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9Precedent and rest stop convergence in reflective equilibriumSynthese 203 (3): 1-19. 2024.The method of reflective equilibrium is typically characterized as a process of two kinds of adjustments: hold fixed one’s current set of commitments/intuitions and adjust rules/principles to account for them, then hold fixed those rules while making adjustments to one’s set of commitments. Repeat until no further adjustments are required. Such characterizations ignore the role of precedent, i.e., information about the commitments and rules of others and how those might serve as guides in one’s …Read more
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15Convergence and Shared Reflective EquilibriumErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.We build a model of the reflective equilibrium method to better understand under what conditions a community of agents would achieve a shared equilibrium. We find that, despite guaranteeing that agents individually reach equilibrium and numerous constraints on how agents deliberate, it is surprisingly difficult for a community to converge on a small number of equilibria. Consequently, the literature on reflective equilibrium has underestimated the challenge of coordinating intrapersonal converge…Read more
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39Introduction to the Special Issue: “Expertise, Semiotics and Interactivity”Social Epistemology 38 (1): 1-12. 2024.In this article, we offer an overview of the philosophical and psychological literatures on expertise. Work so far has failed to engage with recent work in embodied and encultured cognition--in particular the notions of interactivity and semiosis. We suggest how bringing these concepts on board reveals new areas of research concerning the philosophy and psychology of expertise. We conclude with a brief synopsis of each paper.
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37Reading the Signs: From Dyadic to Triadic Views for Identifying ExpertsSocial Epistemology 38 (1): 98-109. 2024.A naturalistic approach to expert-identification begins by asking, ‘how do novices pick out putative experts?’ Alvin Goldman and Elizabeth Anderson, representing a fairly common approach, consider agents’ psychological biases as well as social situatedness. As good as this is, culture’s role in shaping cognitive mechanisms is neglected. An explanatory framework that works well to accommodate culturally-sensitive mechanisms is Peircean semiotics. His triadic approach holds that signs signify obje…Read more
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11Dogmatism and Domination: A Simulation StudyEpisteme 1-14. forthcoming.Some epistemic agents will not change their position on a claim. These are dogmatists, common creatures in our epistemic communities. This paper discusses the population-level epistemic effects of increasing numbers of dogmatists. All agents in the model are assigned a degree of belief (using a Likert-type scale) and adopt the beliefs of others in interactions. Subsets of agents are dogmatists. Analysis of model results suggests that even a modest increase in a group's dogmatists can have substa…Read more
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31Review of David Chalmers, Reality+: virtual Worlds and the problems of Philosophy, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022 (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1-12. forthcoming.
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19Watching People Watching People: Culture, Prestige, and Epistemic AuthoritySocial Epistemology 36 (5): 601-612. 2022.Novices sometimes misidentify authorities and end up endorsing false beliefs as a result. In this paper, I suggest that this phenomenon is at least sometimes the result of culturally evolved mechanisms functioning in faulty epistemic contexts. I identify three background conditions which, when satisfied, enable expert-identifying mechanisms to function properly. When any one of them fails, that increases the likelihood of identifying a non-authority as authoritative. Consequently, novices can en…Read more
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37New Ontological Foundations for Extended Minds: Causal Powers RealismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1-19. forthcoming.In this paper, we describe causal powers realism as a conjunction of four claims: causal powers are not reducible to counterfactuals; they are empirically-discoverable; they manifest effects in conjunction with partners; and their manifestations empower further manifestations. We describe four challenges to extended mind theory and for each show how an ontology of causal powers realism either avoids or dissolves the problem. We close by suggesting that causal powers realism isn’t a competitor wi…Read more
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53In search of an ontology for 4E theories: from new mechanism to causal powers realismSynthese 199 (3-4): 9785-9808. 2021.Embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended theorists do not typically focus on the ontological frameworks in which they develop their theories. One exception is 4E theories that embrace New Mechanism. In this paper, we endorse the New Mechanist’s general turn to ontology, but argue that their ontology is not the best on the market for 4E theories. Instead, we advocate for a different ontology: causal powers realism. Causal powers realism posits that psychological manifestations are the product o…Read more
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25Could a robot flirt? 4E cognition, reactive attitudes, and robot autonomyAI and Society 37 (2): 675-686. 2022.In this paper, I develop a view about machine autonomy grounded in the theoretical frameworks of 4E cognition and PF Strawson’s reactive attitudes. I begin with critical discussion of White, and conclude that his view is strongly committed to functionalism as it has developed in mainstream analytic philosophy since the 1950s. After suggesting that there is good reason to resist this view by appeal to developments in 4E cognition, I propose an alternative view of machine autonomy. Namely, machine…Read more
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19Arational belief convergenceSynthese 198 (7): 6329-6350. 2019.This model explores consensus among agents in a population in terms of two properties. The first is a probability of belief change. This value indicates how likely agents are to change their mind in interactions. The other is the size of the agents audience: the proportion of the population the agent has access to at any given time. In all instances, the agents converge on a single belief, although the agents are arational. I argue that this generates a skeptical hypothesis: any instance of purp…Read more
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14Diversity and Resistance to Change: Macro Conditions for Marginalization in Post-industrial SocietiesFrontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.
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44How to Power Encultured MindsSynthese 197. 2020.Cultural psychologists often describe the relationship between mind and culture as ‘dynamic.’ In light of this, we provide two desiderata that a theory about encultured minds ought to meet: the theory ought to reflect how cultural psychologists describe their own findings and it ought to be thoroughly naturalistic. We show that a realist theory of causal powers — which holds that powers are causally-efficacious and empirically-discoverable — fits the bill. After an introduction to the major conc…Read more
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15Implicating without intending on the Gricean account of implicatureEmpedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 4 (2): 199-215. 2012.The aim of this article is to support the position that what is implicated is not determined by speaker intention, a claim which runs counter to the widely accepted position that what is implicated is determined by speaker intention. This article argues for the conclusion that communication of conversational implicatures can be unintended by presenting three examples in which Grice’s criteria for the completion of conversational implicature are satisfied but the speaker does not intend to implic…Read more
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35The coupling-constitution fallacy: Much ado about nothingPragmatics and Cognition 21 (1): 178-192. 2013.The coupling-constitution fallacy claims that arguments for extended cognition involve the inference of “x and y constitute z” from “x is coupled to y” and that such inferences are fallacious. We argue that the coupling-constitution fallacy fails in its goal to undermine the hypothesis of extended cognition: appeal to the coupling-constitution fallacy to rule out possible empirical counterexamples to intracranialism is fallacious. We demonstrate that appeals to coupling-constitution worries are …Read more
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41Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity, and Human ArtificePhilosophical Psychology 28 (8): 1245-1249. 2015.
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116Implicit racial bias and epistemic pessimismPhilosophical Psychology 30 (1-2): 79-101. 2017.Implicit bias results from living in a society structured by race. Tamar Gendler has drawn attention to several epistemic costs of implicit bias and concludes that paying some costs is unavoidable. In this paper, we reconstruct Gendler’s argument and argue that the epistemic costs she highlights can be avoided. Though epistemic agents encode discriminatory information from the environment, not all encoded information is activated. Agents can construct local epistemic environments that do not act…Read more
Spokane, Washington, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |