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76Is There Something it’s Like to be a Garden SnailPhilosophical Topics 48 (1): 39-63. 2020.The question “are garden snails conscious?” or equivalently “is there something it’s like to be a garden snail?” admits of three possible answers: yes, no, and denial that the question admits of a yes-or-no answer. All three answers have some antecedent plausibility, prior to the application of theories of consciousness. All three answers retain their plausibility after the application of theories of consciousness. This is because theories of consciousness, when applied to such a different speci…Read more
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75The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behaviorPhilosophical Psychology 27 (3): 293-327. 2014.We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with …Read more
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74Creating a large language model of a philosopherMind and Language 39 (2): 237-259. 2024.Can large language models produce expert‐quality philosophical texts? To investigate this, we fine‐tuned GPT‐3 with the works of philosopher Daniel Dennett. To evaluate the model, we asked the real Dennett 10 philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry‐picking. Experts on Dennett's work succeeded at distinguishing the Dennett‐generated and machine‐generated answers above chance but substantially short…Read more
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66Difference tone training: A demonstration adapted from Titchener's experimental psychologyPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 11. 2005.This demonstration recreates an example of introspective training from E.B. Titchener's laboratory manual of 1901-1905. The purpose is to prompt thought about the prospects of introspective training as a means of improving the quality of introspective reports about conscious experience. The demonstration requires speakers or headphones, and a high-speed internet connection is recommended
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65Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to KammererPhilosophia 44 (3): 877-883. 2016.In Schwitzgebel I argued that the United States, considered as a concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts, meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. Kammerer defends materialism against this seemingly unintuitive conclusion by means of an “anti-nesting principle” according to which group entities cannot be literally phenomenally conscious if they contain phenomenally conscious subparts who stand in a certain type of functional relation to the group as a whole. I ra…Read more
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65Marilyn Vos savant on goliath and lumpParade Magazine. 1994.While taking Charles Chihara's metaphysics course as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, I wrote an advice columnist to ask about the puzzle at the center of the course. Marilyn Vos Savant writes a weekly column for Parade Magazine , which is included in the Sunday editions of many newspapers. She claims to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for "highest IQ".
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64Do professional ethicists behave any morally better than other professors do? Do they show any greater consistency between their normative attitudes and their behavior? In response to a survey question, a large majority of professors (83 percent of ethicists, 83 percent of nonethicist philosophers, and 85 percent of nonphilosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student e-mails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95 p…Read more
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64On containers and content, with a cautionary note to philosophers of mindAvailable on Author's Homepage. 2001.
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64When our eyes are closed, what, if anything, do we visually experience?Draft Available on Author's Homepage; Final Version in 2011 Monograph. 2009.This chapter raises a number of questions, not adequately addressed by any researcher to date, about what we see when our eyes are closed. In the historical literature, the question most frequently discussed was what we see when our eyes are closed in the dark (and so entirely or almost entirely deprived of light). In 1819, Purkinje, who was the first to write extensively about this, says he sees "wandering cloudy stripes" that shrink slowly toward the center of the field. Other later authors…Read more
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62A difficulty for simulation theory due to the close connection of pretense and action in early childhoodAvailable on Author's Homepage. 2000.
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62Experimental Evidence for the Existence of an External WorldJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3): 564--582. 2015.In the first experiment, I exhibit unreliable judgment about the primeness or divisibility of four-digit numbers, in contrast to a seeming Excel program. In the second experiment, I exhibit an imperfect memory for arbitrary-seeming three-digit number and letter combinations, in contrast to my seeming collaborator with seemingly hidden notes. In the third experiment, I seem to suffer repeated defeats at chess. In all three experiments, the most straightforward interpretation of the experiential e…Read more
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60Children's theories and the drive to explainScience & Education 8 (5): 457-488. 1999.Debate has been growing in developmental psychology over how much the cognitive development of children is like theory change in science. Useful debate on this topic requires a clear understanding of what it would be for a child to have a theory. I argue that existing accounts of theories within philosophy of science and developmental psychology either are less precise than is ideal for the task or cannot capture everyday theorizing of the sort that children, if they theorize, must do. I then pr…Read more
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59Experiments in economics and philosophyEconomics and Philosophy 29 (2): 151-153. 2013.Not so long ago, many economists and philosophers felt that their disciplines had no use for experimental methods. An experimental study was, by its nature, ‘not economics’ or ‘not philosophy’ – psychology maybe. Opinion has changed dramatically. This issue of Economics and Philosophy represents a collection of recent contributions to experimental research that explicitly deal with empirical findings or methodological questions in the intersection of the two disciplines. To the best of our knowl…Read more
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54Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat EthicsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-26. 2021.In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group d…Read more
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53Are ethicists any more likely to pay their registration fees at professional meetings?Economics and Philosophy 29 (3): 371-380. 2013.Lists of paid registrants at Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association from 2006–2008 were compared with lists of people appearing as presenters, commentators or chairs on the meeting programme those same years. These were years in which fee payment depended primarily on an honour system rather than on enforcement. Seventy-four per cent of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees: not a statistically …Read more
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49The experience of readingConsciousness and Cognition 62 (C): 57-68. 2018.What do people consciously experience when they read? There has been almost no rigorous research on this question, and opinions diverge radically among both philosophers and psychologists. We describe three studies of the phenomenology of reading and its relationship to memory of textual detail and general cognitive abilities. We find three main results. First, there is substantial variability in reports about reading experience, both within and between participants. Second, reported reading exp…Read more
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47Against the mind package view of minds: Comments on Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mindMind and Language 35 (5): 671-676. 2020.Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mind lays the groundwork for critiquing the mind package view of minds. According to the mind package view, psychological properties travel in groups, such that an entity either has the whole mind package or lacks mentality altogether. Implicit commitment to the mind package view makes it seem absurd to attribute some psychological properties (e.g., preferences) to entities that lack other psychological properties (e.g., feelings). Contra the mind package view, we are p…Read more
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47Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith’s Making MonstersAnalysis 83 (4): 780-787. 2023.
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45The Weirdness of the WorldPrinceton University Press. 2024.How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the …Read more
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44Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete PersonsJournal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9): 188-203. 2023.Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a possible 'ancillary mind' modelled on a system envisioned in Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between a communicating group of individuals and a single, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a grey zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither deter…Read more
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44Engaging charitable giving: The motivational force of narrative versus philosophical argumentPhilosophical Psychology 1-36. forthcoming.Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attit…Read more
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44Knowing Your Own BeliefsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (S1): 41-62. 2009.To believe is to possess a wide variety of dispositions pertinent to the proposition believed. Among those dispositions are self-ascriptive dispositions. Consequently, being disposed to self-ascribe belief that P is partly constitutive of believing that P. Such self-ascriptive dispositions can be underwritten by any of a variety of mechanisms, acting co-operatively or competitively. But since self-ascriptive dispositions are only partly constitutive of belief, there can be cases in which the…Read more
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42Why don’t we know our chinese philosophy?APA Newsletter on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers & Philosophies 1 (1): 26-27. 2001.
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42What unifies experiences generated by different parts of my brain?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1): 167-168. 1999.Neither of the explanations O'Brien & Opie offer to account for “subject unity” succeeds. Subject unity cannot arise from constructed personal narratives, because such narratives presuppose a prior unity of experience. Subject unity also cannot arise from projection of experiences to the same position in space, as reflection on pregnant women and the spatially deluded reveals.
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41Consciousness, Idealism, and Skepticism: Reflections on Jay Garfield’s Engaging BuddhismSophia 57 (4): 559-563. 2018.Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism admirably shows the relevance of Indian philosophy to the interests of mainstream analytic Anglophone philosophers. Garfield deploys the Indian tradition to critique phenomenal realism, the view that there really are qualia or phenomenal properties—that there really is ‘something it’s like’ to be undergoing the experience you are undergoing right now. I argue that Garfield’s critique probably turns on a false dilemma that omits the possibility of introspection as…Read more
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39Difficulties in Davidson's arguments against belief without languageDissertation Chapter, U.C. Berkeley Philosophy. 1997.
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34Theories in children and the rest of usPhilosophy of Science Association 3 (3). 1996.I offer an account of theories useful in addressing the question of whether children are young theoreticians whose development can be regarded as the product of theory change. I argue that to regard a set of propositions as a theory is to be committed to evaluating that set in terms of its explanatory power. If theory change is the substance of cognitive development, we should see patterns of affect and arousal consonant with the emergence and resolution of explanation-seeking curiosity. Affect …Read more
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31Rationalization in the pejorative sense: Cushman's account overlooks the scope and costs of rationalizationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.According to Cushman, rationalization occurs when a person has performed an action and then concocts beliefs and desires that would have made it rational. We argue that this isn't the paradigmatic form of rationalization. Consequently, Cushman's explanation of the function and usefulness of rationalization is less broad-reaching than he intends. Cushman's account also obscures some of rationalization's pernicious consequences.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |