•  26
    Quilty-Dunn et al. maintain that language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) is the best game in town. We counter that LoTH is merely one source of models – always wrong, sometimes useful. Their reasons for liking LoTH are compatible with the view that LoTH provides a sometimes pragmatically useful level of abstraction over processes and mechanisms that fail to fully live up to LoT requirements.
  •  25
    Animal Consciousness
    with Michael Trestman
    In Susan Schneider & Max Velmans (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley. 2017.
    This article surveys philosophical and scientific issues arising from questions about animal consciousness. These questions include: which animals have consciousness and what (if anything) that consciousness might be like. Just what sort(s) of science can bear on these questions is a live issue, but investigations of the behavior and neurophysiology of a wide taxonomic range of animals, as well as the phylogenetic relationships among taxa are relevant. Such questions are also deeply philosophica…Read more
  •  118
    Why the Causal View of Fitness Survives
    with Jun Otsuka, Trin Turner, and Elisabeth A. Lloyd
    Philosophy of Science 78 (2): 209-224. 2011.
    We critically examine Denis Walsh’s latest attack on the causalist view of fitness. Relying on Judea Pearl’s Sure-Thing Principle and geneticist John Gillespie’s model for fitness, Walsh has argued that the causal interpretation of fitness results in a reductio. We show that his conclusion only follows from misuse of the models, that is, (1) the disregard of the real biological bearing of the population-size parameter in Gillespie’s model and (2) the confusion of the distinction between ordinary…Read more
  •  150
    How “weak” mindreaders inherited the earth
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 140-141. 2009.
    Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers’ line-drawing exercise is called into question
  •  81
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Developed Dynamic Reference Work
    with Uri Nodelman and Edward N. Zalta
    Metaphilosophy 33 (1‐2): 210-228. 2003.
    The present information explosion on the World Wide Web poses a problem for the general public and the members of an academic discipline alike, of how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic. At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), we have since 1995 been developing and implementing the concept of a dynamic reference work (DRW) to provide a solution to these problems, while maintaining free access for readers. A DRW is much mor…Read more
  •  25
    Digital access to large amounts of scholarly text presents both challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. Meeting these challenges depends on having high-quality representations of the contents of digital resources suitable for both machines and humans to use. Different ways of categorizing these contents are appropriate for different purposes, leading to the further problem of relating the contents of different categorization schemes to each other. This essay discusses the…Read more
  •  6
    Book reviews (review)
    with Jay L. Garfield, Paul E. Griffiths, David Pitt, Andy Clark, J. D. Trout, and Justin Leiber
    Philosophical Psychology 11 (1): 89-109. 1998.
    How to build a theory in cognitive science. Valerie Gray Hardcastle. Albany: State University of New York. Press, 1996Language, thought, and consciousness. Peter Carruthers. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1996. ISBN 0–521–48158–9 (hc)Young children's knowledge about thinking. John H. Flavell, Frances L. Green & Eleanor R. Flavell with Commentary by Paul L. Harris & Janet Wilde Astington. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1995, 60 (1, Serial No, 243) Chicago: T…Read more
  •  112
    Consciousness might matter very much
    Philosophical Psychology 18 (1): 113-22. 2005.
    Peter Carruthers argues that phenomenal consciousness might not matter very much either for the purpose of determining which nonhuman animals are appropriate objects of moral sympathy, or for the purpose of explaining for the similarities in behavior of humans and nonhumans. Carruthers bases these claims on his version of a dispositionalist higher-order thought (DHOT) theory of consciousness which allows that much of human behavior is the result of first-order beliefs that need not be conscious,…Read more
  • Teleological Notions in Biology
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.
    The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role. Histo…Read more
  •  550
    Engineered Wisdom for Learning Machines
    Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 36 (2): 257-272. 2024.
    We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The form…Read more
  •  13
    Static-Dynamic Hybridity in Dynamical Models of Cognition
    Philosophy of Science 89 (2): 283-301. 2022.
    Dynamical models of cognition have played a central role in recent cognitive science. In this paper, we consider a common strategy by which dynamical models describe their target systems neither as purely static nor as purely dynamic, but rather using a hybrid approach. This hybridity reveals how dynamical models involve representational choices that are important for understanding the relationship between dynamical and non-dynamical representations of a system.
  •  29
    Temporal binding is the phenomenon in which events related as cause and effect are perceived by humans to be closer in time than they actually are). Despite the fact that temporal binding experiments with humans have relied on verbal instructions, we argue that they are adaptable to nonhuman animals, and that a finding of temporal binding from such experiments would provide evidence of causal reasoning that cannot be reduced to associative learning. Our argument depends on describing and theoret…Read more
  •  210
    Practical quantum computing devices and their applications to AI in particular are presently mostly speculative. Nevertheless, questions about whether this future technology, if achieved, presents any special ethical issues are beginning to take shape. As with any novel technology, one can be reasonably confident that the challenges presented by "quantum AI" will be a mixture of something new and something old. Other commentators (Sevilla & Moreno 2019), have emphasized continuity, arguing that …Read more
  •  12
    Hormonal Correlates of Exploratory and Play-Soliciting Behavior in Domestic Dogs
    with Alejandra Rossi, Francisco J. Parada, Rosemary Stewart, Casey Barwell, and Gregory Demas
    Frontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.
  •  355
    Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin’s reading notebooks
    with Jaimie Murdock and Simon DeDeo
    Cognition 159 (C): 117-126. 2017.
    Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized read…Read more
  •  189
    On (not) defining cognition
    Synthese 194 (11): 4233-4249. 2017.
    Should cognitive scientists be any more embarrassed about their lack of a discipline-fixing definition of cognition than biologists are about their inability to define “life”? My answer is “no”. Philosophers seeking a unique “mark of the cognitive” or less onerous but nevertheless categorical characterizations of cognition are working at a level of analysis upon which hangs nothing that either cognitive scientists or philosophers of cognitive science should care about. In contrast, I advocate a …Read more
  •  44
    Communication and Cognition: Is Information the Connection?
    with Marc Hauser
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992 81-91. 1992.
    Donald Griffin has suggested that cognitive ethologists can use communication between non-human animals as a "window" into animal minds. Underlying this metaphor seems to be a conception of cognition as information processing and communication as information transfer from signaller to receiver. We examine various analyses of information and discuss how these analyses affect an ongoing debate among ethologists about whether the communicative signals of some animals should be interpreted as refere…Read more
  • Species of Mind. The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 33 (1): 163-168. 2002.
  •  312
    Computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, and driving trains. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach argue that as robots take on more and more responsibility, they must be programmed with moral decision-making abilities, for our own safety. Taking a fast paced tour through the latest thinking about philosophical e…Read more
  • The naturalistic theory of mind that arises from ethology is faced with the question of continuity between human mind and animal mind. In particular, the applicability of intentional, mentalistic terms to animals arises. I argue that cognitive ethologists can and should operate with a realistic conception of intentional states in animals. ;I start by considering arguments claiming to show that the attribution of intentional states presents special difficulties in the case of animals, because the…Read more
  •  260
    Private codes and public structures
    In David McFarland, Keith Stenning & Maggie McGonigle (eds.), The Complex Mind, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 223. 2012.
  •  42
    Why Eshkol-Wachman behavioral notation is not enough
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (2): 266-267. 1992.
  •  63
    Methodological questions begged
    Behavior and Philosophy 39. 2011.
    I argue in opposition to Sam Rakover that the current lack of fully adequate theories of the subjective and qualitative aspects of mind does not justify the adoption of what he calls “methodological dualism” (Rakover, this issue). Scientific understanding of consciousness requires the continuation of attempts to explain it in terms of the neural mechanisms that support it. It would be premature to adopt a methodological stance that could foreclose on the possibility of more reductionistic approa…Read more
  •  68
    Ethics, Law, and the Science of Fish Welfare
    Between the Species 16 (1): 7. 2013.
    Fish farming is one of the fastest growing sectors of agriculture, attracting considerable attention to the question of whether existing farming regulations and animal welfare laws are adequate to deal with the expanding role of fish in feeding humans. The role of fish as model organisms in scientific research is also expanding -- a majority of research biology departments now keep zebrafish for the purposes of genome biology, and they are used widely used for basic neuroscience research. Howeve…Read more