•  3548
    Oppressive Things
    with Shen-yi Liao
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1): 92-113. 2020.
    In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sci…Read more
  •  464
    Norenzayan and colleagues suggest that Big Gods can be replaced by Big Governments. We examine forms of social and self-monitoring and ritual practice that emerged in Classical China, heterarchical societies like those that emerged in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and the contemporary Zapatista movement of Chiapas, and we recommend widening the hypothesis space to include these alternative forms of social organization.
  •  381
    Drawing the boundaries of animal sentience
    with Walter Veit
    Animal Sentience 13 (29). 2020.
    We welcome Mikhalevich & Powell’s (2020) (M&P) call for a more “‘inclusive”’ animal ethics, but we think their proposed shift toward a moral framework that privileges false positives over false negatives will require radically revising the paradigm assumption in animal research: that there is a clear line to be drawn between sentient beings that are part of our moral community and nonsentient beings that are not.
  •  294
    What Does the Nation of China Think About Phenomenal States?
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 225-243. 2010.
    Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific r…Read more
  •  254
    The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations
    with Susan Dwyer and Marc D. Hauser
    Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3): 486-510. 2010.
    Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an acc…Read more
  •  251
    Genuinely collective emotions
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1 (1): 89-118. 2011.
    It is received wisdom in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that individuals can be in emotional states but groups cannot. But why should we accept this view? In this paper, I argue that there is substantial philosophical and empirical support for the existence of collective emotions. Thus, while there is good reason to be skeptical about many ascriptions of collective emotion, I argue that some groups exhibit the computational complexity and informational integration required for being in ge…Read more
  •  245
    Commonsense concepts of phenomenal consciousness: Does anyone care about functional zombies?
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (1): 133-155. 2010.
    It would be a mistake to deny commonsense intuitions a role in developing a theory of consciousness. However, philosophers have traditionally failed to probe commonsense in a way that allows these commonsense intuitions to make a robust contribution to a theory of consciousness. In this paper, I report the results of two experiments on purportedly phenomenal states and I argue that many disputes over the philosophical notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ are misguided—they fail to capture the in…Read more
  •  175
    Recent behavioral experiments, along with imaging experiments and neuropsychological studies appear to support the hypothesis that emotions play a causal or constitutive role in moral judgment. Those who resist this hypothesis tend to suggest that affective mechanisms are better suited to play a modulatory role in moral cognition. But I argue that claims about the role of emotion in moral cognition frame the debate in ways that divert attention away from other plausible hypotheses. I suggest tha…Read more
  •  153
    Accountability and values in radically collaborative research
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 46 16-23. 2014.
    This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting i…Read more
  •  144
    Critiquing Empirical Moral Psychology
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 41 (1): 50-83. 2011.
    Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, the…Read more
  •  127
    What is a philosophical effect? Models of data in experimental philosophy
    Philosophical Studies 172 (12): 3273-3292. 2015.
    Papers in experimental philosophy rarely offer an account of what it would take to reveal a philosophically significant effect. In part, this is because experimental philosophers tend to pay insufficient attention to the hierarchy of models that would be required to justify interpretations of their data; as a result, some of their most exciting claims fail as explanations. But this does not impugn experimental philosophy. My aim is to show that experimental philosophy could be made more successf…Read more
  •  126
    Moral judgments about altruistic self-sacrifice: When philosophical and folk intuitions clash
    with Marc D. Hauser
    Philosophical Psychology 24 (1): 73-94. 2011.
    Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) has argued in a recent paper that intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice suggest that something has gone wrong in philosophical debates over the trolley problem. We begin by showing that her arguments face a series of significant philosophica…Read more
  •  117
    Banishing “I” and “we” from accounts of metacognition
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 148-149. 2009.
    Carruthers offers a promising model for how know the propositional contents of own minds. Unfortunately, in retaining talk of first-person access to mental states, his suggestions assume that a higher-order self is already We invite Carruthers to eliminate the first-person from his model and to develop a more thoroughly third-person model of metacognition
  •  114
    Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (review)
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (2). 2013.
    No abstract
  •  114
    The Moral-Conventional Distinction in Mature Moral Competence
    with James Lee and Marc Hauser
    Journal of Cognition and Culture 10 (1-2): 1-26. 2010.
    Developmental psychologists have long argued that the capacity to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions develops across cultures and emerges early in life. Children reliably treat moral transgressions as more wrong, more punishable, independent of structures of authority, and universally applicable. However, previous studies have not yet examined the role of these features in mature moral cognition. Using a battery of adult-appropriate cases (including vehicular and sexual assault, r…Read more
  •  112
    Collective intentionality and socially extended minds
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (3): 247-264. 2017.
    There are many ways to advance our understanding of the human mind by studying different kinds of sociality. Our aim in this introduction is to situate claims about extended cognition within a broader framework of research on human sociality. We briefly discuss the existing landscape, focusing on ways of defending socially extended cognition. We then draw on resources from the recent literature on the socially extended mind, as well as the literature on collective intentionality, to provide a fr…Read more
  •  111
    Drawing the boundaries of animal sentience
    Animal Sentience 29 (13). 2020.
  •  99
    This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It is argued that collective mentality should be only be posited where specialized subroutines are integrated in a way that yields skillful, goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to concerns that are relevant to a group as such.
  •  98
    Troubles with stereotypes for spinozan minds
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (1): 63-92. 2009.
    Some people succeed in adopting feminist ideals in spite of the prevalence of asymmetric power relations. However, those who adopt such ideals face a number of psychological difficulties in inhibiting stereotype-based judgments. I argue that a Spinozan theory of belief fixation offers a more complete understanding of the mechanisms that underwrite our intuitive stereotype-based judgments. I also argue that a Spinozan theory of belief fixation offers resources for avoiding stereotype-based judgme…Read more
  •  95
    Minding Theory of Mind
    with Melanie Yergeau
    Journal of Social Philosophy 48 (3): 273-296. 2017.
  •  88
    Collective responsibility and fraud in scientific communities
    In Saba Bazargan-Forward & Deborah Perron Tollefsen (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, Routledge. 2020.
    Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegianc…Read more
  •  80
    Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms
    Philosophical Review 127 (4): 541-545. 2018.
  •  70
    Surprisal and valuation in the predictive brain
    Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 3 415. 2012.
    Surprisal and Valuation in the Predictive Brain
  •  68
    Minimal minds
    In Tom L. Beauchamp R. G. Frey (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics., . 2011.
  •  66
    Collectivities (states, club, unions, teams, etc.) are often fruitfully spoken of as though they possessed representational capacities. Despite this fact, many philosophers reject the possibility that collectivities might be thought of as genuinely representational. This paper addresses the most promising objection to the possibility of collective representation, the claim that there is no explanatory value to positing collective representations above and beyond the representational states of th…Read more
  •  60
    A Neuro-Yogācāra Manifesto
    Res Philosophica 100 (1): 63-91. 2023.
    In this article, I defend a neuro-Yogacara framework that is based on an understanding of allostatic regulation, and organized around the following four philosophical claims: 1) experience is shaped, in deep and pervasive ways, by a person’s history and their ecological and social context; 2) each moment of experience occurs amid an ongoing flow of conscious activity, which reflects the attempt to integrate diverse sensory and cognitive experiences into a subjective awareness of a world; 3) ever…Read more
  •  59
    How the Source, Inevitability and Means of Bringing About Harm Interact in Folk-Moral Judgments
    with Marc D. Hauser and Phillip Pettit
    Mind and Language 26 (2): 210-233. 2011.
    Means-based harms are frequently seen as forbidden, even when they lead to a greater good. But, are there mitigating factors? Results from five experiments show that judgments about means-based harms are modulated by: 1) Pareto considerations (was the harmed person made worse off?), 2) the directness of physical contact, and 3) the source of the threat (e.g. mechanical, human, or natural). Pareto harms are more permissible than non-Pareto harms, Pareto harms requiring direct physical contact are…Read more