-
12Autonomy, the moral circle, and the limits of ownershipBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Why can't we own people? Boyer proposes that the key consideration concerns inclusion in the moral circle. I propose an alternative, which is that specific mental capacities, especially the capacity for autonomy, play a key role in determining judgments about human and animal ownership. Autonomous beings are viewed as owning themselves, which precludes them from being owned by others.
-
11Little puritans?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.I propose that young children may be a useful test case for Fitouchi et al.'s theory that certain seemingly harmless acts are moralized because they are seen as risk factors for future poor cooperation. The theory predicts that prior to the development of certain folk-psychological beliefs about self-control, children should be untroubled by violations of puritanical morality, and that an adult-like folk psychology of self-control should develop in tandem with disapproval of such violations.
-
2453The folk conception of knowledgeCognition 124 (3): 272-283. 2012.How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s ju…Read more
-
9Going above and beyond? Early reasoning about which moral acts are bestCognition 236 (C): 105444. 2023.
-
6Not the same same: Distinguishing between similarity and identity in judgments of changeCognition 218 (C): 104953. 2022.What makes someone the same person over time? There are (at least) two ways of understanding this question: A person can be the same in the sense of being very similar to how they used to be (similarity), or they can be the same in the sense of being the same individual (numerical identity). In recent years, several papers have claimed to explore the commonsense notion of numerical identity. However, we suggest here that these researchers have instead been studying similarity. We develop a novel…Read more
-
49Expert or Esoteric? Philosophers Attribute Knowledge Differently Than All Other AcademicsCognitive Science 44 (7). 2020.Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept of knowledge espoused by the discipline of philosophy may not align with the concept held by laypeople. Across two studies, we investigate the concept…Read more
-
8Control it and it is yours: Children's reasoning about the ownership of living thingsCognition 202 (C): 104319. 2020.
-
91Taking ‘know’ for an answer: A reply to Nagel, San Juan, and MarCognition 129 (3): 662-665. 2013.Nagel, San Juan, and Mar report an experiment investigating lay attributions of knowledge, belief, and justification. They suggest that, in keeping with the expectations of philosophers, but contra recent empirical findings [Starmans, C. & Friedman, O. (2012). The folk conception of knowledge. Cognition, 124, 272–283], laypeople consistently deny knowledge in Gettier cases, regardless of whether the beliefs are based on ‘apparent’ or ‘authentic’ evidence. In this reply, we point out that Nagel e…Read more
-
33If I am free, you can’t own me: Autonomy makes entities less ownableCognition 148 (C): 145-153. 2016.Although people own myriad objects, land, and even ideas, it is currently illegal to own other humans. This reluctance to view people as property raises interesting questions about our conceptions of people and about our conceptions of ownership. We suggest that one factor contributing to this reluctance is that humans are normally considered to be autonomous, and autonomy is incompatible with being owned by someone else. To investigate whether autonomy impacts judgments of ownership, participan…Read more
-
Yale UniversityGraduate student
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |