imagined from the 1st person perspective. This paper argues that recent cognitive theories of the imagination, coupled with standard views about indexical concepts, help explain our reactions in the 1st person cases. The explanation helps identify intuitions that should not be trusted as a guide t…Read more
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27Imagination and the IMind and Language 23 (5): 518-535. 2008.Thought experiments about the self seem to lead to deeply conflicting intuitions about the self. Cases imagined from the 3rd person perspective seem to provoke different responses than cases imagined from the 1st person perspective. This paper argues that recent cognitive theories of the imagination, coupled with standard views about indexical concepts, help explain our reactions in the 1st person cases. The explanation helps identify intuitions that should not be trusted as a guide to the metap…Read more
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18Imagination and immortality: thinking of meSynthese 159 (2): 215-233. 2007.Recent work in developmental psychology indicates that children naturally think that psychological states continue after death. One important candidate explanation for why this belief is natural appeals to the idea that we believe in immortality because we can't imagine our own nonexistence. This paper explores this old idea. To begin, I present a qualified statement of the thesis that we can't imagine our own nonexistence. I argue that the most prominent explanation for this obstacle, Freud's, …Read more
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178Innateness and moral psychologyIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press New York. pp. 353--369. 2005.Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporary innateness debates, moral nativism has perhaps an even deeper ancestry. If linguistic nativism is Cartesian, moral nativism is Platonic. Moral nativism has taken a backseat to linguistic nativism in contemporary discussions largely because Chomsky made a case for linguistic nativism characterized by unprecedented rigor. Hence it is not surprising that recent attempts to revive the thesis that we have innate moral kno…Read more
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178Imagining and believing: The promise of a single codeJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2): 129-39. 2004.Recent cognitive accounts of the imagination propose that imagining and believing are in the same “code”. According to the single code hypothesis, cognitive mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination-based inputs (“pretense representations”) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. In this paper, I argue that the single code hypothesis provides a unified and independently motivated explanation for a wide range of puzzles surrounding fiction…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Moral Psychology |
Experimental Philosophy |