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301% SkepticismNoûs 50 (4). 2016.A 1% skeptic is someone who has about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism and about a 1% credence that some radically skeptical scenario obtains. The first half of this essay defends the epistemic rationality of 1% skepticism, endorsing modest versions of dream skepticism, simulation skepticism, cosmological skepticism, and wildcard skepticism. The second half of the essay explores the practical behavioral consequences of 1% skepticism.
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30A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical MisadventuresMIT Press. 2019.A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on …Read more
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22Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat EthicsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1): 113-138. 2023.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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21Uncle Iroh, From Fool to Sage – Or Sage All Along?In Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt (eds.), Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy: Wisdom From Aang to Zuko, Wiley-blackwell. 2022.Book Three of Avatar: The Last Airbender portrays Uncle Iroh as wise and peace‐loving, in the mold of a Daoist sage. This chapter argues that Iroh's Book One foolishness is a pose, and Iroh's character does not fundamentally change. In Book One, he is wisely following strategies suggested by the ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi for dealing with incompetent leaders. His seeming foolishness in Book One is in fact a sagacious strategy for minimizing the harm that Prince Zuko would otherw…Read more
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20Borderline consciousness, when it’s neither determinately true nor determinately false that experience is presentPhilosophical Studies 180 (12): 3415-3439. 2023.This article defends the existence of _borderline consciousness._ In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vag…Read more
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19The Two Envelope Paradox and Using Variables Within the Expectation FormulaSorites 135-140. 2008.You are presented with a choice between two envelopes. You know one envelope contains twice as much money as the other, but you don't know which contains more. You arbitrarily choose one envelope -- call it Envelope A -- but don't open it. Call the amount of money in that envelope X. Since your choice was arbitrary, the other envelope (Envelope B) is 50% likely to be the envelope with more and 50% likely to be the envelope with less. But, strangely, that very fact might make Envelope B seem attr…Read more
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9The Behavior of EthicistsIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.We review and present a new meta‐analysis of research suggesting that ethicists in the United States appear to behave no morally better overall than do non‐ethicist professors. Measures include: returning library books, peer evaluation of overall moral behavior, voting participation, courteous and discourteous behavior at conferences, replying to student emails, paying conference registration fees and disciplinary society dues, staying in touch with one's mother, charitable giving, organ and blo…Read more
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5Death, Self, and Oneness in the Incomprehensible ZhuangziIn Philip J. Ivanhoe, Owen Flanagan, Victoria S. Harrison, Hagop Sarkissian & Eric Schwitzgebel (eds.), The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self, Columbia University Press. 2018.The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi defies coherent interpretation. This is an inextricable part of the beauty and power of his work. The text – by which I mean the “Inner Chapters” of the text traditionally attributed to him, the authentic core of the book – is incomprehensible as a whole. It consists of shards, in a distinctive voice – a voice distinctive enough that its absence is plain in most or all of the “Outer” and “Miscellaneous” Chapters, and which I will treat as the voice of a s…Read more
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5Reinstalling EdenIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.This chapter presents a story that depicts the creation of a simulated world “Eden”. According to the author, installing Adam and Eve was a profound moral decision. Their lonely island is transformed into an archipelago. They were shielded from the blights that afflict humanity; they suffer no serious conflict, no death or decay. Then, the archipelagans were put in charge of their own experiment. Adam and Eve were given science and a drive to discover the truth of their being. They realized that…Read more
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4Theories in Children and the Rest of UsPhilosophy of Science 63 (S3). 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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4Reply to commentators: scientific and everyday theories are of a pieceScience & Education 8 (5): 575-582. 1999.
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3Presuppositions and background assumptionsJournal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 206-233. 2011.
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2How well do we know our own conscious experience? the case of visual imageryJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (5-6): 35-53. 2002.Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or 'phenomenology'. I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to …Read more
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2The Behavior of EthicistsIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2016.
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1The unskilled Zhuangzi : Big and useless and not so good at catching ratsIn Karyn Lai & Wai Wai Chiu (eds.), Skill and Mastery Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi, Rowman and Littlefield International. 2019.
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1A Dispositional Approach to the AttitudesIn Nikolaj Nottelmann (ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure, Palgrave. pp. 75-99. 2013.I argue that to have an attitude is, primarily, (1.) to have a dispositional profile that matches, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a stereotype for that attitude, typically grounded in folk psychology, and secondarily, (2.) in some cases also to meet further stereotypical attitude-specific conditions. To have an attitude, on the account I will recommend here, is mainly a matter of being apt to interact with the world in patterns that ordinary people would regard as characte…Read more
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Can large language models be trained to produce philosophical texts that are difficult to distinguish from texts produced by human philosophers? To address this question, we fine-tuned OpenAI's GPT-3 with the works of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett as additional training data. To explore the Dennett model, we asked the real Dennett ten philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry-picking. We recruited 4…Read more
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Do people still report dreaming in black and white? An attempt to replicate a questionnaire from 1942Perceptual and Motor Skills 96 25-29. 2003.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |